These gourmet food vans might not be widespread, but they are starting to appear. I've never seen one in Sheffield outside of fancy temporary euro food markets, but there is one set up regularly in Leeds that sells exotic meat burgers (eg Kangaroo and Zebra).

Don't forget the "sauce" task where they failed to provide a sample for a buyer ( which was in the remit) but were allowed to go back with one later & went on to win.

It was a poorly designed task and I liked that Adam saw through it. The results were profit based and with no formal definition of "gourmet" given, I think he was within his rights to gamble on his cost margins.

Gourmet is just marketing/branding, that part of the team failed him and I was glad Katie went because of it.

I totally agree. If LA doesn't start fining teams that don't follow the brief, every episode is the same. All task are just make the most money. Next week, with market trading, it looks like another selling episode.

I'm sure there used to be a lot more reward for creativity and smart business ideas, now it is always selling. Even LA needs people that can create new products, do great marketing and get repeat business. Recently, he seems to rule out anyone that doesn't just "sell and run".

Brilliant post. And what's so odd is that now AS is an investor rather than an employer, you'd think he'd be looking for creativity and innovation.

Makes for terrible televison, though. We might just as well have the same task every week: go off and buy a load of rubbish cheap and then sell it on a market stall. Repeat fourteen times.

If you're going to have a task like this with a focus on quality, then the emphasis should be on sales not profit. Give the teams a choice of pitches (varying and generally unknown apart from those who have visited) and see if they can sell quality produce in the pitch they have chosen, demonstrating astute decision making, branding, ability to produce quality and ability to identify market need.

Give the teams a "gourmet" budget and then have them compete with each other to sell different products but at similar prices.

You're not coming across as a snob at all - totally agree with you, very valid point.

A very good suggestion. If both teams had been given a fixed budget (e.g. £500), are told to produce quality food, it would have made much more sense than the actual episode. If only the beeb had taken the time to think about how to avoid the "spend little, sell expensive" model that almost all episodes seem to fall into this season.

I hope they keep in the item hunt. I like watching the teams use their initiative to find things, work out where they'll get the best prices and negotiate buying instead of selling. We also need more "experts" telling LA which team did the best job, rather than just looking at the profit every time.

I agree with the above, some perceptive points there. Part of the problem is that numbers are quoted in each episode but some are sales income, some are profit and so on. I'm guessing that as quoting a number and calling it 'profit' is easier for most viewers to understand than qualititive evaluations.

When they have had advertising/creative tasks, they have experts and the boardroom comes down to idea A vs idea B but this does not really mirror the real world. Some of the worst products sell well and some award winning advertising campaigns fail.

In early Apprentices, AS did sometimes talk about wanting a rounded indidual and some people who did not sell as well as others went far because of other skills. At the moment, if you do not sell well for one week you can be in the firing line. I liked the balance of earlier series better but I do see why. A team would seem to be ahead the whole task, then an inscrutable comment or two from an expert and they lost. I feel they should bring back creative/more non selling tasks but rule that they would be scored out of 10 on design, marketing etc. This would not solve the problem but I think it would be a little easier to understand.

The agency who designed the adverts for Sunny Delight must have chuckled !!

I think the show is actually far less about sales ability than it used to be in the early days. Pretty much the entirity of Series 2 focused on it, with week after week of tasks that were simple sales task with no other angle (which Ruth excelled at, putting her in the final without ever having to demonstrate any other skills at all - often just separating into a sub-team of her own and ignoring the rest of the team entirely). People were definitely fired principally for lack of salesmanship (Jo, Samuel, Tuan) and not being a brash Route One salesman was behind a lot of other firings as well, such as Sebastien in Series 1.

And yet when we get to Series 6, we have quite a few people (Shibby, Paloma, Liz) who were fired despite having the highest sales total for their team and being demonstrably stronger sales people than a lot of people left. This wouldn't have happened at all in the early series.

Totally agree with the highlighted bit.

Also, I think the editing didn't paint an entirely accurate picture of their final product. The recipe was created by a Michelin starred chef, Tom made sure Adam didn't scrimp on ingredients, Italian peasant cuisine is some of the most celebrated in the world, and just because pork mince is cheap, doesn't mean it can't be turned into something delicious. Their customers enjoyed it, as we saw. I see nothing to justify them being disqualified for ignoring the brief.

In many ways, I thought it was a smart dish to go for - fundamentally they were let down by their locations. Also, I guess Adam didn't exactly help himself by giving plenty of material to fuel the storyline the editors wanted to go for (i.e. Adam is a pile em high, sell em cheap market trader who wouldn't know gourmet if he fell over it on the street').