Fire only gutted a third of bakery site, says Northern Foods

Two thirds of Northern Foods' Fletchers Bakeries factory at Claywheels Lane, Sheffield should be back up and running by the end of August following a serious fire that struck the site on July 16, said company bosses.

A third of the site was not impacted by the fire, a third was under assessment and a third had been destroyed, said Jeff Halliwell, director of the bakery division at Northern Foods, Fletchers' parent company.

The section gutted by fire is likely to be rebuilt, a process that could take up to a year, he said. However, all of the site's 600-plus staff should be back at work by September, either at Fletchers or through redeployment into other Northern Foods sites.

The fire did not affect Northern Foods' disposal plans for Fletchers, which produces specialty breads, scones, doughnuts and rolls for all of the leading supermarkets and foodservice companies, he insisted.

He added: “The fire has not affected disposal plans for Fletchers which we announced on May 31. This process is already underway and will continue.”

The cause of the fire is still being investigated but the incident management process had worked smoothly, he said.

The company declined to comment on how much production it would be able to transfer to other sites, but said it was confident that it would not lose a substantial amount of business in the long term, despite the fact that it operates primarily in own-label products, where rivals could easily step into the breach.

A spokesman said. “We have very long standing relationships with customers and well developed business continuity plans.”