It will be at least 1218 months before Uniq's ill-fated desserts plant at Minsterley returns a profit, chief executive Geoff Eaton has admitted.
The company, which posted a £1.5m pre-tax loss on sales down 4% year-on-year to £407.8m in the 26 weeks to October 1, had nevertheless made significant progress through improving controls at the former Northern Foods plant, which it bought for £16.5m last May.
"Minsterley was installing new IT systems at the same time as winning a huge piece of business with a major retailer, which caused indigestion and led to unacceptably high levels of waste," said Eaton.
A lack of control over forecasting was also a key problem, while maintaining high customer service levels was costing "an enormous amount of money," he added. "We've got a dedicated team at Minsterley and improved the waste situation by £100,000 in October alone. There isn't going to be a turnaround overnight."
He said Uniq's achievements at its Spalding site, which lost a major salads contract with Sainsbury last year but subsequently won new business, showed "what you can do when you have real focus"
Keeping the company's desserts plant at Evercreech open rather than transferring work to Minsterley was the right decision, he insisted. "It's a great factory with a skilled workforce. Sometimes producing everything for multiple customers from massive plants isn't the best approach."
However, Numis Securities analyst Andrew Saunders said he was pessimistic about Uniq's prospects. "No white knight can be expected to rescue Uniq, given that most venture capitalists and trade buyers are already thought to have considered the business prior to its aborted takeover talks. The acid test will be whether Geoff Eaton can steady the ship in the second half before restoring profit growth in 2006/7."