We have been accumulating information about freefrom food producers and their products for years and stashing it all away in our ‘free-from’ directories on FreeFromFoodsMatter. But, although they were a fantastic resource, they had become so overcrowded and repetitive that even we were unable to find our way around them! So, after the presentation of the FreeFrom Foods Awards and the Allergy + FreeFrom show in May, we decided to tackle them.
To this end Cressida has spent much of the summer with her head in her hands and her red pencil at the ready, checking through all our entries, editing them and reorganising them so that, hopefully, they will be much easier to access, to navigate around and, as a result, be of much more value both to site visitors and to manufacturers. We hope that they are now pretty comprehensive but, inevitably, there will be some companies that we have overlooked so, please, if you know of anyone who has escaped Cressida’s eagle eye, let her know. She is always to be found at cressida@foodsmatter.com.
In the new directories, rather than listing products as dairy free or gluten free, they are now listed under their food types – bread, breakfast cereals, savoury biscuits and snacks, drinks etc. The original listing under dairy free or gluten free seemed logical at the time but, we are delighted to say, that so many products are now now only dairy free but also gluten free and often egg free, yeast free and soya free that we ended up with massive duplication and general confusion.
Each entry is now coded for what that manufacturer makes (DF – Dairy free, GF – gluten free, EF – egg free etc) and gives an overview of their products plus links to their site and details of where their products can be found. And heading up each section are the recent winners of FreeFrom Food awards. Just roll your mouse over the link at the bottom of their entry and the details of the winning product, including the ingredients and the judges comments, will appear in a drop down box.
We are really pleased with the new directories (and hugely relieved that we have finally managed to get them finished…) so we do hope that site visitors will find them easy to use and packed with helpful and useful information. However, if anyone has any comments (good or bad!!) we would really like to hear them as, having put so much effort into them, we really want the directories to be as useful a resource as they possible can be. Check in here and tell us what you think.
So now on to 2013 FreeFrom Food Awards…. Entry will open on 17th September and the 2013 website will go live at the beginning of September. We are delighted to report that we already have fourteen of the sixteen categories sponsored so, if anyone was hoping to sponsor a category this year, they had better get in quick!! Details right here.