New Chilled Range is Here!

If you live abroad one of the things you probably enjoy the most is getting to experience the food and drink on offer in a new country. However, no matter how good the cuisine is there will always be a few items that you miss from home, and for British expats there tends to be one product in particular they miss the most.......bacon.

Before you moved away from home you probably never realised how much you'd miss it, but it's impossible to make a decent fry up or bacon sandwich with anything other than proper British bacon.

This is why we've been working very hard to launch our new chilled range, as its items like bacon, along with British sausages and cheese that are missed just as much, if not more, than ambient items like Heinz Beans and Branston Pickle.

Our chilled range was launched last Friday (15th March) and currently includes a variety of cheese, bacon, sausages, yogurts, butter, pies, pasties, Quorn and snacks from top brands you'd find in the UK.

So whether you crave a British fry up on a Saturday morning or a Ginsters Pork Pie in your packed lunch, we're here to help!

Due to restricted delivery times we can currently only offer our chilled range to France, Germany, Republic of Ireland, UK, Monaco, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. However, we are running further testing and hope to be able to extend this list of countries in the near future.

If you can think of any products that should be in our chilled range and aren’t, just let us know and we'll do our best to source the item for you!

Great Novelty Treats for Easter!

Easter, as we've said before, is the second most popular holiday in the UK, and being one of the few times in the year you're expected to eat chocolate it's easy to see why!

Every year top brands such as; Nestle, Mars and Cadbury battle it out to not only produce the best Easter egg range, but also to create a new novelty Easter treat.

For Mars this product is their Malteaster Bunny - a small individually wrapped chocolate bunny with a crunchy and creamy honeycomb filling. Undeniably delicious and if you're already a Malteasers fan you're sure to want to eat a whole bag of these!

To rival this Cadbury have also had their design team working hard and have come up a great novelty Easter product - Cadbury Egg n Spoon. This consists of four chocolate eggs filled with a divine fluffy chocolate mousse, which comes in a branded purple egg box.

Nestle have also launched their Aero Lamb, again a small individually wrapped treat, but this time in the shape of a lamb and filled with a traditional mint Aero filling.

So this year we really are spoilt for choice when it comes to picking our indulgent treat(s) for Easter, but for us the stand out product of the year has to be the Cadbury Egg n Spoon. Not only is it completely unique to anything else on the market, but being made of Cadbury chocolate it's sure to taste amazing!

We have plenty more novelty treats, cakes and eggs of all sizes within our Easter category, including Smarties Chicken, Milkybar Cow and Thorntons Bramble Model. So whether it’s for you, your partner or the kids you will definitely find something to help make this Easter a good one!

If you have an opinion on what you think is the best Easter product this year, leave a comment and let us know!

Cereal - A Quick and Simple Breakfast

Every country tends to have a typical breakfast food they are most famous for; in France and Germany it's a continental style breakfast, whereas in America it's pancakes and maple syrup.

In the UK we're well known for enjoying a fry up, but actually, due to time retraints, it's more likely that the majority of us enjoy a bowl of cereal first thing in the morning.

Because of this continous demand for cereal the choice available is extremely extensive, so no matter what your taste or dietary needs there is a cereal designed to meet your requirements!

At BCS we have done our best to get as many types of cereal as possible into our breakfast selection, and so have split our range into 6 different categories: Hot Cereals, Traditional Cereals, Better For You, Cereal Snack, Childrens Cereal and Crunchy Cereal.

Below are our top 10 most popular products from these categories;

1. Nestle Shreddies
2. Shredded Wheat
3. Weetabix
4. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes
5. Special K
6. All Bran
7. Cheerios
8. Alpen - Reduced Sugar
9. Rice Krispies
10. Coco Pops

So, with such a range to choose from it's no wonder so many of us choose a quick and easy breakfast like this to start our day. Of course, at the weekend you can't go wrong with a good classic British fry up!

Easter is on its Way!

After Christmas Easter is the most popular holiday in the U.K, and judging from the amazing variety of Easter eggs on offer this year it's easy to see why! Christmas Day and Easter Sunday are the only two days of the year where we're able to eat as much chocolate as we want (guilt free), so it's definitely worth shopping around for the perfect egg(s) to devour on the day!

