About Loch Ness Smokehouse

Our careers started in the Netherlands, where Bert was a nurse and Mirjam a management secretary. A deep love for Scotland was the reason we emigrated from the Dutch Lowlands to the Scottish Highlands in August 1997, where we started our Bed & Breakfast establishment in May 1998.

Mirjam started her own complementary therapy practice in 2002 and until 2006 Bert worked part-time as a mental health nurse. But after 25 years in the nursing profession he decided to pursue another passion and train as a chef.

The idea to start a smokehouse was born in January 2009 when we started looking for a way of translating Bert’s smoking hobby (not his cigars!) into a viable business set-up.

Bert Wigman has been smoking foods for many years for private consumption and occasionally also to treat our Bed & Breakfast and our Cooking Holiday guests to delicacies like smoked salmon, smoked haddock, dry-cured and traditionally smoked back bacon and smoked ham.

Traditional Smoked Bacon Products

He is also a dab hand when it comes to making sausages and black pudding, but we decided that it was the smoking part of his hobby we wanted to take a step further.

From the initial idea we went through the process of setting up a new business. Although familiar with running a Bed & Breakfast and a complementary therapy practice for many years, we soon found out that running a smokehouse would require us to deal with many different and unfamiliar issues.

Advice was sought and found and at an early stage the decision was taken to start the business on a small scale, producing only one product: dry-cured and traditionally smoked back bacon. It had been found to be very tasty indeed by several connoisseurs and therefore seemed to be the perfect product to start with.

Ten months on, a small outbuilding at our B&B has been converted into professional smokehouse premises and we are proud to say that Loch Ness Smokehouse has now started production