Kingfisher Brixham supply quality fresh fish and seafood to the catering industry in the South West. From our premises in Brixham, with a prime coastal position; we source, prepare and deliver fresh and frozen, fish and seafood; directly to professional kitchens.
Kingfisher’s staff hold a wealth of knowledge and experience with many having grown up in the local area so almost have fish in their blood! This experience enables the Kingfisher Brixham team to not only take fish orders but also offer customers advice on menu planning, fish and seafood availability and recommend specials each day.
Anyone can write 'local and sustainable' on a menu, but to be truly able to make this bold claim, you must be able to back it up. Tante Marie has built an impressive set of relationships with its suppliers over the years. There are certain priorities for us in this area of the business: a supplier must be able to demonstrate traceability, they must be local and understand the importance of sustainability in this wasteful world.
We are hugely proud to have achieved accreditation from the Sustainable Restaurant Association for Tante Marie Culinary Academy.
Every now and then, we discover a gem in life. Coffee Real is one of them. There's a small army on the team here at Tante Marie and we love great coffee... and of course, serving fantastic coffee is hugely important, as a bad coffee can ruin a lovely meal.
Coffee Real supply coffee to Tante Marie and also train the staff on how to make a cup of coffee which really hits the spot. They also run coffee training courses for our diploma students, teaching about brew methods and how to make beautiful coffee no matter where you are.
Foodspeed is a family-owned, independent company. Put simply, they supply the Queen with milk for her cornflakes in the morning. (Well, kind of: they are the official dairy supplier to the Queen and the Royal Palaces).
For Tante Marie, we have a more important reason for liking them: quality and sustainability is at the top of their list of priorities. They have higher level NSF accreditation for chilled storage, distribution and food safety and also verified 100% carbon neutral status for the last four years.
DDP is renowned for supplying the highest quality fresh fruit and vegetables from the UK and around the world.
They are fully committed to traceability and are hugely supportive of the education ethos of Tante Marie. DDP take groups of Cordon Bleu Diploma students to visit farms, where students can pick their own herbs, bag them up and name them and send them off into the supply chain. Then, the following morning, when the students come into class, the herbs they have bagged up are delivered here to the school, demonstrating the freshness and speed with which DDP produce can make it from farm to plate.
Prince & Sons Butchers have spent over 40 years building a reputation for excellence in butchery. This has led to a wide range of loyal customers.
They are local to Tante Marie and only source their meat from Surrey farmers: their pork is free range, from Plantation Pigs in Shackleford, near Guildford. Their beef is from Surrey farms, free range, all hormone and additive free, fed a natural diet and is butchered and hung by P&S for minimum 14 days before sale.
Set in a beautiful Cotswold valley near Tetbury, the mill in Shipton Moyne Wood has been producing flour since the time of the Domesday Book. Today it produces a wide variety of speciality flours, using both traditional grain and traditional methods.
Students on our Cordon Bleu Diploma course are sometimes fortunate to be able to visit Shipton Mill for tours, so see the milling process and Shipton Mill come to Tante Marie to lecture to the Diploma students.
They might not be one of our food suppliers, but at the world's best cookery schools need printers too. Headline Design and Print are our local printers and in some cases, lifesavers!!! Mark Warner runs one of those companies where we can simply pick up the phone and shout "HELP!" ...and they always deliver!
They are local, privately run and work really hard to meet the needs of their clients... exactly the sort of company we'd like to support.
Dukeshill is one of the really specialist suppliers we use - there's only one product we get from them: bacon. They produce lots of other wonderful pork products, but their bacon is just the best we've been able to find.
We don't generally buy ham from them, simply because we make our own ham at Tante Marie... but if we were buying in ham, we would be getting this from Dukeshill too.
Dukeshill remains a family run business and now has a Royal Warrant to supply ham to the Queen. If it is good enough for Her Majesty, it is good enough for Tante Marie!
Ritter Courivaud
Established in 1929 Ritter Courivaud Ltd is a supplier of specialist ingredients to the catering trade. 'Ritters' is a supplier we've enjoyed a great relationship with for nearly 40 years! They supply us with the really important ingredients which we would not want to get from a 'mainstream' wholesaler... things like chocolate, olive oil and specialty flours.
Established in 1958, R&G is a third generation family business. From modest beginnings as a market stall in Covent Garden, they now supply the entire fresh cut herb range to Waitrose and Ocado, alongside major restaurants, wholesalers and foodservice customers.
R&G is a big business now, but still retains a small business approach to quality. They have been supplying our fresh herbs, which we collect in person from their farm in Bisley, Surrey, for over 50 years!
