Food Manufacture Excellence Awards: Sponsors profiles 2016

Appetite Learning

Appetite Learning is an eLearning platform created in partnership by William Reed, the food and drink industry expert, and Virtual College, eLearning specialist with more than 2M online learners. It offers a wide range of online courses specifically for the hospitality, retail and food manufacturing industries. It brings clients the powerful combination of William Reed’s industry knowledge and experience, combined with Virtual College’s pioneering eLearning expertise.

Appetite Learning’s competitively priced online courses save users time and money, showing measureable results alongside proof of compliance for their business. Learning is flexible with course content accessible anywhere an internet connection is available. It not only offers courses that meet compliance requirements, such as Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene, but Appetite Learning also covers the full suite of health and safety products as well as safeguarding and a manager’s toolkit.

Appetite Learning provides a complete learning solution. It not only supplies relevant coursework accessed online, but also transforms the way clients manage their training through the provision of an easy-to-use cloud-based Learning Management System and modern audit tool.

Log in, learn anywhere, anytime, with Appetite Learning.

www.appetitelearning.com​

b3 Jobs

CATEGORY: YOUNG TALENT OF THE YEAR

Operating for the last 16 years, b3 jobs is a market-leading agency specialising in food manufacturing recruitment across England, Scotland and Wales. Since 2000, it has been supplying both permanent and interim staff to small and medium-sized enterprises and blue chips alike, offering a flexible and versatile recruitment service that includes contingency recruitment, preferred supplier resourcing and talent acquisition. In a nutshell, it aims to take the headache out of finding the right staff that are so vital to driving its clients’ business forward.

The company’s core values include: finding the right person for the job and the right job for the person; providing team-delivered, ethical, honest, expert and cost-effective services to the highest standards; and developing mutually beneficial long-term business gains and not short-term goals.

b3 Jobs takes time to ensure that it understands exactly what its clients and candidates alike really want and therefore only introduces those people that it believes genuinely match their requirements it does not just send clients CVs on a wing and a prayer! The company prides itself on its well-respected reputation for providing reliable, knowledgeable and honest recruitment consultancy that delivers the right results cost effectively and on time.

www.b3jobs.co.uk​

KDH

CATEGORY: CHILLED AND FRESH MANUFACTURER OF THE YEAR

KDH is a national multi-disciplinary small works construction and refrigeration company that specialises in serving only the food and beverage industry. It carries out works from a couple of hundred pounds, including small maintenance jobs, to projects up to about £1.5M.

KDH works with its customers, creating tailor-made solutions to suit individual site needs. Work is carried out with minimum disruption through a flexible approach, using weekends, night working or during factory shut-down windows.

The company employs more than 100 of its own tradesman and engineers (refrigeration engineers, insulated panel installers, resin floor layers, stainless steel fabricators, electricians and ground workers). This ensures it is able to maintain maximum flexibility and is in control of quality and safety at all times. It also means its customers, only deal with people who only work in the food and drink environment and gain maximum value for money while ensuring the latest regulations are complied with.

Everything is carried out in-house including computer-aided design, refrigeration design and planning and building control applications, should they be necessary.

www.kdhprojects.co.uk​

LAURAS INTERNATIONAL

CATEGORY: JUDGES’ STAR PERFORMER

Lauras International works with food and drink manufacturing businesses that are frustrated with performance, want to drive profit, or are simply fed up with waste. Each business usually has a good operation, often having started a continuous improvement programme already but prior to working with us, has been disappointed with the rate of improvement or sustainability of results.

Lauras’s expertise in lean, six sigma, total productive maintenance, management development and a range of in-house developed approaches, means it can tailor its ‘rapid Improvement model’ to clients both large and small.

Lauras lays claim to being the only lean improvement company in the UK awarded the Investors in People Gold Standard. It uses highly-skilled practitioners rather than consultants. Its practitioners have all managed a factory, or a significant part of one, and are dedicated to helping client teams to improve productivity by training, getting involved in meetings, and working with the shopfloor.

The company also provides professional consultancy services to support its customers’ organisational capability towards improvement including interim placements, coaching and mentoring, and due diligence assessments.

www.laurasinternational.com​

MICHAEL PAGE

CATEGORY: FOOD MANUFACTURE COMPANY OF THE YEAR

Michael Page specialises in the permanent and interim recruitment of engineering and manufacturing professionals. It has a proven track record of completing assignments with organisations ranging from small and medium-sized enterprises to blue-chip multinationals, through its consultative approach. Michael Page has a national offering across 10 UK cities. It has been able to dedicate a lot of resource into developing relationships within fast-moving consumer goods sectors, with a particular emphasis on food manufacturing.

Across each office, it now has a dedicated consumer specialist recruiting research and development/new product development; quality and technical; continuous improvement/lean; operations/production; maintenance; and health and safety professionals.

With a wealth of experience in its teams and many consultants who actually started their careers within engineering and manufacturing, Michael Page understands the trends and challenges across the food and drink sector, as its teams are broken down by sector, salary level and location. This means Michael Page’s clients will always deal with someone who knows their market inside out.

www.michaelpage.co.uk​

SANDERSON

CATEGORY: SME INNOVATION

Sanderson, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software specialist for food and drink manufacturing, today powers 140+ sites in the sector with its UnityF8 ERP software. This has been developed in partnership with leading food and drink small and medium-sized enterprises across three decades.

Working with fast-growing food and drink manufacturers that have outgrown disparate internal systems, the UnityF8 ERP system delivers ‘all in one’ control across food production and the supply chain managing traceability, recipe weighing, labelling and new product development, together with integrated warehousing, distribution, sales, financials and reporting. Recent new customers have included Peter’s Food Service and Thistle Seafood. These have joined long-term users, such as Tunnock’s and English Provender Company, that have expanded their businesses supported by Sanderson.

By developing its software with top food firms over many years, Sanderson provides ambitious UK food manufacturers with the ‘ready to use’ capabilities that support both immediate business growth and future needs.

If your business wants to unleash growth through smarter processes while protecting its profits and quality, talk to Sanderson to discover how its specialist UnityF8 food ERP system can help you.

www.sanderson.com/food​