British Sandwich Week 2016
Posted: 4th May 2016
Paperwork is hoping for big success at The British Sandwich Industry Awards, The Sammies, with customers nominated in three awards.
The leading names in the sandwich industry are well represented in the awards and labels made by Paperwork have helped our customers land nominations for best Cafe Sandwich Retailer, Specialist Sandwich Bar Chain and New Sandwich.
The shortlist has been drawn up from entries from across the £7.85 billion sandwich market that employs over 300,000 people un the UK.
To celebrate our involvement in this year’s awards, we thought we’d have a bit of fun and share some sandwich trivia courtesy of the British Sandwich and Food to Go Association.
– British consumers manage to munch their way through over 11.5 billion sandwiches each year.
– If you laid each one end to end, they would go around the world about 44 times.
– More than half of these were made and eaten in the home.
– More sandwiches are consumed in hot weather than when it is wet or cold.
– Well over 3,500,000,000 sandwiches are purchased from UK retail or catering outlets each year.
– We paid over £7,850,000,000 for them – that’s as much as 36,500 brand new Ferraris. (That means the average price of a sandwich almost £2.07.)
– Chicken remains the most popular filling in commercially made sandwiches accounting for around 31% of all sandwiches.
– Britons eat some 43,000 tonnes of chicken in sandwiches each year. That’s the same weight as 258 Blue Whales or 6,006 Double Decker buses.
The first ‘packaged’ sandwich is believed to have been launched by Marks & Spencer in 1985 thanks to the creation of a ‘easy seal’ pack by Hans Blokmann, the then technical director of packaging supplier Danisco Otto Nielsen.
The modern sandwich is named after Lord John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, but the story might not be an accurate historical account. Lord Sandwich, a “dedicated” gambler, did not like to take time out from the game to have a meal. He would, therefore, ask casino waiters to bring him slices of meat between two slices of bread; a habit well known among his gambling friends. Because John Montagu was the Earl of Sandwich others began to order “the same as Sandwich!” – aka the ‘sandwich.’
An alternative story is provided by Sandwich’s biographer, N. A. M. Rodger, who suggests Sandwich’s commitments to the navy, to politics and the arts mean the first sandwich was more likely to have been consumed at his work desk [Source: Wikipedia].
The following are the estimated volumes (in tonnes) of key ingredients used by the commercial sandwich market each year:
1. Chicken = 43,000
2. Cheese = 16,000
3. Ham = 15,000
4. Egg = 14,000
5. Bacon = 7,000
6. Prawns = 6,250
7. Tuna = 6,250
8. Salmon = 3,000
9. Beef = 2,750
10. Sausages = 250
