This year marks our first anniversary and to mark the occasion we have decided to take part in a number of fundraising events to raise money for the charity SAMH, the Scottish Association for Mental Health.

We have chosen SAMH because mental illness is still a stigma in far too many workplaces.

Mental health is one of the most important issues facing both employers and employees.  Taking and keeping a job has consistently been shown to be a key life goal, and the confidence and self-esteem employment provides is a key to emotional well being   A workplace that promotes good mental health achieves more through greater morale and productivity.

Despite this, the stigma surrounding mental health issues in Scottish workplaces still exists.

SAMH was founded in 1923 and is now Scotland’s leading mental health charity.

Their work includes campaigning for positive change on such issues as discrimination, providing community-based services, delivering national programmes including anti-bullying, improving mental health through activity and sport, and resource centres providing mental health information.

Here at Camerons we are planning to raise money for SAMH in a number of different ways including through our own charity events and donating money from sales of special bags of sweets. 

We’ll keep you posted on our fundraising activities in future issues of our newsletter.

Find out more about SAMH by visiting their website at www.samh.org.uk

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In 2007 a study was published by Southampton University on the effect of a combination of certain artificial food colours and sodium benzoate on childhood behaviour.

The study supported a possible link between the consumption of these colours and a sodium benzoate preservative and increased hyperactivity in children between the ages of three and nine.

These ‘azo-dyes’ have become known as the ‘Southampton 6’ colours.

In recent years food containing artificial colours has been increasingly avoided by consumers, partly because of these concerns about the impact on children’s behaviour and also because of a preference for eating more ‘naturally’. Food and drink manufacturers have responded by turning more and more to natural colourings found in fruit and vegetables.

Confectionery, though, is slightly different to other industries because people buy with their eyes and remember the look and colour of a sweet from their childhood. Also, due to the high temperature in the boiling process in confectionery the industry has found it hard to find alternative natural colours that hold their colour at such temperatures.

Despite these difficulties, at Camerons over the last we have been working hard with our suppliers to find alternatives to the artificial additives. We have done this, even though it has affected a couple of our top sellers, because we didn’t want to market a sweet that could have an adverse effect on any child who eats it.

In most cases we have succeeded but we have decided to discontinue a few lines until we are happy with replacements for the Southampton six colours. For example, a supplier of bright yellow pineapple cubes has sent four batches of samples to us and they are all different colours of orange. Would customers buy pineapple sweets that look orange?

We are also researching all our confectionery lines to make 95 per cent of them completely natural by the end of 2013. Food technicians are being brought in to work on our recipes to see how we can achieve this.

We will also be altering out labelling to reflect these changes so that your customers will be aware of them.

If you would like to know more about the work we are doing to eliminate artificial colouring from our confectionery range, get in touch by e-mail or phone.

The Southampton Six artificial colours

• sunset yellow FCF (E110) – provides an orange shade

• quinoline yellow (E104) – provides a yellow shade

• carmoisine (E122) – provides a red shade

• allura red (E129) – provides a red shade

• tartrazine (E102) – provides an orange shade

• ponceau 4R (E124) – provides a red shade

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