Blaze costs WC Rowe £2M to renovate

14-Aug-2014 - Last updated on 15-Aug-2014 at 13:11 GMT

Factory renovation will cost WC Rowe £2M

Fire damaged pasty manufacturer WC Rowe will have to spend more than £2M on its Falmouth site to bring it back up to standard, the director in charge of the renovation has said.

Rob Cuffe, project director at the building contractor Taylor Rose, which is handling the renovation, said the job was a fairly big one and would take until the end of the year to complete.

“I would hope that it would be up and running before the end of the year and completely finished, with us off site, by the end of the year,” he told FoodManufacture.co.uk.

Not full capacity

The Cornwall-based company was not operating to full capacity following the fire on July 19, but was running a processing operation in a smaller part of the factory, FoodManufacture.co.uk understands.

“The factory now needs to be brought back up to BRC [British Retail Consortium] standards,” said Cuffe.

“We would like to get them up and running as soon as possible, but it’s a fairly big job.

“Electric services, processing services and mechanical services will all need to be gutted,” he added.

The factory supplies Cornish pasties and other baked goods to many of the major multiples, including Asda and Tesco.

WC Rowe, which was established in 1949 by founder Bill Rowe, also has a series of 18 high street bakeries in and around Cornwall.

Damaged a small area

Following the fire, WC Rowe released a statement on its Facebook page, which stated the blaze had only damaged a small area of the factory.

“We have in place robust contingency plans for incidents such as this and are in the midst of implementing these to ensure none of our customers are affected,” it said.

WC Rowe is a major employer in the area and has around 500 staff.

No one from the company was available to speak with FoodManufacture.co.uk at the time this article was published.