Prince among ready meals

Princes Foods' factory manager Elliot Gledhill describes some of the issues involved in moving production from one location to another

I joined Princes eight years ago as production manager at the Southport sauces and spreadables plant. When I took the post they promised me a new, purpose-built factory. They didn’t tell me it would be five years later and 300 miles away!

In 2002 we closed the Southport site and the old Shippams factory at East Walls, Chichester. Princes had bought the new site from Uniq in 2001 and moved both into this site in Terminus Road. It was a patchwork of buildings that Uniq had used to make yoghurts and desserts.

We kept part of the original structure but 80% was demolished and we spent £15m fully redeveloping the site. We’ve also spent over £4m on capital projects since then. And this year we’ve installed a US-made pot filling line that has enabled us to launch Quick Eat. It’s a range of ambient microwaveable ready meals recipes like Thai green curry with rice that we think could be the start of a completely new category. I’ve wanted to get plastic pots in here for some time, but that project has been the bane of my life for the past two years!

I know West Sussex is an unlikely place to be investing in food manufacturing, but it was just more convenient than anywhere else. The Southport plant was modern but landlocked so it had limited scope for expansion. Shippams was more of a cottage-style operation slow, methodical and high quality, but low volume. It did a lot of own-label for Marks & Spencer.

We were originally looking in the north west to find a site, so we could retain the Princes staff and take the Shippams plant up there. But Shippams’ production was more complex and it was decided it was easier to move the modern equipment here than shift all this antiquated equipment up north. And Chichester had an established workforce.

Southport was doing pâtés, spreads and pastes and bottled and canned sauces. The best-known brands were Princes and Bon Appetito, the tomato and herb-based sauces range. Shippams was obviously doing its own famous range of spreadables, but was doing canned ready meals too.

There was also a difference in the technologies between the Shippams and Princes brands, which was mainly about texture and coarseness. Because Shippams was a traditional, low-volume producer it had more separate processes: the product went through a flaker, then it was cooked, then it went into a bowl chopper and finally into a filler. That gives you far more control of the texture. Princes is a more straight-through process and it’s over the filler before you can blink. For us now, it’s about maintaining that difference for customers who prefer one brand or the other.

When we were ready to start moving production in here, we did it in two phases. We divided the building in two with a solid wall and concentrated on getting one half finished first. We closed Southport in May 2002 it was a full redundancy situation and the machinery was transported down.

We had built up a reasonable amount of stock, but I don’t think we’d anticipated how long it would take to get up and running. It took about two months, and even then it was more limping than running. Did we short anyone? Oh god, yes. We had 250 products, and trying to build up stocks of all those was extremely difficult, especially when you’re asking for more output from people who know they are about to be made redundant.

Once the Southport machinery was re-installed we brought some of the East Wall staff over to run it, and once we’d closed East Wall we transferred the rest.

It doesn’t make any difference whether machinery is being moved from round the corner or 300 miles away, once it’s been stripped down you’d be surprised what you can manage to lose. And even though it’s a purpose-built factory, there are things you don’t get right. In 2004 we spent in the region of £240,000 on drains because where we had originally planned to put machinery didn’t suit our product flow.

By the end of 2003 we’d installed six lines five with multi-head rotary fillers, and a sixth, twin-head manual filler for Marks & Spencer speciality sauces in glass jars. Since then, piece-by-piece, we’ve been taking out old machinery and replacing it with modernised, CE-compliant and less labour intensive equipment.

For example, we had a bank of 12 retorts that must have been 30 years old. They were also not programmable logic controlled so they were rather prone to failure, and when you lose pressure in a retort you can lose everything up to 3,000 cans or 8,000 jars. We’re half way through the process of replacing those with six rotary retorts. They aren’t just bigger they also have a reduced cycle time, so you get better quality because you are not having to cook for so long. We’ve spent £1.5m on the retorts alone but, to be fair, we’d never have been able to do the new microwaveable ready meals in plastic pots without them.

The pots came about after my engineering manager, Jimmy McMonagle, was over in France talking to a retort manufacturer. They were conducting trials with a US company on plastic pots with ring-pull ends. Later, while I was in the US, I had a chance to look at some of the products they were doing there. And at the same time, our account manager for Marks & Spencer heard they were looking to replace their canned protein-in-sauce products with something better.

Initially, we launched six enhanced products for M&S earlier this year. But these were still only meat-in-sauce products. For us, the endgame was always to produce a complete ready meal in a pot. The M&S business gave us the springboard to do that. Now we’ve launched Quick Eat, which is a Princes branded product and produced a range of complete ready meals for M&S too.

We originally thought that buying the machinery would get us 50% of the way there but it was nowhere near. We had to rethink our entire process to do these meals. There’s nothing standard about them. To get the quality for a ready meal that would sell at £1.98, compared with other pot products that sell at 49p, we needed to stop the carbohydrate absorbing the sauce. The real breakthrough was getting a full meal for example, rice or pasta with a sauce and a protein into the pot in layers, in such a way that they wouldn’t mix.

FACTORY FACTS

Location: Princes Foods Manufacturing Division (UK), Terminus Road, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 8TX. Tel: 01243 788373.

Site area: 30,000m2

Production area: 10,000m2, with 700m2 reserved for expansion

Employees: 176

Main products: Ambient sauces, spreadables and ready meals in bottles, jars, cans, plastic pots and flexible pouches

PERSONAL

Name: Elliot Gledhill

Age: 40

Career highlights: Began food industry career with Pourshins, the short shelf-life fresh fruit juice producer, in Runcorn. Moved to Delta Daily in Wrexham, Clwyd, as operations manager, producing airline food and frozen ready meals. Joined Princes eight years go, as production manager in Southport, moving to Chichester as factory manager in 2002.

Domestics: Married with three children, and living in Poling, near Arundel.

Outside work: “I go to the gym several times a week, and do an awful lot of DIY. The first house we bought was new, because I didn’t have time for anything but work, work, work. This one’s older and I’ve spent the last year doing it up."