The Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards ceremony was once again a memorable evening, with an array of successful companies taking well-deserved prizes away from London's Park Lane Hilton on November 5.
As the UK emerges from one of the longest recessions for decades, the evening's award winners proved they had what it takes to thrive in bad times as well as good. And, perhaps, it is this resilience which sets the food and drink sector apart from many other manufacturing sectors. We must add to this resilience its deftness at innovation, together with the extreme flexibility it displays when faced with challenging market conditions.
This year, in recognition of the huge strides that food manufacturers have made to improve their sustainability and reduce their environmental footprint, we introduced a new award for Best Environmental Initiative of the Year. Although a hotly contested award, the eventual winner Coca-Cola Enterprises really stood out for its tremendous achievements over the past year. However, this should by no means detract from the great work carried out by the other shortlisted candidates. In any other year, these companies could quite easily have walked away with the top prize for their achievements. And, of course, there's always next year
Our experienced panel of judges, ably led by chairman Paul Wilkinson, once again faced the very difficult task of choosing winners from some equally worthy candidates across a range of awards categories.
It is worth emphasising how rigorous the judging process was. First, judges undertook the onerous task of evaluating in detail the various entries prior to submitting their scorecards, which rated different companies against one another. All 14 then met on the judging day, on which they argued the case for their preferred candidates. The panel finally arrived at a shortlist in each category from which judges agreed often by a secret ballot an overall winner.
The category awards were judged against a list of seven criteria. This covered: category management; marketing and new product development; supply chain improvement; quality assurance; health safety and environmental management; process innovation; and human resources development.
The Food Manufacturing Company of the Year was selected from the winners of the eight individual sector categories. Awards were also made for Personality of the Year, Small Company of the Year and the Judges' Special Award.
In addition, an award for Best Training Programme of the Year recognised the importance the food manufacturing sector places on raising the skills of its employees. This award was once again a very close call, with a number of high-quality entries.
November 5 certainly proved to be an evening to celebrate some great achievements. The 400 attendees were encouraged to register their comments on and offer their congratulations to the award winners via Twitter on the night using our dedicated awards hash tag #FMEA12. Here is a collection of the best tweets from the night. Video interviews with a selection of the successful winners can be viewed here. For a full list of shortlisted candidates and winners see visit our dedicated awards website.