A popular cocktail business which has grown rapidly is being celebrated as it has been handed three prestigious awards.

This year's Great Taste Awards have been handed out to food and drink firms across Essex and surrounding areas.

The annual awards recognise businesses across the country with the best products, and gold stars are awarded to recognise the excellence of their products.

They are organised by the Guild of Fine Food, with more than 100 judges – leading critics, chefs, buyers and restaurateurs – pouring through thousands of entrants to come up with a definitive list.

Products receive a one, two or three-star rating if they are ranked among the best by judges, with the majority receiving no rating at all. Around two per cent of products receive three-star ratings (extraordinarily tasty) each year, with less than 10 per cent achieving two stars (outstanding) and roughly 25 per cent of entries handed one-star awards (simply delicious).

And one south Essex firm has scooped a whopping three one-star Great Taste Awards.

Tapp'd Cocktails, in Progress Road, has been handed the awards for its Blue Lagoon Canned Cocktail, Non-Alcoholic Passionfruit Martini, and Pornstar Martini.

The Great Taste website said: "Great Taste offers a unique benchmarking and product evaluation service, that encourages confidence and commercial success for quality food & drink businesses.

"This in turn generates a greater awareness for products locally, regionally, nationally and internationally."

Tapp'd Cocktails is a family-run business which has gone from trailing drinks to friends and family to selling its ready-to-drink cocktails across the whole of the country.

And, after marking its fifth anniversary earlier this year, the firm could soon have its products on sale across the world as it revealed international partnerships were being finalised - including in America and Ibiza.

To mark five years in business the firm also launched the Tapp’d Charitable Trust (TCT) in a bid to eventually raise £1 million for Little Havens.