Silvery Tweed Cereals pumps £1.175m into site upgrade
The £1.175m extension and upgrade, which will create six new jobs, will comprise a palletised storage warehouse, a new weighbridge, grain silos, a grain intake system, a waste collection facility and an upgrade of the company’s cereal cooking plant.
The extension should deliver significant savings by enabling Silvery Tweed to store materials in-house “rather than using external contractors where, at its peak, our spend has been up to £220,000 a year”, md Bob Gladstone told FoodManufacture.co.uk.
“It will also enable us to reduce vehicle movements and cut down on food miles. We will be able to extend our services by providing storage facilities for our customers, which was previously not possible, as well as holding more stocks of finished products to create a more efficient service.
“On the grain handling side, the extended facility will reduce storage costs and make us more efficient by having longer production runs. It will also enable us to improve site hygiene by containing all waste in a purpose-built storage silo and reduce vehicle loading times.”
Barley beta-glucan
Silvery Tweed, which has a turnover of around £18m, supplies a wide range of products including wheat, rice, barley and rye flakes, barley flour, granola and fibre blends to leading manufacturers. These are then used in everything from soups and sauces to breakfast cereals and bread.
It has also developed techniques to supply white barley flour containing high levels (7-12%) of cholesterol-busting beta-glucan, said Gladstone.
"The barley flour is milled using our own bespoke methods which we have developed over a period of time. The barley is a unique variety which is grown under licence to Silvery Tweed in the UK. The product is manufactured using all-natural methods so no chemical extraction methods."
The financing for the extension was provided by Yorkshire Bank and a grant from One North East under the Rural Enterprises scheme