The Confederation of Tourism and Hospitality is an international qualifications awarding body specialising in the hospitality sector.
In 2010 Tante Marie Culinary Academy teamed up with CTH to create the Level 4 Diploma in Professional Culinary Arts - a qualification which is now being awarded by a number of the world's leading independent cookery schools.
There are some ingredients which are just so special that to get the best, you have to be prepared to search high and low. Vanilla is one of those ingredients. We can buy vanilla from a great many wholesale suppliers, but we were never happy with the quality.
Eurovanille is an international producer and supplier of only the highest quality vanilla products. As their name suggest, they are all about vanilla... and nothing else.
Ron Fowler & Son
Ron Fowler has been Tante Marie's fishmonger for nearly 40 years and will be known to our Cordon Bleu Diploma students as the lovable man who delivers an inspirational fish masterclass to all of our professional course students.
Being a fishmonger in Surrey is not easy - the county has no coastline! Ron gets around this by sourcing his fish from a long standing network of suppliers, including daily trips to the markets and direct supply from the fishermen themselves.
Liberty Wines was founded in 1997 by Master of Wine, David Gleave, with a team of just 4 people and a small network of fabulous Italian wine producers.
David's aim was simple and hasn't changed to this day: “I started this business determined to work with exceptional producers, whatever their size or location, with the belief that with hard work and by being stubbornly quality focused we would deliver the finest wines to our customers”.
Now with a staff of over 100 and a portfolio of over 200 of the most interesting producers in the wine world, Liberty Wines continues to offer exceptional value and quality at every level.
Cheesman is an independent family run business, founded in 1975, providing wonderful quality fresh fruit and vegetables in Surrey.
Based in Guildford, they have established a faithful and loyal customer base and have been supplying Tante Marie for many, many years.
John Downes has over 20 years' experience in the wine business and is one of only 325 Master's of Wine in the world.
John runs the wine course component of our acclaimed Cordon Bleu Diploma as well as running a number of inspirational daytime and evening wine courses, and corporate and team building events at Tante Marie.
With up to 80 full-time students using our state-of-the-art premises, we get through a lot of cloths... and we have lots of very smart and shiny new kit and we like to keep it all looking lovely.
e-cloths are the only ones which actually keep Tante Marie looking shiny and new and stand up to the hard work of our students.
Tante Marie and Neff have a relationship stretching back many decades and we are delighted to strengthen this relationship in our new, state-of-the-art premises. Students at Tante Marie are exposed to a wide range of Neff appliances - induction and gas hobs, down-draft and conventional extraction systems, steam and microwave combination ovens... some of the most advanced oven technology available today.
Absolute Taste is one of London's leading events design and catering companies and recipient of ‘Events Caterer of the Year’. The company was founded by Tante Marie graduate Lyndy Redding in 1997 and offers exciting roles to many of our current graduates. Lyndy is now also one of Tante Marie's owners and a Director of the Academy.
Absolute Taste has a small army of Tante Marie alumni working across its various businesses.
Luxury Poggenpohl kitchens are the centrepiece of any home: beautiful, relaxed surroundings for cooking and living, blending work with pleasure and style with perfect function. An unrivalled reputation for quality, exclusivity and innovation has brought Poggenpohl international renown, and established the brand as the yardstick against which all premium kitchens are measured.
Today, Poggenpohl stands for modern, stylish and luxurious kitchens, where fabulous design comes with the solid reassurance of reliability, consistency and lasting value.
A Thermomix is a common site in professional kitchens. For chefs, Thermomix is a reliable extra pair of hands and an opportunity to raise menu quality to another level; for the home cook, Thermomix is an opportunity to discover and develop the art of cooking and to make difficult recipes successful every time. Thermomix is a power blender and processor that also weighs, cooks and steams. It is a vital tool in modern cooking techniques and one which students at Tante Marie must become familiar with as part of their all-round training.
In 2008 we had to return one of our Magimix's for repair. It had stopped working for the first time since it was given to us in 1983 - 25 years previously. Unsurprisingly, Magimix simply replaced it, but the kept the old one and have it on display in their head office.
If a piece of cooking equipment can be broken, our students (through sheer hard work), will find a way. Magimix food processors are unbreakable. Trust us - we've really tried!
We never offer exclusivity to suppliers at Tante Marie - our students need to learn how to cook on a broad range of kit. But just sometimes we come across something we really love and wouldn't be without. Kenwood's famous 'Chef' food mixers are an all round essential and are robust enough to stand up to the tough environment that is Tante Marie Culinary Academy, and the advanced cookery training we provide.
