The Making of a Medley Dish

For our Autumn/Winter Medley range, the journey starts back in February.

Led by our Head of NPD, Kate Edgecombe, the team begins by looking at what customers need from their menus and where tastes are heading. Months of development follow before a dish is ready to leave Cuisine Centre.

And creating something delicious is only part of the brief.

Foodservice kitchens are under pressure. Teams need to serve food people genuinely want to eat while managing skills, labour and rising costs. Consistency matters, particularly when service gets busy. All of these factors change how we approach development.

Medley is designed to take care of some of the preparation while still giving kitchen teams freedom with the finished dish, using our dishes as a base and then adding their own personality. So from the beginning, our NPD team considers not only how something tastes, but how it will work in a real kitchen.

Every dish starts with a rationale. We look at customer needs, menu performance and food trends to identify where there is an opportunity to do something different. Then we get cooking.

One ingredient that caught our attention for Autumn/Winter 2026 was wild British venison.

For our Hearty Venison and Vegetable Stew, we brought out its rich flavour with button mushrooms, pearl onions, carrots, swede and potatoes. It is proper cold weather comfort, but developing it means thinking beyond the first tasting. How will those vegetables eat after reheating? Does the venison remain the hero? Will the dish deliver the same experience consistently?

Our Venison and Bean Chilli took us in another direction. We started with a simple question. Does chilli always have to mean beef?

Venison brings an earthy richness that works beautifully with the smoky chilli sauce. Beans add substance, while sweet potato and peppers bring sweetness and colour. The beans also support Compass Group UK&I's commitment to increase its procurement of beans and pulses by 15% by 2028 through the Bang in Some Beans campaign.

For us, the important bit is putting beans where they make culinary sense and with this dish they absolutely belong.

Once a dish has been developed, it needs to prove itself beyond the development kitchen. Our eight-stage process takes every dish through internal feasibility and customer review before moving into production handover and trial. After launch, we review it again.

Along the way, the team considers nutrition and compliance, sustainability, cost, supply and quality. It is this broader view that makes NPD different from simply developing a recipe. The culinary thinking never disappears. It just has a much bigger job to do.

Our Black Bean and Cauliflower Saagwala is a good example. Inspired by a Compass and Brakes collaboration around beans, it combines black beans, cauliflower and spinach in a creamy, medium spiced curry sauce.

During development we chose to present one version topped with diced paneer glazed in mango chutney, then baked it until the paneer was golden and the chutney sticky. Absolutely delicious, but also a great demonstration of Medley. We've created the base and taken care of much of the preparation. A kitchen can serve it simply or use it as a starting point for something of its own.

Our Quorn™ and Chickpea Jalfrezi brings another challenge into focus.

Quorn™ and chickpeas sit in a rich tomato sauce with onions and peppers. Getting the flavour right in development is one thing but making sure those flavours and textures remain consistent through production is another. That is why the production trial matters.

The aim isn't to create one brilliant jalfrezi in our development kitchen. It's to make sure customers can rely on that same quality when they serve it in theirs.

By the time our new Autumn/Winter dishes launch, Kate and the team have been working on them for months. Some ideas will have changed along the way. Others won't make it through the process at all.

Behind every dish are decisions about how it tastes and how it performs. There is also the question that follows a Medley dish all the way from that first February brief to launch: Will this make life easier for the kitchen serving it, while still putting great food on the plate?

That's the balance we're looking for. And then, of course, it has to be delicious.

Explore Medley.