- Play Hard
- 27th Jul 2024
- 0
- 5 minutes
Seaham Food Festival returns next weekend for a jam-packed weekend full of special guests and vendors from across the North East
Seaham Food Festival, which takes place on the 3rd and 4th of August, features an incredible lineup of celebrity guests from Rosemary Shrager, Phil Vickery, chocolatier Paul Young and Bishop Auckland’s Mike Bartley.
There will also be a number of local and regional vendors that will showcase their food and drink on stalls throughout the festival.
One of those vendors will be Seaham-based ‘Just a Littlemore’ – who bake a range of delicious cookies.
The Littlemore family had no previous experience in baking or working on market stalls but felt inspired to pursue this dream and they have gone from strength to strength since taking that leap of faith.
From Lianne and her husband to their child to her parents, all three generations are heavily involved in the business and are dedicated to making it the best it can be.
Lianne’s parents are Community Support Officers and work long shifts but still, after a 12-hour shift, they help the family with the baking.
“They finish work, sometimes at midnight, and my Mum is still up at 4.00am baking. We will come over at 6.00am to decorate whilst she gets a couple of hours sleep,” said a spokesperson for Just a Littlemore. “They just like to see people succeed, and they have seen it come from a hobby, with my husband baking his first cake, and it went from there.
It is a family business, and they have no intentions of changing it.
“People say, ‘You need help’ and ‘You need staff in’, but we don’t want to go to that because it feels like it’s just ours,” they said.
The bakers had humble beginnings with a market stall at Seaham Harbour, and their lack of experience made them feel incredibly anxious about whether it would be worth their while after all the hard work.
“It was daunting to put money into it. We were questioning, should we do this? Would people really want to buy from us when they can buy four cookies in Asda for £1? We thought no, but the first stall we ever did, we sold out straight away,” they said.
The Seaham Food Festival is one of the most significant dates on the company’s calendar, as they work around the clock to supply the regional visitors with their sweet treats.
This is no easy feat as the Littlemore family has two domestic cookers that can only bake eight cookies at a time.
“We have found each other sitting on the kitchen floor at 4.00am and then we’d have to be at the event at 7.00am because we’ve been baking for nearly 24 hours,” they said.
Like their first food stall all those years ago, the bakers admitted that they had similar feelings of imposter syndrome when they first attended the Seaham Food Festival.
“We panicked thinking that we were out of our depth. A food festival, are you crazy? You sit there looking at all this stock and thinking that it’s silly and asking why we did this. We looked at all the lovely bakers and thought we weren’t at this level.”
Despite all the hard work, preparation, and sacrifice that the family has put themselves through for ‘Just a Littlemore’, it is all worth it when they see the satisfied look on the customers’ faces.
“There’s all the hard work and the stress. We look at the products and think, ‘What if it rains?’, ‘What if we can’t attend?’ They said. “There’s all the stress that nobody sees first, but when you sit back and watch the product going out and see people look and go, ‘Oh my God!’, that’s when you can relax.”
‘Just a Littlemore’ said that food festivals are a big boost for local vendors because people will travel from all over to attend and see what is on offer. On the other hand, weekly food stalls mostly rely on regular customers.
The bakery said that the Seaham Food Festival gets “better and better” each year because the organisers are constantly thinking of ways that they can improve the experience for both vendors and customers.
The hard work the organisers and vendors put into the festival makes ‘Just a Littlemore’ appreciate the event all the more because it’s a year-round passion for everyone involved.
“It’s such a good day because the organisers do such a good job, even down to the advertising,” they said. “Last year, we were at Newcastle Airport, and one of the billboards popped up with the Seaham Food Festival. Seaham benefits from such a good company behind it.”
There are hundreds of similar stories to that of ‘Just a Littlemore’, a small independent vendor that has taken a leap of faith to pursue a dream of being in the Food & Drink industry. This is what the Seaham Food Festival is all about – giving everyday people the opportunity to showcase their talents to the flocking visitors.
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