"We have clients in various stages of development," said sales and marketing director Dale Fiddy. "There are a number of projects due to come to fruition shortly. Over the past 12 months we have grown the business faster than predicted. I joined two years ago and in that time we have gone from £114M to £128M, which is fairly healthy growth through a difficult trading period."
Most of the growth had come from winning business from competitors, said Fiddy, who aims to chalk up sales of £150M in 2012.
For the next 12 months to two years, NFT would focus on its core market of chilled and fresh food requiring storage and transport at 05°C, said Fiddy. However, he said deep chill facilities at Daventry offered more opportunities to expand into storing foods such as meat and meat products at low temperatures without harming quality and extending shelf-life. Deep chill products are kept at -1°C there.
"Bacon, for example, can kept in deep chill, which will slow down growth in bug count. We have used this successfully to attract and retain accounts such as [meat supplier] Forza."
NFT announced the completion of initial investment in its flagship Daventry site two months ago. It has spent £8M on the facility over two years and is due to finish an extension there in April, taking total storage capacity of the 18,581m2 site to 20,000 pallets.
The extension includes an area dedicated to services such as repacking and relabelling. "There's every opportunity for us to develop in areas such as automatic inkjet printing, barcode labelling or shrink wrapping," said Fiddy. Construction of the depot only began in November 2008, but most of it had already been allocated to existing customers, he said. "We are looking at additional capacity, which will involve investment in warehousing."
NFT customers include Asda, Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer.