With Lord Chris Haskin’s funeral held earlier today, Food Manufacture takes a look back at his life and the impact he has had on the modern food manufacturing landscape.
The Dublin native passed away earlier this month aged 88, and had been a member of the House of Lords up until 2020.
He entered the House in 1998 after a long association with the Labour Party and served as Tony Blair’s ‘rural tsar’ in the early 2000s during an outbreak of foot and mouth disease.
But Lord Haskins will undoubtedly be best remembered for his ground-breaking innovations in the chilled foods sector during his time at the helm of Northern Foods.
Now commonplace, chilled ready-made dishes were largely science fiction before the 1970s, and Haskins’ close working relationship with Northern Foods and Marks & Spencer created a convenience revolution.
Former colleague and now director at Wilkin Chapman Rollits, Julian Wild, reflects: “It is easy to forget that before the 1970s convenience foods such as packaged sandwiches, chilled soups, recipe dishes and dairy desserts did not exist.
“It was Northern Foods’ relationship with M&S that created the chilled foods revolution, which was only later copied by other supermarkets. Products were produced one day and by refrigerated transport were on M&S shelves from Scotland to Cornwall by opening time the next day. That had never happened before anywhere in Europe.”
Underscoring Haskin’s role in this chilled food revolution, Wild continues: “Chris Haskins, who had joined Northern Foods at its dairy business in Northern Ireland and became managing director and then chairman, started the relationship with M&S and he was absolutely fundamental to maintaining that bond for the next 30 years.
“Northern built factories dedicated to M&S without any formal contract, but based on mutual trust. Chris was highly respected by a series of senior managers in M&S, and later in Tesco and Sainsbury’s, as he grew Northern’s business to become the most innovative food supplier in the UK.”
Haskins was also indispensable in growing Northern Foods into the multibillion-pound company it later became.
Having first joined the firm in 1962, the business grew during his tenure from a regional dairy company based in Hull in the 1960s to a £2 billion turnover, broadly based food group by the time it demerged Express Dairies in 1998.
By then, it had developed a £500 million business with its largest customer, M&S, the biggest supplier-customer relationship in food in Europe.
Paying tribute to his former manager and mentor in his own words, Wild told Food Manufacture: “Chris believed in letting managers manage. He encouraged a highly devolved, lean management style across Northern’s operating companies, which allowed the best talent in the British food industry to flourish and grow. Without exception, Northern’s senior management held Chris Haskins in the highest regard.
“He was totally unpretentious and understated in everything he did. But he introduced weekly accounting across a multi-million-pound group of companies so that he knew by the following Friday how every company had performed the week before. His finger was always on the pulse and every manager knew it.
“He also had a huge intellect and was brilliantly well read, so he was a hard person to argue with. But he was always willing to listen and respect alternative views. Unusually for an executive chairman, he had strong socialist and ethical principles, which ran through the whole culture of Northern Foods.
“Towards the end of his career, Chris became Lord Haskins of Skidby, the village where he lived for over 50 years. It was not a title he would ever have sought or particularly valued. For the last 20 years of his life he devoted much of his time to being a force for good, firstly in Yorkshire and then more locally on both sides of the Humber.
“Without any doubt, during my 26 years in Northern Foods in a number of different roles, Chris Haskins was the biggest influence on my career, and I was privileged to have him as a boss and a very good friend. I will miss him greatly.”
