CELEBRITY chef Gordon Ramsay has become the latest high profile customer for a farmers and wholesale butchers, which started life selling meat to a local pub just six years ago.

North Yorkshire firm Taste Tradition is now supplying the prestigious Gordon Ramsay at the Savoy restaurant in London.

Other celebrity clients include Jamie Oliver's Fifteen branded restaurants.

The company employs 14, after being started by farmer Charles Ashbridge and his mother Joyce, who were joined soon after by butcher James Wright.

Operating from two farms in Thirsk, orders are dispatched both locally, nationwide and into France and Ireland, but it is the London market which is seeing the largest growth, with other clients including Fortnum & Mason, The Stafford Hotel and The Goring Hotel.

Mr Wright, a director at the firm, said it was "fantastic" to secure the approval of Mr Ramsay's restaurant.

He said: "I believe when the chefs are working at that level it is a close knit community and if one of them mentions who they deal with, the others pick up on it.

"The London market has taken us by surprise, a few years ago we started selling locally in a pub down the road, then started to get enquiries from local restaurants.

"That I could comprehend, but then we started gaining one or two London customers and has taken off in a way I would never have imagined."

Mr Wright believed the chefs appreciated the quality of the meat, which is produced by using traditional farming methods and rare and traditional native British breeds of Beef and Pork.

He said: "What we do is nothing new, it is almost turning the clock back.

"Over the last 20 years or so a lot of developments were put in to make breeds faster to farm and we have gone away from that.

"A lot of the intensive farmers think we're mad, but it is worth it with the finished product."

Mr Wright also revealed that in a chance conversation following the Royal Wedding he discovered the then Kate Middleton's family, who stayed at The Goring Hotel, were served the firm's sausages with their breakfasts on the morning of the Royal Wedding.

He added: "We were told the sausages went down well."