A blind tasting, nothing more
Strip away the gold foil and the marketing language and the Great Taste scheme is a blind tasting competition. Products arrive stripped of branding. Judges — drawn from the trade, working in panels — taste without knowing the producer, the price or the story behind what's in the bowl or on the plate. Discussion follows, and a consensus is reached. That structure is explicitly designed to stop a well-known name or a compelling backstory doing the work that flavour should do.
One star, two stars or three. A single star means a panel agreed that something tasted good. Two means it went further — re-tasted, re-discussed, found to hold up under extra scrutiny. Three stars are reserved for a small proportion of entries: products that went through multiple rounds and emerged with a unanimous verdict of outstanding. The pyramid is deliberately steep.
How the judging works
Panels don't just vote — they talk. A judge who disagrees has to say why, and the group works through that. At higher star levels, different panels retaste the same product, so a three-star product hasn't impressed one set of judges on one morning; it has impressed several groups across separate sessions.
The judges are practitioners — food buyers, chefs, deli owners, food writers, producers — people whose working lives involve tasting critically. That's a different kind of authority from a public vote or a social media following, and the distinction is worth keeping in mind when you see the stars in a farm shop.
The honest caveats
The scheme has limits any careful shopper should know.
- Entry costs money. Producers pay to submit their products. A jar without a star may simply be from a maker who never entered, or who entered one product line and not another. Absence of a star is not a verdict.
- It's a snapshot. The award is given to a specific batch tasted on a specific occasion. Recipes evolve, suppliers change, batches vary. A star earned in a previous year reflects that year's product.
- Flavour only. The scheme judges taste — nothing else. A three-star product makes no claim about its ingredients, its supply chain, animal welfare or fair pay. Those are entirely valid questions, but this award doesn't answer them.
None of this diminishes the stars. It means they answer a precise question — does this taste good, judged blind by people who know food — rather than a broad one about ethics or provenance.
How to read them in practice
The most useful way to treat a Great Taste star is as a shortcut when choosing between unfamiliar products on a shelf. Faced with three chutneys from producers you've never tried, a star gives you a reasonable basis for starting with one over another. It's not gospel, but it's a better signal than the label design or the font on the jar.
What it shouldn't do is end the conversation. A starred product you find too sweet, too sharp or simply not to your taste is still not to your taste. A local producer who has never entered the scheme — and plenty of very good ones haven't — deserves the same open mind. Ask the person behind the counter what they think, or talk to the producer at the market. Stars are a starting point, not a ranking of everything on the shelf.
The scheme's value lies in the consistency of its method rather than the authority of any individual result. Blind tasting, trade judges, consensus, re-tasting at higher levels — that's a credible process applied across a huge range of products. When you see three stars, something genuinely difficult to achieve has happened, even if it happened to one batch on one day.
