"Ready Meal" Leadership and Management.

image: Reviewed.com

Many years ago, at the beginning of the "ready meal" trend, I got to manage a project to take chilled pasta and sauces to market via the supermarkets. Decades later, the memory makes me both smile and grimace.

It makes me smile for the memory of working with Andreano Rossi, a wonderful, passionate Italian Chef with an uncompromising take on pasta. It took months to finalise recipes, for the simple reason no two he ever made were the same, whilst all were wonderful. He insisted that great fresh pasta varied by the day depending on humidity, the age of the flour and the nature of the eggs. The same applied to the sauces. He applied love to every dish he made, and the process was a joy (if the weight I put on was not).

Eventually though, we had to decide on recipes to scale up to industrial production. He hated it, this averaging out. Commercially, it was a success. What we brought to market was streets ahead of what else was available, even as it was miles behind the in…