Question & answer with Bill Cottam

Bill, for the benefit of some of our younger readers, can you begin by giving us an insight into your carp fishing background, as well as your business?
"I caught my first carp – a common of 1lb 12oz – in 1976 when I was 13-years-old and have been pretty much obsessed with trying to catch carp ever since. I was born and brought up in South Yorkshire, which is just about as far removed from the carp fishing hotbeds as it is possible to get, in fact, carp waters were very few and far between in the frozen north in those days. I am happy to report that things have improved considerably over the years, although realistically us Yorkshire folk still have to travel considerable distances to get to the better quality venues that offer the chance of bigger fish.

"In 1986, Tim Paisley and I set-up a bait company that was initially based in my Mum and Dad's garage; after many hours of contemplation, we decided to call our pipe dream 'Nutrabaits'. Inside eighteen months I had given up my job as a swimming pool lifeguard and sports coach to concentrate on trying to make a living selling bait full-time. Our aim from the outset was to produce the very best quality and most effective carp baits that money could buy and in that respect nothing has really changed to the present day!

"Today I am the Managing Director of Nutrabaits Limited and our products are available in over fifty countries world-wide. I am now creeping dangerously close to my 50th birthday and I spend most of my time either working too many hours or fishing for big carp in France."

What in your mind is a good carp bait?
“No bait will ever be all things to all people and with that fact in mind, a good bait is undoubtedly the one that best suits the specific requirements of the angler who is using it. If you are the type of angler who fishes short sessions on numerous different venues over the course of a season, a nutritional foodbait that is designed with long-term baiting campaigns in mind is far from ideal, similarly if you are planning to spend three days a week on the same water for the next four years then a high-attract bait, packed to the rafters with high level attractors is not really what you need either. The key is to choose the bait that will be ‘good’ for you and the fishing situation you find yourself in. If you feel you need help in establishing which bait within your chosen range best suits your needs, contact the bait company in question and pick their brains; that’s what they’re there for!”

How long have you been looking into carp bait yourself?
“The first ‘special’ bait I ever concocted was in around 1975 and was actually intended for tench fishing. If my memory serves me correctly, it was paste bait consisting of pellets that I ground down to powder with a little mortar and pestle, plain flour from my Mum’s cooking cupboard, a high protein product called Body Bulk that I sourced from the local health food shop, a strawberry essence – again from my Mum’s baking stash – and liquid red dye from the supermarket. The results on my wonder paste were in a totally different league to anything I had experienced before. My interest in bait and just what it is possible to achieve when you are using a good quality food source has stayed with me ever since.”

How do you go about formulating a carp bait? Has the thought process changed much over the years?
“The vast majority of the baits Nutrabaits’ produce are put together with long-term results in mind; of course our mixes can be made considerable more instant in the short-term my tweaking the a inherent attractors, but generally speaking we aim to produce baits that fish will accept as an everyday food source – do that and the task of catching carp is made a great deal easier!

“After all these years, we have a pretty good idea of what kind of things need including in baits of this type, so certainly some of the inclusions are relatively straight forward, others, however, maybe products that are either new to the industry or that we have had produced specifically for our use. I must also stress that every bait we produce under the Nutrabaits banner is totally different to the next; I know that some companies out there choose to have a ‘standard bait’ that makes up a good percentage of virtually all their mixes to which they then add a proportion of birdfood or fishmeal or whatever other route they wish to go down and although I am not criticising this practice in anyway, it is certainly not my way of doing things. Obviously many of the same ingredients are included in the make-up of several of our baits, but all the recipes – and consequently the required egg levels – are totally different from one another.”

Do you have favourite bait ingredients which you tend to use time and time again?
“I would imagine that anybody who has spent any amount of time experimenting with carp baits will have favourite ingredients that they have total faith in and that they keep returning to; if they haven’t they certainly should have, because generally speaking what was an effective product ten years ago will remain exactly that today. In no particular order my long-standing favourites are: Green Lipped Mussel Extract, Trigga in its various forms, kelp and seaweed, liver powder, Betaine HCl, high-quality sardine and anchovy meal and krill meal and dare I say it… our Blue Oyster ingredient that provides the highly distinctive smell in our recently launched bait that bears the same name.”

How do you recognise a good ingredient?
“Technical specifications, the precise make-up of an ingredient and the method of production are undoubtedly a guide in the first instance, but in truth, genuine effectiveness can only really be accurately assessed by long-term field-testing trials and the experiences of anglers who are accustomed to judging such things… To cut a long story short, if an ingredient is a beneficial addition to carp’s diet and it inclusion means the angler’s chances of catching are improved when they are using it, then I consider it a good ingredient. If the angler’s chances of catching are not boosted by a particular ingredients inclusion and there are no nutritional benefits to the fish that are eating it, I cannot really see the point!”

What about flavours and liquid additives? What line of thought goes into designing these?
“It’s a similar deal to sourcing effective powdered ingredients, in that the starting point would be to obtain a variety of samples of the particular flavour we are looking for from our flavourist that would then be then passed on to our field-testing team for lengthy experimentation. Very often we may test three or four versions of the same smell to allow us to establish which one is the most effective in a carp bait. Having a ‘quick sniff’ is something we all guilty of doing and it is a practise that I suspect ultimately decides which additive many anglers eventually settle on as the label for their bait, but in all honesty it is very often a pointless exercise in my view. What does it matter how much you like the smell a particular flavour? You aren’t the one who is going to be expected to eat it! The only true test of effectiveness, is how often the bobbin smacks against the buzzer when you are using it!”

