FERNDALE FOODS LTD

The Ferndale Foods business was purchased at the beginning of 1993. At that time it was an £8M business making cooked omelette and cooked/raw frozen sausage. Further business was needed to fill this large site and after a foray into chilled snack products in 1994(which did not succeed) part of the site was offered as a dedicated chilled ready meals plant to ASDA in 1995.

An investment of £4M saw the set up of a chilled meals factory within the business that consolidated supply and offered better quality products to the customer, so business soon took off. Further growth in the ready meals category and successful tenders against the competition lead to two further tranches of investment, giving a total of £18M; which rapidly increased the capacity from 300, 000 meals to 600, 000 meals and then on to 1, 000, 000 meals per week by 2005. This investment coupled with a display of culinary skill also attracted new business and Waitrose frozen own label business was won in 2001. Overall turnover for the comapany at its peak was approximately £55M with over 42M coming from ready meals. By 2005 the company had skills and technology to handle Italian (pasta based) meals, English traditional (potato topped meals), American meals, Healty Eating and finally, the top luxury lines made in a special craft kitchen.

At the end of 2005 the contract with ASDA was taken away with the loss of many jobs. However, further investment of £7M in 2006 has reinvigorated the business as a premium, healthy meals supplier to J.Sainsbury and Waitrose.

The omelette business has continued to show growth to £4 million in annual sales. We now supply major retailers, airlines and food service outlets with a range of sizes and fillings.

From 2005 we have seen a major year on year growth in cooked sausages with the chilled cocktail sausages leading the way. In December 2006 Tesco alone took over 43 million of our cocktail sausages.