Business editor RON GODFREY meets the manufacturer who wants the workers of tomorrow to experience the sweet – and savoury – taste of success.

IF ANY firm can become more than an overnight flavour of the month when it comes to students’ aspirations it is Firmenich UK Ltd in North Yorkshire.

As university fees soar and higher education placements shrink, this £15 million turnover flavour manufacturer in Dalton, near Thirsk which is swathed in the alluring aromas of meat sauces, caramel, strawberry or yoghurt, proves a major point.

Namely, that manufacturing is not the business you enter only if you’re… not too academic.

And that, as Neil Winstanley, Firmenich’s site director points out, is a message that he has to get across before it is too late.

You only have to see the high-tech effects of a just-completed £3.5 million investment in new machinery to understand that making things is an activity for the super-skilled – for tomorrow’s chemists, physicists and engineers.

Then there are the back room support skills, the human resources jobs which require legal as well as interpersonal skills, the finance experts… “It’s a matter of life and death for the UK’s manufacturing sector,” he says.

“We have to reach pupils before their ideas have already formed. Also in danger are the support services that back manufacturing.

“It is not just about apprenticeships. The fundamental problem is that these are regarded as an alternative to A-levels.

“It suggests that those who are not so bright should go into manufacturing and those who are, should pursue academia. But the future of manufacturing relies on both.”

Unsurprisingly, Firmenich was a finalist in the Best Employer And Education Link category of The Press Business Awards last year when judges were impressed with the firm’s Developing A Taste For The Future programme.

With the help of the North Yorkshire Business and Education Partnership, the factory welcomed 27 students on site and interacted with more than 1,000 young people and their parents throughout the year at career fairs and business enterprise days. Work experience was provided for four students.

Many youngsters saw for themselves – and were inspired by – the work done by the 50 staff in processing 2,000 separate raw materials into 2,500 metric tonnes of flavouring, 85 per cent of which is exported with the balance going to UK markets.

They marvelled at how these reproduced compounds resurfaced as savoury flavours in soups, stock cubes and pasta sauces, and how sweet flavours, (including that delicious waft of caramel) ended up in ice cream, powdered desserts and yoghurts – in all 1,500 products supplied to more than 300 customers worldwide.

Mr Winstanley, who is on the advisers’ board at York St John University, says: “The problem with the economic downturn and with university fees getting more expensive and with fewer and fewer university places, means that some potential academically gifted people appear to have no option. Not so.”

He dismisses NVQs as “being diluted” and “merely a box-ticking exercise”, but believes that further education colleges needed to cater for the new range of skills needed in manufacturing.

“I served my time as an apprentice engineer many years ago doing a Higher National Diploma at college interspersed with blocks of time with an employer – in my case, Unilever – and it has done me no harm.”