Give peas a chance says Birds Eye boss

Craig Hamilton, general manager, Birds Eye, Lowestoft

I joined Birds Eye 14 years ago as a Unilever management trainee and secured my first management posts soon after as a shift supervisor, then a project engineer.

I was a manufacturing manager at Birds Eye Lowestoft's potato building for three years and went on to spend 12 months restructuring the vegetable building here. I moved across to the Grimsby factory for three years. Five years ago I became head of technology in Lowestoft and finally I assumed my current role in November.

This is my first general manager role and we have had to deal with a lot in quite a short time. I've enjoyed it, though.

I've done both technical and manufacturing jobs on the site over the years, so I know the people, the processes and the buildings.

In fact, I met my wife here when I was a manufacturing manager and she was a microbiologist at the company laboratories across the road. We got married in April 1999. As a matter of fact, my wife's grandparents worked here as supervisors during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

The site is built in the South Denes area of Lowestoft, which used to be an old fishing village, hence the reason why the different plants are called Denes 1, 2, 3 and 4.

It is Birds Eye's largest frozen food site, covering 26 acres and it's as far east in England as you can go. We back on to the sea wall. At high tide last winter the sea came over it up to the loading bay.

Processing post-harvest

The pea harvest lasts for seven weeks and we spend the rest of the year dealing with the produce of that harvest. Once the peas are harvested, they are transported to the processing factory and frozen within two and a half hours of being picked. They are then graded in size and large field defects are removed, such as weeds, coke and insects.

We grade our peas to varying sizes, depending on whether they are for UK Birds Eye packs or our continental customers.

We have sophisticated colour sorting technology to filter out peas that are not the right colour for our purposes or to remove residual field contaminants. We also sieve out oversized peas and we can tune machines to look for particular defects. Anything that comes out is used in animal feed.

There are two lines for fluid-fill peas and two for mixed vegetable products. We've now built our SteamFresh vegetable capacity up to 8,000t per year.

Levels of automation are high within our Denes 2 repack building for peas, SteamFresh and other vegetables, with line integrated quality controls for assessing bag seal integrity and case weights.

In frozen food, shelf-ready packaging is not as developed it is in ambient, but it is still one of the things we're looking into.

Meanwhile, soya has been described as the next pea, but we have to take it steady to build capacity as the product proves itself.

Personally, making the step from being one of my peer group to leading my peers has been a challenge. But probably the most challenging thing for me was Birds Eye announcing the closure of its Hull factory in January.

We've had to take on the processing of a further 20,000t of vegetables, plus 10,000t of fish across the whole of the Lowestoft site and we had to implement the increase in capacity within a 10 week window in three of our four manufacturing areas.

We're on track and commissioning is going well. We're investing less than £2M in the move, with most of that going on the removal and reintegration of equipment from Hull.

Site composition

Apart from that, the most recent investment in this site was for SteamFresh Vegetables, which came on line in 2003.

The whole Lowestoft site is composed of four manufacturing units, one for red meat and burgers, one for potatoes, one for poultry and one for peas and vegetables.

The entire site is operational for seven days per week and 24 hours per day. We close for four days at Easter and we shut at lunchtime on Christmas Eve, opening again on January 2. I like to get to work early, around 07.15, so that I can leave at around 17.30 to spend time with my family.

We have to have competitive and technical advantages, for example, ensuring our peas are as clean as they can possibly be. That's partly about minimising the conversion process.

Another advantage we have is that we can spread our overheads. For example, we process 12,000t of potatoes on a site with the capacity to process 130,000t of product.

An additional issue is how the market will pan out when the whole of the UK has been hit by the worst pea season anyone can remember. It's important we secure the supplies we need and ensure that we are manufacturing as well as we possibly can.

The impact will be felt through to June next year. We are looking at different sourcing options. Everything is driven by the sales plan. There are sourcing options in the southern hemisphere, where harvests take place around Christmas time.

We have agency labour that we can use to flex our workforce up and down accordingly. Different manufacturing units also work to different sales patterns across the year, so we can shift people across to them as and when we need them.

I'm not too worried about my next step from here. I'll worry about that when I'm coming to the end of this roll in five years time. At the moment, I'm six months into the job. I'm keen to stay in the area and obviously I don't have to worry about the commute.

Interview by Rod Addy

FACTORY FACTS

Location:​ Birds Eye, Lowestoft, Whapload Road, Lowestoft, NR32 1JG. Tel: 01502 573131

Site history:​ "Development began in 1949. Denes 2 was built in 1965, Denes 3 in 1968. In 1987 we built Denes 1, our burger factory, and in 1993, Denes 4, the poultry building."

Employees:​ "The whole site has 600 staff. The pea plant operates on 12 people per shift, plus agency workers."

Output:​ Total site is 120,000t per year. We process 50,000t of peas per year.

Products:​ Birds Eye Garden Peas. Birds Eye Waffles, Simply Fish, Birds Eye Burgers, Birds Eye or Igloo branded poultry, are all made at the same site.

PERSONAL

Name:​ Craig Hamilton

Age:​ 35

Career highlights:​ "In the vegetable building in the 12 months of 1999. It was all about modernising equipment. We started with 11 production lines and we had to go down to four, but the volume didn't change."

Domestics:​ Married with twin daughters

Outside work:​ "I run twice a week and occasionally cycle to work - I live three miles away. Aside from that, my family demand a lot of attention and quite rightly."