When you work in the industry as long as we have, you soon begin to realise that the world is full of raw material suppliers who claim to have the answer to all your prayers within their product range and that by parting with outrageous amounts of your hard earned money, you can change your life forever. The problem is of course, the salesman who is sat in your office, drinking endless cups of your coffee has - in the vast majority of cases - never actually fished for carp, let alone put a bait together. Consequently, the job of establishing what products are and are not valid additions to a bait recipe invariably falls at our door, via the tireless efforts in our factory running tests followed by our field testing team putting the baits through months and many cases years of testing.
We can vividly remember one particular guy walking into our office with a foul smelling powder and an equally disgusting liquid in around 1990; he was adamant that the extensive research his company has funded, had inadvertently established that these two products - when used in combination - attracted carp like nothing else on earth. Not that old chestnut again we thought…
When you begin to come up with a new bait, very often one particular product - or in this case two products - become the starting point around which the rest of the mix is built and when we began to formulate what we were hoping would end up being the ultimate food source carp bait, the aforementioned powder and liquid became uppermost in our minds. Having read up and researched the products in some depth since the initial samples had arrived, our thoughts on what might be possible to achieve with them had changed considerably; in fact from being a little dubious initially, we were now firmly of the opinion that we might indeed be on to something very special.
We built the prototype mix around high quality, low temperature and Pre-Digested Fish Meals along with Krill meal, Sluis CLO, Casein, Whey Protein, Kelp Powder, Betaine HCI, Vitamins and Minerals along with an educated guesstimate at the inclusion rates of our new wonder powder and liquid.
Next job was to gauge the initial feedback from some of our more experienced field testers and with that in mind we set about rolling 300kg; this was then sent out to a number of our trusted team who we knew were spending time on the right type of waters. Usually in cases like this, you hear nothing for a few weeks and then feedback begins to gradually trickle in, but on this occasion the phone melted within days.
Several big hits of carp along with big carp being landed from the off and as you can imagine the excitement started to build within the Nutra HQ.
Once we reach the stage of knowing that a bait is worth persisting with, we tend to give it a provisional name, so we all know what we are referring to; our working name for this particular concoction was…Trigga!
We had three prototype versions of Trigga on test, all of which were based on more or less the same recipe, but with different inclusion rates of the seemingly magical powder and flavour combination of attractors. It took a further six months or so to establish which mix had the most potential for long term applications, but once we had done so - and once our fieldtesting team had been supplied with it - the results were unlike anything I had ever come across; although seemingly everybody who used it was catching personal bests, lake records and re-writing the record books wherever they went, it was the baits apparent ability to single out the bigger fish that amazed us the most. I had come across baits that caught more than their share of the better sized fish in the past, but Trigga’s ability to do so was totally off the scale…
A couple of years on from the launch of Trigga, we set about putting a winterised version of the same bait out to our field testing team and I am happy to say that - as we suspected they might be - results were at least comparable. Trigga Ice is now treated by the vast majority of Nutrabaits users as year-round alternative to the standard Trigga, but undoubtedly the inclusion of natural emulsifiers, spice extracts and high quality oleo resins do increase its cold water catching capabilities.
I guess the rest is history; Trigga and Ice in their various guises continues to re-write the record books on virtually every lake where it is applied sensibly and continues to amaze me in terms of what can be achieved with it. They remain - without question - the best long term carp baits we have ever come across and I suspect they always will be!
A huge thank you therefore goes out for our time served fieldtesters who continue to spend hour upon hour sat behind baits of unknown potential.
The range has grown meaningfully over the years and our exclusive Trigga and Trigga Ice attractor packages are now included in freezer bait, shelf-life boilies, pop ups, corkie wafters, carpet feeds, pellets along with liquid boosters, dedicated hook bait complex for boosting your chosen hook baits and our bait soak sprays for maximum instant attraction.
Virtually everybody we come across who has an interest in bait thinks they have what it takes to be a field tester, but in truth we don’t think many of them actually grasp what is involved; most want to fieldtest established baits that already have proven track record for catching big fish. I hate to disappoint you, but that is not the deal!
The great bait buying public only get to hear about the success stories and the members of our product development team who have been fortunate enough to get on a real biggie before it goes on public release; they don’t stop to think that for every successful product that ends up hitting the shop shelves, there are probably half a dozen that never see the light of day due to the fact that the long term results were not worthy of the Nutrabaits seal of approval.
