I got married, was given a place at Leeds University, but I never went there and ended up founding KK Fine Foods in 1987. In 1995 we expanded and moved to an 836m2 factory in Flint. It was very challenging at the beginning. I was selling meal concepts to development chefs and they were asking, ‘what does this housewife know about food?’
We moved again to Deeside, Flintshire, in 2003 and started supplying meat dishes soon afterwards. We had been 100% vegetarian as a business before that. It was a challenge to change customer perception – could they trust KK to make a protein-based dish? You would get customers asking: ‘why don’t you stick with what you’re good at?’
Now, 70% of what we do is meat. We can make British, Indian, Italian, Thai, Chinese, Eastern European and Mediterranean meals and handle lamb, fish, beef and chicken.
We can use the sous vide method for slow-cooking meat. We invested in it and it opened up a new market for us – after all, when all you are making is vegetarian dishes you are really only covering 5% of people’s menus. You would get customer briefs, put your name against the vegetarian products and look at the other side and say: ‘I’d like to do that’ – it was a big frustration. People tended not to regard us as a serious player because of it – we were an afterthought.
But I wanted to grow and plough money back into the business. And going into meat was the only thing that could give me the growth that I was craving. In the past five years we have expanded and grown from £5M to £13.5M. Protein-based food has a higher value than vegetarian meals. When you make a change like that it has got to be the right timing. You have to educate your labour force. There’s a lot of learning that needs to happen and you need the right equipment.
Since then we have made further investments in new processes. We’re always open to try new avenues and markets. With the latest investment we can do virtually any meal, starters as well as main courses, so we’re almost a one-stop shop for customers.
Would we go into chilled? I would never say never, but we have plenty of business in the frozen food market, so we’re sticking with that for now. We have two products launching very soon using a new process.
We have 929m2 of extra space we could expand into, depending on business growth and customer demand, on top of the existing 7,432m2 currently used on site. The factory could be turning over £25m and we are at £13.5m now, excluding that space. At a push we could stretch sales to £30m.
We use third-party logistics providers for distribution and cold storage such as ACS&T and 3663, although we have also got our own storage here. Some customers’ orders are more unpredictable than others, so you have got to hold stock. Daily loads could be anything up to 100 pallets, depending on the season.
Of all the challenges we are facing at the moment, raw material sourcing is one of the biggest. The issue hasn’t just been the weak pound, but also the weather. Bad weather in Poland hit the onion crop and forced prices up and lamb has doubled in price. We’re trying to avoid any development with lamb, but we can’t really do without onions.
We have very little control over ingredients pricing, but if prices go up, we can’t just pass that on to the customer. We’re tackling the situation by doing more for less. We’re focusing very much on training.
Like a lot of companies, we have been busy re-engineering products because of the recession, in an attempt to take out cost without compromising quality.
A recession is not a bad thing. You have to look at it positively. It makes you look inwards. National Insurance contributions are going up. I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Yes, it’s hard and we all have to suffer, but there’s no point in moaning about it. All I am focused on is: have we got enough business coming through the doors?
We brought Toyota in towards the tail end of last year in order to look at lean manufacturing techniques, continuous improvement and standardisation of practices, involving workers in the decision making. We went to see one of their factories and were absolutely bowled over. We are committed to their training for the whole of this year. We are very lucky that we have one of their sites next door.
The Toyota initiative is something I am very proud of because I wanted the best for my staff and you can only get that through training. I love the element of respect that you see when you go to Japanese factories. I am very passionate about the principles of Kaizen and Six Sigma.
By training staff you can develop better performance and productivity, reducing your costs. Sometimes you can find a hidden star in the workforce and you have the opportunity to develop and understand people more.
We aim to involve staff wherever possible. We have a suggestion box, energy saving, efficiency improvement and health and safety committees, we organise activities and operate an employee of the month scheme so they feel that they are not forgotten. We also work with Glyndwr University in Wrexham, putting a lot of people through courses.
We have just built an in-house training room. We also like to organise socials, such as barbecues, hog roasts or trips to Alton Towers. And if any member of staff has been here longer than five years, we offer them share options in the company.
We have a good reputation and low staff turnover – about 2%. Many people we employ have been with us since the business started.
Interview with Rod Addy
Factory Facts
Location: KK Fine Foods, Estuary House, 10th Avenue, Zone 3, Deeside Industrial Park, Deeside, Flintshire, CH5 2UA. Tel: 01244 286200
Staff: 170, including 10 part time
Operating hours: 40 hours a week, plus weekends depending on demand
Products: A mix of branded and own label. Ready meals, cooked using sous vide and standard methods, pastries, filoux items and savoury tartes, curries, risottos, pasta, burgers, patés, soups, grills, vegetarian sausages for foodservice outlets, the independent trade and supermarkets through third parties.
Output: 100t/week
Capacity: 200t/week
Annual turnover: £13.5m
Personal
Name: Leyla Edwards
Age: 21 at heart!
Career highlights: “Building my own factory. I came to Deeside in 2003 and I only had a 2,787m2 production facility.”
Domestic: “I am married and have three children, two girls, Nadia and Rawia, and a boy, Samir. Rawia is my business development manager and Samir is commercial manager.”
Outside work: “I love clay pigeon shooting and trekking. I went backpacking in Nepal in 2007. I also love portrait painting. When I retire I’d love to be painting, sculpting and travelling.”