Young’s reshapes board to fight ‘challenging market’
The Grimsby-based seafood firm hoped the changes would help improve transparency, efficiency and functional excellence within the business.
Young’s Seafood previously adopted a strategy, ‘One Young’s’, across its back office functions and will now roll this out across its remaining frozen and chilled activities – including sales and operations.
As part of Young’s restructure Frank Green has been appointed as sales director and Steve Lidgett will take on the role of operations director from August 1.
The firm planned to appoint key functional heads of all One Young’s activities, together with the bosses of Young’s standalone business units, to the company’s board.
As a result of these changes Wayne Hudson, md of Young’s Seafood’s frozen business unit, announced his decision to leave the business tomorrow (July 31).
Factory closures
The move followed in the shadow of a third formal consultation meeting with staff and their representatives about the planned closure of Young’s Fraserburgh and Spey Valley sites.
The consultation follows Sainsbury’s decision to transfer its smoked salmon and fresh salmon processing contracts away from Young’s to Marine Harvest, which has put 900 jobs at risk.
The loss of these contracts would leave the Fraserburgh site in Grimsby “significantly under-utilised” and the Spey Valley factory completely empty, with no work, Young’s said.
Young’s is consulting on a proposal to integrate the servicing of the remaining customer contracts and volumes presently processed at Young’s Fraserburgh and Spey Valley into its other manufacturing sites in Grimsby, Livingston and Annan.
Alternative options
The company continues to consider alternatives as part of the consultation process. One of these alternatives is a potential plan that could keep Young’s Fraserburgh open on a reduced basis with up to 250 permanent roles retained, a Young’s spokeswoman said.
“This alternative option would be loss-making in the short-term, until further contracts could be won and scale could be re-introduced,” she said.
“To date, no tangible financial assistance has been committed by any external agency in either Fraserburgh, Grantown-on-Spey or Grimsby.
“We are working hard with our employees and stakeholders to see if this new Alternative Option could be made into a reality, as part of the consultation process.”
