Uniq back in the black

A spectacular turnaround at Uniq's desserts factory in Minsterley, Shropshire, has seen the site move from an annual operating loss of £16M to break even in just two years.

The plant is now ready to contract new business and site md Paul Bates plans to launch several new products including bakery, fruit preparations and smoothies.

Although revenues had remained the same at about £71M, gross margins had doubled and stock-keeping units had almost halved from 350 products to under 180 in the last two years, said Bates. Labour costs had also fallen significantly as the site moved from a 24/7 to a 12-hours-a-day operation.

Overall efficiency and utilisation had more than doubled, energy and water use had plummeted and the amount of waste going to landfill had halved, he said. "In two years we've taken £4.5M of waste out of this factory."

Moving into bakery and fruit would help the site reach its goal of turning over £100M by March 2009, he said.

"We have finally started to ramp up the new product pipeline again. We even have our first product on TV with Marks & Spencer. If we had not increased the efficiencies four-fold on the two lines that we're doing that on, we wouldn't have had a cat-in-hell's chance of success."

The lean manufacturing process introduced at the site was so successful that it was being rolled out across the rest of Uniq, said Bates. "They look to us for best practice."

Ultimately, there was capacity to generate £150M of revenue through the site, he added.

See the next issue of Food Manufacture for the full interview​