2024/25 Annual Report

Written by James
Published on 13th March 2025 at 11:51 • No comments yet, be the first!

We’ve recently passed the lunar new year, and it's now the 'Year of the Snake', but you could say that 2024/25 has been more like the 'Year of the Swan’ at Spicery HQ! From the outside it might have looked like we were just calmly cruising along with nothing major happening, but in fact behind the scenes we’ve all been extremely busy cooking, designing, photographing, editing, grinding, blending, unloading, packing and assembling to produce what might just be our biggest ever project... Noodle Legend!

So many of you have asked about a product like this over the years, and it’s great to be able to say we’ve finally got there! This new cookbook kit focuses on Chinese cooking, with 4 brand new accompanying spice blends, and has been over 18 months in development. Our recipe developers have travelled around China and eaten their way through the menus of our favourite local Chinese restaurants, to bring all of these flavours back to the Spicery kitchen and create this fabulous new product.

We’re really pleased with the end result, which includes classics like sweet and tangy lemon chicken, and rich and savoury beef in black bean sauce, as well as more adventurous dishes such as rich and sweet red braised pork and spicy Chongqing beef noodles. It’s been a huge effort from everyone here to get the product together on time, so fingers crossed you all enjoy cooking from it!

From what we can tell, there are certainly thousands of you out there who are cooking regularly from our other cookbooks, as we’ve just passed the 1 million Legend refills mark! It’s extraordinary to think how many Legendary meals that translates to, and we’re all looking forward to seeing what you make with the next million bags!

This year we also had our first Ultimate Legend - an impressive accolade achieved by accumulating a massive 10,000 Legend points! These are based on registering every single Legend book, buying dozens of sets of refills and posting regular photos to the Wall of Fame. Congratulations to Richard B, seen here proudly sporting his (staff-only issue!) Spicery T-shirt, closely followed by Robin A, who popped in during a trip to Bristol to collect his prize and join us for our staff lunch!

We were very relieved to secure our longer-term future in our warehouse on Feeder Road, as the area is rapidly being developed for a new Bristol University campus and thousands of student flats. Now we know we’ll be here for another 10 years, we've done a fair bit of revamping and tidying up to bring as much colour and texture to the walls, floor, and even ceiling in places. There can’t be many warehouses in the country that are quite as colourful as Spicery HQ now!

For our staff we introduced a new restaurant allowance this year, giving everyone an annual £200 budget that they can spend eating out in local restaurants in order to bring some new ideas back to the Spicery kitchen.

And last but not least, those of you with friends and family in Australia can finally introduce them to the Spicery community, as we’re about to launch a separate site for orders to Australia.

It’s always been very difficult to send all of our products to Australia due to the very complex and strict biosecurity rules, but we’ve now discovered that if we limit the options to Legend cookbook kits and refills, it’s definitely possible to send these items down under.

We look forward to seeing some fantastic Spicery food being cooked by our Antipodean friends!

Happy spicing and best wishes for 2025!

James (Spicery founder and owner)