Pork Farms growth outstrips market
The manufacturer of pork pies, sausage rolls, quiches, pasties, tarts and scotch eggs says sales have grown by around 6% a year over the past three years, with the wider market growing at just over 1%.
Peters said he was expecting a similar rate of growth to April 2014: “We are clear in our heads where that growth will come from and we are confident we will grow at five times the rate of that of the market as a whole.”
Peters became md in 2007 when the firm was bought by private equity firm Vision Capital. The finance house is now offering the manufacturer for sale, FoodManufacture.co.uk revealed exclusively this week (October 2).
The “heavy lifting” carried out in the first two-and-a-half years of Peters' tenure had laid a solid platform for today’s performance, he said.
Reorganisation
A reorganisation of the manufacturing operation led to the firm's four factories each focusing on one specific area of the business; the Queens Drive site in Nottingham makes pork pies, the Riverside bakery in Nottingham is responsible for quiches, the Shaftesbury factory manufactures scotch eggs and cooked sausages while the Palethorpes site produces chilled sausage rolls, savoury hot pies, pasties and slices.
Each site houses its own cost centre, category and commercial teams, meaning decisions can be quickly reached and new ideas rapidly assessed, said Peters.
“This has really helped with product innovation and has led to some of the radical thinking that has changed the market,” he added, citing products such as the cupcake quiche, runny poached scotch eggs and the Dippy Egg soft boiled egg as prime examples.
Peters said there would be further innovation in the year ahead in order to meet the firm’s growth ambitions, along with further investment in process technology.
New products
“We have invested £7M over the past year on production projects and I can't see that diminishing going forward. Some of the new products have required considerable investment in technology but that is something we are willing to do. We have to invest in what I term ‘disruptive innovation’.”
One such development that is likely to bear fruition in the next 12 months is the launch of savoury pastry products for the gluten-free market.
“There will be a real premium for the first company that can crack and launch this,” added Peters.
“We have a lot of on-going innovation in this area but it is difficult to do gluten-free well for chilled foods and we are not prepared to compromise when it comes to quality.”
Meanwhile, Pork Farms has been short-listed for two Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards.