Within our Easter range we have a wide variety of products ranging from large, medium and small eggs from all of the top confectionery brands, like Cadbury, Thorntons, Galaxy and Mars. On top of this we also have lots of new and more unusual products, like Cadbury Egg n Spoon and Malteasers Mini Bunnies. So whatever your preference there will definitely be something to suit your tastes in our collection.

Our top 10 most popular Easter products are;

 1. Cadbury Creme Egg

2. Cadbury Mini Eggs Bag

3. Smarties Easter Egg

4. Thorntons Bramble Bunny White Chocolate Egg

5. Cadbury Egg n Spoon Double Chocolate

6. Galaxy Minstrels Egg Large

7. Thorntons Moments Egg

8. Nestle Lion Bar Retro Egg

9. Cadbury Caramel Bunnies Giant Egg

10. Thorntons Classic Egg

As well as the obvious reasons to celebrate Easter it also means that we are one step closer to the summer, and with the unrelenting rain and snow we've had in the UK over the last few months, a bit of sunshine couldn't come quick enough!

So to celebrate all the good things about the up-coming holiday we're running two Easter promotions;

1. Win an Easter Hamper - simply write a product review for any Easter product and be entered into the draw to win a hamper stuffed full of chocolaty treats!

 2. BCS Golden Easter Egg Hunt - We'll be placing a golden chocolate egg in five random BCS order boxes over the next few weeks, and the lucky customers who receive one of these eggs will win a £50 BCS gift voucher!

We'll be picking the winner of the hamper of the 4th March so start writing reviews today to be in with a chance of winning!

Red Lentil and Borlotti Bean Crumble

With the severe winter weather that's hit the UK and much of Europe over the last couple of weeks, there's never been a more perfect time to create some warming winter meals to get you through until spring.

Meat eaters generally have a wider variety of choice when it comes to these kinds of recipes with hotpots, stews and casseroles commonly using chicken, pork and beef as the main ingredient. So if you're a veggie and would like a little help coming up with some new comfort food dishes, then help is at hand! Our resident chef Hannah has come up with a great dish that'll be loved by both meat eaters and vegetarians a like.

Hannah's latest creation is a protein and fibre packed Red Lentil and Borlotti Bean Crumble. It's filling is made using red lentils, borlotti beans, herbs and stock, and Walkers Crisps and cashew nuts are used for the crumble.

If you'd like to see details for all of Hannah's recipes you can visit our recipes section on the website. We're lucky enough to have two recipes a month from Hannah, so keep an eye out for these on the site and on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

It's Never Too Late To Enjoy A Mince Pie!

Today here in the UK we've been hit with what the press are calling 'the big freeze' and most of the country is currently under a blanket of snow. For many other countries this much snow would not cause a problem, but with the mild conditions we experience 99% of the year, this sort of weather takes us a bit by surprise!

It does seem a bit of shame that we couldn't have had the snow a few weeks earlier and enjoyed it at Christmas, but it's nice to see the countryside looking so beautiful whatever month this wintery weather does come along.

If you're a big fan of Christmas but you didn't discover our website until it was too late to order for the big day, then you might be interested to have a look at our stock clearance category. It's full of many of our most popular festive products that are now at a hugely discounted price.

Many of the products in this category, although enjoyed at Christmas are just as nice to have throughout the rest of the year; such as Cadbury Occasions Biscuits, Quality Street tins and Giant Malteaser Tubes.

So if you missed having traditional British Christmas items at your house in 2012, then why not buy them now and not only get them at bargain prices, but also indulge yourself with a sneaky festive treat 11 months early!

Burns Night Celebrations

Every year on 25th January Scotland celebrate the life and works of their most famous poet - Robert Burns.

Burns is most famous for his poem 'Address to a Haggis' and the New Year anthem 'Auld Lang Syne', but wrote hundreds of other peoms and songs in his lifetime. 

The Burns Night celebration typically involves gathering friends and family for a traditional Scottish feast, consisting of haggis, neeps and tatties.

So if you live abroad and are planning on celebrating Burns Night, make sure you check out our new 'Scottish Corner', full of products such as; StahlyQuality Foods Scotch Haggis and everything else you'll need to celebrate in true Scottish fashion.

If you're struggling for pudding ideas to end your celebrations then you might be interested in trying resident chef Hannah's Tipsy Laird Trifle. This dessert is made using Battenberg cake and was first created for Queen Victoria's daughters wedding!

All the details for this pudding are within our recipe section of the website.