Page 42 - Market Times December 2020
P. 42

42 TRADER PROFILE • TRACY MACKNESS
From drugs queen to gourmet
sausage entrepreneur — via
a 10-year stretch in the clink
  MARKET trading may be in Tracy Mackness’s blood, but hers is not an everyday tale of building a business on the markets.
In her remarkable life, the 55- year-old, who used to graft on her parents’ fruit and veg stall as a child, went on to become the “drugs queen” of Essex.
That was before she was caught in a police sting and sentenced to 10 years behind bars for her part in a £4 million plot to import cannabis.
It was in an open prison in Suffolk in the final years of her sentence that she finally saw the light. She fell in love with the saddleback pigs on the farm there, qualified in pig husbandry and butchery, and when she left she bought 30 of the pigs she had raised and launched her “farm to fork” business.
Today, The Giggly Pig is a thriving enterprise with its own piggery, an impressive range of award-winning sausages and pork products, 12 or 13 vans on the road, a farm shop and market stalls at the top markets in London and the Home Counties.
Tracy also has a best-selling autobiography under her belt and she still finds time to give inspirational speeches in her mission to spread the word that “bad girls” can turn their lives around and make a success of their lives.
Tracy’s story began several decades ago in Romford where her parents had a fruit and veg stall in the days when the market was heaving.
“We used to help on the market stall as young children and I didn’t bother too much with school because I didn’t think I needed to,” Tracy said
Life was good and Tracy had everything she could have asked for. All that changed when her dad, a bit of a rough diamond, went to prison when she was 15 and disappeared from the family’s life.
“For the first time I had to fend
for myself and I didn’t want to miss out on the good things I was used to having,” she added.
It started with a bit of shoplifting and within no time she was selling speed. “I gradually got more involved and in the end I was in so deep I couldn’t have got out of it even if I had wanted to because of the people I was in with,” she said.
In her thirties she was a drug-debt collector known as “The Queen” and at 37 her life of crime came to an abrupt end when she was caught in a drugs bust.
“My boyfriend had asked me to get two men who could empty a lorry. I had a fair idea what might be in that lorry, but it was his deal, not mine. But the police were waiting for us. Seven of us were arrested but he got away and no one has heard of him since.”
Tracy was hoping for an acquittal, but she and five others were found guilty and she was given a 10- year sentence.
“After that I sat down and decided I had two options — give up and consider taking my own life or make the best of it.’
Although she considered the former, she opted for the latter and during her 10 years in jail she took 52 courses, including an Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) programme which aims to use cognitive training to change mindsets.
Tracy now gives talks in schools telling her story and she advocates taking the ETS programme into schools to help prevent young people going off the rails.
The real turning point came at the open prison in Suffolk where she served the last three years of her sentence.
“The governor there just seemed to believe in me,” she said.
The prison had a pig farm and Tracy fell in love with the rare breed, saddleback pigs she was allowed to look after. She passed her NVQs in pig husbandry from level one to four with ease. She gained qualifications in butchery and worked at a butchers shop near Romford for her final year, returning to prison after work.
“I was released on the 26th of February 2007 and I used the money I had earned to buy 30 of the pigs I had raised in prison.”
A friend allowed her to keep them on a field she owned and Tracy was
soon building a viable business rearing pigs and selling bespoke sausages and pork products on mainly farmers markets in the London area.
The butcher she had worked for rented her half his butchers shop for £100 a week and in time she bought out his share. A friend leant her £15,000 to get the business going. Nine months down the line she found land where there had once been a piggery and the council agreed she could reinstate it.
Markets were the obvious place to sell her bespoke products. “Market trading is in my blood, but my products wouldn’t sell at a market like Romford,” Tracy said. She hand-picked quality food markets including Saffron Walden (see feature page 34) and her staff also
 




































































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