The charming way Hendo's secret recipe used to be mixed to make Sheffield's favourite condiment

Grocer, Harry Henderson, blended the first batch of his famous spicy sauce with the same secret recipe used today in 1885, and since then, the company has only been owned by two other families.

The Freemans are the second of those two families to own Henderson’s Relish, or Hendo’s as it is affectionately known by many in Sheffield.

Siblings, Simon Freeman and Julia Waxman, are the current directors of the firm; and have previously explained how one of the responsibilities that comes with being in charge of Hendo's is being custodian of the Relish’s secret recipe, which has long been one of the city’s best-kept secrets.

While the company has continued to grow and evolve – moving into national and international markets, and upgrading to new machinery at a state-of-the-art site off the Parkway on Parkway Rise allowing the production of Hendo’s to be automated – it is only in the last few years that the recipe has even been written down.

Up until then, a spoon passed between custodians of the recipe was the only way of ensuring that tangy Hendo’s taste was perfectly mixed.

Recalling a video he took of his father showing him how to mix the secret recipe, Simon said in 2021: “Dad’s like: “So you get this spoon here.” It was like an old-looking silver scoop. And I said: “How much is that, how many grams or millilitres is that, Dad?” And he said: “I don’t know, it’s just the spoon.”

“I said: “But we don’t know how much that is, what if we lost the spoon?” “Well, we won’t,” he replied. And that, literally, is how it was done.”

Julia “We’ve moved on, but that only happened when we moved here [to the Parkway site in 2013].”

Julia used to travel from her home in Liverpool to mix the secret ingredients, but when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, that responsibility was passed on to Julia’s son, Sebastian Waxman. After taking on the mantle, Sebastian wrote the measurements of the secret ingredients down, helping the company to move past the trusty, and invaluable, measuring spoon used by Hendo’s custodians for decades.