Julia Catton

A love of food and an entrepreneurial streak were in Julia Catton’s blood from her early days. Here, she talks of how these were fostered at Bedales, along with the confidence to make the most of them. Julia goes on to recall her subsequent enormously successful career in the food manufacturing and retail industries, including her seminal role in the creation of one of the most successful confectionery concepts of recent years: Percy Pigs!

Originally, Julia Catton was a Midlander. “My early school memories are of a place in Warwick called The Squirrels, where the main thing that sticks in my mind is the grey woollen underwear that was a part of the school uniform,” she says. “My father then got a job in Farnham and wanted me to have a progressive education when we moved south, which is how Bedales crossed our radar. I was given a place at Dunhurst on condition that I boarded there in Group 3 & 4; it seemed that it was a struggle to get children to board at Bedales at the time and this was the school’s way of encouraging families to think about it.”

Seven years old when she began at Dunhurst, Julia adjusted reasonably smoothly to an unfamiliar environment. “I didn’t have much to compare it with and I enjoyed it,” she recalls. “There were some cliques, of course, as there always are at any school, but I made my friends and always looked forward to the start of each school day. Craft was my thing; I wasn’t great  at drawing and there was such an enormous range of crafts to try. Weaving in the barn, with its amazingly evocative smells of wood and wool, was one and I also enjoyed enamel work and pottery. Later on at Bedales, I got involved with the Sotherington Barn and a bit of wattle and daubing. There was a very environmental streak at the school and I do remember a big campaign back in the 1970s against the plan to build a by-pass through, or very close to, school grounds.”

Food was a particular preoccupation of Julia’s throughout her school years, a love that went hand in hand with a nascent streak of entrepreneurialism. “My foodie thing goes back to Mum being a great cook who would always give me something new to try,” she says. “Family travel tended to revolve around food as well and I remember Mum constantly giving me chunks of Brie, for example, in my Christmas Stocking because she knew I loved it! At Dunhurst we went on a lot of camps, where I seem to think that Weetabix with butter and marmalade was a big thing…”

"...At Bedales in general, the food was pretty good; there was even a vegetarian option which was a bit ahead of its time, as well as the odd cooking activity” Julia continues. “And then there was the café, which I think was called the Blue Print or something like that, just off the Quad. There was a great pottery teacher at Bedales called Felicity Ayliffe, whose mother used to run the café and I would help out there from time to time. It was in effect a tuck-shop with a difference; Felicity’s mum would bring in a bunch of delicious homemade rolls and we would turn them into really tasty sandwiches. All this commercial activity must have inspired me because my friend Serena and I would later go into town and buy ingredients for peppermint creams and fudge, which we would make and then sell to our mates. I even did an English language project on nouvelle cuisine, much to the disappointment of John Batstone who clearly felt that as a topic it was a complete waste of time.”

Elsewhere at Bedales, Julia was a musical all-rounder who played the harp, the violin and the piano and was involved, among other endeavours, in a production of Verdi’s Requiem. Academically, she chose A Levels in geography, human biology and maths with varying degrees of success. “I certainly should never have done maths, which I flunked,” she says. Economics, which really did interest me, would have been a much better choice. “The problem that I had was that it didn’t seem as though many of my teachers, with the notable exception of Nicola Taylor, who understood me best, were totally aligned with what I wanted to be, which already, I think, had something to do with the food industry and perhaps the commercial world. No one was quite able to tell me how geography or human biology might lead to the kind of career that I would enjoy.”

Despite this, Julia looks back on her Bedales days with her glass firmly half-full. “The diversity of our education was something well out of the ordinary and has helped me enormously to this day,” she says. “More than anything, we were taught to believe in ourselves to feel confident in our ability to do most things and it was mainly for that reason that I later sent my own children to the school."

Julia took a year out, travelled around India and continued to work- a habit with which she had long been entirely comfortable. The habit persisted during her university life at London Metropolitan University, where she studied Economics. “I enjoyed the course and I also had a good time while I was a student working for a Culpeper three days a week, which was a sort herbalist that sold food and beauty products” she relates. “The owner was a serial entrepreneur and it was he who got me involved in the buying side of business.”

It was with this invaluable experience under her belt that Julia answered a job advertisement for the role of a food selector at Marks & Spencer. “This was a brilliant opportunity, a role that took in all aspects of business,” she says. “I would be starting off in confectionery but later getting into everything from horticulture to deli food and wine and I was able to learn on the job about what really mattered to a business: market trends, consumer habits, packaging, presentation, great taste and so on.”

It was on the confectionery side of the M&S empire that Julia made a spectacular name for herself that continues to resonate across her industry. “We’d been working with a German food manufacturer to try and come up with something different that we could bring to market,” she recalls. “British sweet manufacturers at the time were very traditional, quite staid and rather boring by comparison. The Germans were different; they used better tech and had bigger ranges with more flavours, but we had got to the stage where something needed to happen and we thought we would have a final crack at it.”

“The supplier had one sweet that was basically a soft white panda with a taste that had faint liquorice notes,” Julia continues. “That looked interesting to me and I then drew a picture of a pig on a bit of paper that I thought might work as a concept. The idea was to create a confectionery character, rather than a pig per se, and we then spent a while trying various alliterative names for this character before settling on Percy Pig. Creating some nice, bright packaging for the sweet was the next step and we were then able to launch the new product. It was obviously a great success and spawned any number of spin-offs, helped hugely by the fact that M&S really got behind it as a representative brand for the company.”

Percy Pigs continue to sell in vast numbers to this day, but Julia was, and remains, rather diffident about her role in their creation. “For many years, I tended not to mention it,” she admits. “Why? A little natural modesty, perhaps, but I also felt that this was about M&S, rather than just me. In any case, the whole process gave me a lot of industry credibility, which has been very helpful as my career has gone along.”

After ten years, Julia moved on to become Innovation Director with Kinnerton Confectionery. It was far from the end of her relationship with M&S, however. “At Kinnerton, I worked on a number of projects with M&S, which suited me perfectly,” she says."

In an era where worries about sugar intake and population obesity appear to have become political footballs, Julia is refreshingly clear-eyed about the place that confectionery ought to hold in our lives. “Part of the job has always been about understanding nutrition and trying to keep ahead of legislation,” she observes. “It’s clearly true to say that people are more sedentary these days, they cook less and at the same time have almost instant access to anything they might want to eat. Confectionery is a treat and I think that’s the way it should be seen: an enjoyable but occasional pleasure.”

These days, Julia works as a consultant (see her website, www.deliciouscreations.co.uk) to a variety of businesses, helping them to translate their ideas into reality. “My consultancy work encompasses so many different things, from practicalities to technically complex manufacturing and brand advice,” she explains. “I suppose that if I have one professional ambition left it would be to have my own brand at some point. There are a few ideas that I haven’t yet followed up but it would be fun to have something of my own to work on, rather than someone else’s.”

Julia’s career is also her passion and it is one with the deepest possible roots. “My father was always a businessman who wanted to create and manufacture products and in that sense, he was my role model,” she says. “I always cared about that and now I’m older I find that UK manufacturing as a whole is something that matters very much to me."

Julia Catton was interviewed by James Fairweather in Autumn 2023