Work will include replacing existing ventilation infrastructure and additional odour scrubbing capacity to ensure that discharge thresholds are achieved.
Commenting on the work, managing Director Blaine Van Rensburg said: “This significant programme of improvements to totally transform our Attleborough plant will make it one of the most modern in the sector.
‘Years of under investment’
“The work is not only enhance the facility, which I’m sorry to say had previously suffered from years of under-investment, it will also benefit those living in close proximity to our site by reducing both noise and odour emissions.”
Plans to update the odour abatement system – due to be completed by late spring – follow a £160,000 update to its materials handling and product dispatch areas, including the installation of new automatic racking facilities.
Rensburg added: “We are fully committed to reducing our impact as much as possible and, over the coming months, this work will help is achieve this.”
Saved from administration
Banham Poultry’s owners purchased the business in a pre-pack administration in 2018 and have since invested £11m at the Attleborough site.
In May 2019, planning documents were submitted to Norfolk council proposing the business relocated to Bunns Bank, the previous home of the company’s factory before it was destroyed by fire in 1998.
The new factory would replace the current Station Road site, which was originally intended to serve as a temporary base of operations. Despite having extant permission to improve the factory, its location had limited what could be done.
Meanwhile, Glebe Farm Foods plans to invest £6m in the business within four years as it presses on with plant-based NPD, the business’s owners and founders reveal in an exclusive video interview.
