The Forman Ecosystem

For more than 120 years, H. Forman & Son has maintained an unwavering focus: the production of smoked salmon and premium fish products for Britain’s foremost retailers, restaurants, and hotels.

In 1999, recognising that our expertise in sourcing, quality control, and traditional craftsmanship might serve a broader purpose, we established Forman & Field—a sister company operating within the same premises, dedicated to exceptional British produce beyond fish.

HOW WE WORK TOGETHER

Both companies operate side by side within our London facility, each with distinct but complementary expertise.

Forman & Son remains devoted to fish—smoking salmon using the traditional London Cure, preparing gravadlax, and supplying premium seafood to major retailers, alongside leading restaurants and hotels across the globe.

Forman & Field curates and creates prepared meals for direct-to-consumer sales: seasonal game, handcrafted puddings, artisan charcuterie, and ready-to-serve dishes that bring restaurant-quality food into homes across the country. Where we specialise in fish, Forman & Field celebrates the wider landscape of British artisan food—from family farms to small-scale producers whose standards match our own.

The synergy between both companies extends beyond shared premises. Forman & Field’s range naturally includes our smoked salmon and seafood, presented alongside complementary products that meet the same exacting criteria. Our supply chains, cold storage facilities, and logistics infrastructure serve both operations, ensuring that whether a customer purchases smoked salmon or a prepared meal, they receive the same standard of freshness, traceability, and care.

THE KITCHEN:
WHERE CRAFT MEETS COMMERCE

At the heart of our facility sits the Forman & Field kitchen—an operation staffed by chefs with considerable pedigree, several having worked in Michelin-starred restaurants. This kitchen serves multiple functions, all underpinned by the same commitment to quality that has defined our smokehouse for over a century.

For retail customers, these chefs create the prepared dishes and ready-to-serve meals that form the core of Forman & Field’s offering: dishes that require restaurant-level technique, executed at scale without compromise.

For commercial clients, we operate what is known as a dark kitchen—a professional culinary facility available to businesses requiring specialist and bespoke expertise without the overhead of maintaining their own kitchens. This service has proven invaluable across several sectors:

Restaurants and Hotels seeking consistent preparation without dedicating kitchen space or specialist staff to these preparations.

Caterers and Event Companies requiring large-scale production of high-quality dishes—whether seafood-based or otherwise—executed to exacting standards and delivered on schedule.

Food Businesses and Retailers needing menu development, recipe testing, or regular supply of prepared items that demand both technical skill and access to premium ingredients.

Our chefs possess the capability to work with our seafood products or to create entirely separate dishes to a client’s specification. The kitchen operates with the precision and hygiene standards one would expect from a facility supplying major retailers, combined with the culinary expertise one would find in a fine-dining establishment.

This dark kitchen model represents a natural evolution of our business: where once we supplied raw ingredients to chefs, we now offer the option to supply finished dishes, prepared by chefs of equivalent calibre, using ingredients of equal quality.

SHARED VALUES, DISTINCT PURPOSES

Forman & Son and Forman & Field serve different markets, but both uphold the principles that have sustained the Forman name for more than a century: uncompromising quality, respect for provenance, support for British producers, and the preservation of traditional craftsmanship.

Whether supplying smoked salmon to a retailer, delivering a hamper to a home, or preparing dishes for a restaurant through our dark kitchen, the standard remains unchanged. It is this consistency—this refusal to compromise regardless of scale or application—that defines our operation.