Manufacturer Up Close: Grace’s Perfect Blend

Explains the business’s owner Karl Grace “A good customer of mine goes through about a ton of [our] breading a month, for around 20,000 tenders. That’s not including bone chicken or fillets.”

Based near North Tipperary, Grace’s Perfect Blend has an extra USP that’s been making the headlines - a unique history with an iconic fried chicken brand that’s led many on the internet to speculate whether their strong blend is the same as one Colonel Sanders's famous recipe. “I can’t confirm nor deny whether it is or it isn’t the original recipe” says Karl, “I just know the heritage of our company and the quality of the product we’ve been putting out for the last 54 years. It’s top notch.”

And since their growing band of fans agree, we thought it was the perfect time to sit down with Karl and learn more about the business, its origins and why they’ll never compromise on quality...

Grace’s Perfect Blend’s recent retail boom came via an unlikely source...

Karl says: “How we ended up going into the retail market is down to a man by the name of Glen. Glen has a cooking channel called Glen And Friends Cooking. He’s based in Toronto, Canada, and Glen’s story was that he was trying to deconstruct the KFC recipe and show people how to do the recipe at home. He had about 3 years of work done on this. During his research he came across my dad - Pat Grace, who was friends with Colonel Sanders, and after looking at our website he reached out to me in April 2020, when we were all in lockdown. So Glen reached out, and we had a phone call and I sent him out a bag of our Strong Blend. 7 months later, after checking the legalities, Glen put up a video on his YouTube channel, which to date has 2.3 million views. People literally started emailing me that day. By Monday morning I had over 300 emails from across the globe. I was getting emails at 12 o’clock at night from people in Vancouver who were watching it. ”

And the viral video put the same question on everybody's lips...

Karl says: “People were asking me, is this the original KFC recipe? I can firmly stand here, hand on heart and say, I don’t know. My dad died in 2009. When we were going through his personal effects, we came across a safety deposit box and in that was a recipe, a list of herbs and spices, and the ratios. I can’t confirm where my dad got the recipe from, because he had passed away at that stage. But dad and Colonel Sanders were friends.”

And in fact the family business’s connections to Colonel Sanders run deep

Karl says: “My dad emigrated to Canada in the late 50s. He did encyclopaedia sales, window cleaning, taxi driving, but eventually he got working for a company called Carnation Foods, who supplied chips, oil, and other products to fast food restaurants. In the area Dad worked - the Golden Horseshoe there were a couple of [what was then called] Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, and Dad went around to all these places, selling chips and oil. He was working at a trade show in 1966, and Colonel Sanders, who had a holiday home just outside Toronto, happened to be walking through the trade show. My dad walked up to him and said ‘My name is Pat Grace, I’ve become a fan of your chicken because I supply some of your restaurants’. That was the first time they met. Dad was planning to move home [to Ireland], and because Kentucky Fried Chicken was starting to get bigger and bigger in Toronto, and there was nothing like that in Ireland, my dad thought this idea could be a runner. He opened his first chicken shop on May 25th 1970, [By then he had been out to Kentucky and Colonel Sanders] introduced my dad to the people who developed the pressure fryers for him, and the suppliers of the herbs and spices.”

They embrace both traditional and modern lines of promotion - and it’s working

Karl says: “Word of mouth has been massive [for our business] ever since my dad started, and the social media era that we live in has been good for us.

Instagram and Facebook, YouTube to show how best to use our products - I can demonstrate how to make the chicken the way I was taught. We do dress it up as nicely as possible but we also like it to be real and look authentic - I have a video where I made the strong blend into a fish batter and I did make an effort to make it look nice, but it wasn’t photoshopped and it was done in real time.”

Grace’s Perfect Blend focuses on a small but mighty range

Karl says: “We started out with our strong blend and the classic blend. Classic blend is a different ratio of flour and salt to strong blend - we sell that only to the fast food restaurant customers. Now we also have gravy and a hot and spicy blend.

We only launched the hot and spicy blend in February, and it came about when a customer of mine who has a fast food restaurant in Cork approached me and explained he wanted to do hot and spicy wings and I said okay let’s go away and develop it. So I went to my suppliers and explained I wanted something hot, but that has flavour - not something that would melt your eyeballs off, you want to actually be able to savour it. So we tried a load of samples and we came up with our hot and spicy blend, which has that lovely red-orangey colour, and you can really see the difference [between that and the strong blend] when it’s cooked, The strong blend is still our bestseller for fast food restaurants, but hot and spicy is getting very popular - though it is more expensive because of the amount of ingredients like peppers and such."

And they never compromise on the quality of ingredients

Karl says: “In our blends you can see the flecks of pepper, of the herbs and spices in the breadcrumbs. Many businesses use black pepper resin now because the price has gone up 300% in the past 15 years, and by weight it’s one of the most expensive condiments in your cupboard. I have had suppliers ask me if I’d use a pepper resin. I said no - it’s about the taste and the look, You eat with your eyes. I’d rather sell a higher quality product at a higher expense so long as my customers come back and say that it's fantastic.”

Shipping costs have proven a major challenge when it comes to expanding the business

Karl says: “The cost of shipping has been our biggest challenge [when it comes to global expansion]. For the past 14 months we’ve been sending our small packs out to Australia and New Zealand, but it’s been slow to catch on because the shipping costs are so high. We’re talking to a blending company for the US and Canada market - based in Ohio, and have sent them the herb and spice blend pre-mix, then given them the ratios of flour and salt to mix, and they’ll put that out for us. It’s cheaper than shipping the blend out directly and makes more sense.”

Options for gluten-free and other dietary plans are on the horizon

Karl says: “We’re looking to introduce a gluten-free option, but there are challenges. We have a potential gluten-free variety of flour, but the cost of such flour will effectively more than double the price. And we’re all very aware of the economic situation at the moment.

We also need to make sure the texture is as close as possible [to the existing product] and the flavour is right. Only then will we sign off on a gluten-free version. If I’m not happy to eat it I’m not happy to sell it. We’re also working on getting certified vegan, Halal and Kosher - we don’t use any animal products in our recipe.”

With a bright future ahead, the business has a lot to be proud of

Karl says: “I’m proud I was able to keep it going through the financial crash and through COVID, that [since 2002] I’ve gone from a business that was doing maybe 20 tons a year to doing 135 tons, with potential to do 1000 tons. I’m proud to be Pat Grace’s son, and to get his name out there, share his story and his history with Colonel Sanders.”

And now Erudus are on hand to help them reach the next level

Karl says: “We’ve stayed small and independent on purpose, but being on the Erudus platform will allow more Wholesalers to see our product, and it’s that exposure I’m interested in. I want Grace’s Perfect Blend to be available to everyone, from the tip of Land’s End up to Scotland, and that’s a lot of ground to cover. Erudus gives us visibility to help get into more cash and carry’s and Wholesalers.”

Visit the Grace's Perfect Blend website here.