Branston invests £1.7M in potato manufacturing line
The grading, washing and sizing equipment at its Perthshire site will revolutionise the factory’s ability to process high volumes of the crop, claimed the company.
The investment will help the business gear up production to meet the demands of fulfilling a new large, long-term supply contract won recently by the company.
Branston currently works with 41 growers in Scotland and was planning to increase that total, as the business continued to grow.
The potato supplier operates three sites across the UK, located in Perthshire, Lincolnshire and Somerset. It has been supplying potatoes to the country’s major supermarkets for almost 50-years.
‘Increasing efficiency’
The general manager of Branston’s Scotland site Kevin Imrie said: “The new equipment – supplied by Haith Group and Newtec – will go a long way to increasing efficiency and output at our Scottish site.
“The line has state-of-the-art washing equipment as well as the latest in optical-grading technology. It reduces the manual handling of crop and enables potatoes to be graded to remove quality defects then sorted into much more accurate size bands ready for packing.”
The new technology will create a “simpler and more efficient process”, he said. That would allow the factory to wash, size grade and remove quality defects in one process.
50t an hour
The increased efficiencies will enable the factory to handle up to 175,000 potatoes or 50t an hour.
“Machinery is, of course, extremely important to our day-to-day running and new technology makes our work a lot more streamlined and efficient for our staff and customers,” said Imrie. “But we couldn’t survive without the support from our growers.
“We have excellent relationships with our growers and we have chosen our sites based on the UK’s best potato producing areas.”
The continued investment in new technology showed the firm’s commitment to growing its business in Scotland “for the long-term benefit of the potato industry here and across the UK”.
Last month, the potato supplier created 20 new jobs after investing £5M in a factory expansion at its site in Lincolnshire.
The jobs were in operational, technical, engineering and supply chain.
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