Do you listen to the public about bait tips and recommended recipes or is it just an internal thing?
“Just like carp angling itself, we never stop learning about carp bait and it would be enormously naďve to not listen to other peoples experiences and thoughts on the subject. Obviously there are people you tend to listen to more than others, but it is amazing what little gems you can pick up from other anglers, especially those who have been around carp angling for a few years!

“At the end of the day there are a lot of anglers out there who have a terrific bait knowledge, but who have no interest whatsoever in owning or working for a bait company and similarly, just because somebody works in the bait industry it doesn’t necessarily mean they know a great deal about the subject. Unlike gas fitters, who have to have the relevant qualifications before they can begin trading, anybody can theoretically start to sell carp bait tomorrow… it doesn’t mean they know what they are talking about!”

Tell us a little about the field-testing aspects. What stages do your mixes and flavours go through before they reach the market shelf?
“It would be no exaggeration to say that our field-testing team are the main reason we have been able to achieve what we have over the years; without their tireless work and invaluable feedback, the Nutrabaits brand would not be trusted in anything like the way it is today. Every product that bears the Nutrabaits seal of approval has been thoroughly put through its paces before we even start to think about releasing it into the marketplace and all the suggested inclusion levels and recommendations and suggestions for usage that are shown on the product packaging are a direct result of field-tester feedback.

“Tim and I had considered it vitally important that we should have a number of field-testers in place for quite sometime before we eventually launched our first few products way back in the eighties and over twenty-five-years down the road I am enormously proud to report that the vast majority of the same anglers continue to work hard for us behind the scenes to ensure our products are the very best they can be before they arrive in our retail outlets.”

Who are your field-testers? Is it difficult to become one?
“We have upwards of two hundred field-testers worldwide who spend their time helping with the development of Nutrabaits’ products, some are regularly seen in the magazines and others prefer to remain anonymously successful and just quietly get on with it. I don’t really want to go down the road of singling any out, but suffice to say that each and every one of them brings something different to the table and we consider every one is equally important to the overall Nutrabaits success story.

“Everybody wants to be a field-tester of course and in common with many other bait companies out there, we get requests on a daily basis from anglers who want to become part of our team. The bad news though, is that in the vast majority of cases we will spot a Nutrabaits’ user who is doing exceptionally well – who we think will add something to the group – and approach them, as opposed to grabbing somebody who wants to jump ship from another company.”

You hear a lot on the grapevine about chemists working for some of the bait companies. Does this happen at your company?
“Absolutely… I consider it vitally important that I meet with my chemist every month – he supplies my blood pressure tablets!”

What are you thoughts on ready-mades these days? Even hardcore freezer bait lovers seem to be coming around to them.
“If I go back a few years, there was a huge difference between the nutritional quality of shelf-life baits and freezer baits, but more recently – in many cases – the difference is negligible. Having said that, not every bait company produces shelf-life baits to an equivalent quality as the freezer bait equivalent, so at the risk of repeating myself, if you are in any doubt, pick-up the phone and enquire as to what ingredients are used to produce the baits you are thinking about spending your ‘hard-earned’ on. I have long wanted the day to come when bait companies are totally up front as to what their recipes contain; lets face it, carp bait isn’t particularly cheap and surely the customer has a right to know exactly what he is buying!”

From a personal point of view, which type of bait do you prefer: ready-mades with preservatives or frozen baits?
“It depends on where I am fishing and the situation I find myself in, but I will happily use either. A tactic that has proved particularly effective for me over the years is to use the identical bait (in recent years Trigga with Pineapple and N-Butyric Acid) in freezer bait and shelf-life in combination. The thinking here is that the freezers – that usually make up about 70% of the combination – offer slightly more nutritionally, whereas the shelf-lifes provide increase levels of pulling power. Using both in the swim together gives me the best of both worlds.”

What are the best-sellers, and are these the ones which you would expect to be so?
“Difficult one that. The popularity of some products varies greatly from one country to another, our 3D range being a perfect case in point. In the UK, our 3D base mix and ready-mades are little more than average sellers, but I many overseas countries we literally struggle to keep up with the demand. Some products are huge sellers everywhere though and top of the tree are undoubtedly anything that includes the Trigga or Trigga Ice attractor package and the ever-popular Big Fish Mix in its various guises. I suspect the new Blue Oyster products are going to be another enormously popular range of products for us, it is very early days of course, but the initial demand and the pre-launch results, reminds me very much of the initial Trigga launch.”

Talking about some flavours attractive anglers, do you think there are a lot of gimmicks in the bait field?
“Certainly I have seen some over the years, but the great bait buying public are not fools and although gimmicky products – accompanied by endless pages of hype – occasionally fly off the shelves initially, it is the products that consistently come up with the goods that remain popular over a prolonged period of time.

What can you see as the next big craze?
Korda Onesies!