Princes Ltd wins Ambient Food Company of the year 2020 at the prestigious Food Manufacture Excellence Awards
It’s always a huge honour to win an award for the work we do but this one has put a huge smile on our faces because this is a testament to the thousands of Princes colleagues who are dedicated to keeping the nation fed.
There are many reason why we won this amazing accolade, however our massive period of transformation that is underway within the Princes Group is probably the biggest reason why.
We are currently investing £150m in our UK manufacturing sites at our Long Sutton, Cardiff and Erith (Edible Oils Limited – a joint venture with ADM) as part of a long term vision for our food manufacturing. These investments started in 2018 and will future proof these sites while allowing us to deliver greater innovation, capacity and environmental benefits. This transformation has run concurrently with a new Innovation partnership with Cubo and the installation of an Innovation Kitchen at our Head Office, delivering a £5m re-brand of our iconic Princes brand and then there is covid.
Our core canned categories have seen unprecedented levels of increase due to the pandemic and we’ve risen to the challenge whilst suffering from reduced staffing levels during the early weeks. Our Bradford site had its record week of production during lockdown – less than 12 months after a fire at the site – and we responsibly managed a covid outbreak at our Wisbech site with minimal disruption.
All of this has been against a backdrop of maintaining, and where possible, improving our environmental efficiencies. There are a number of areas; part of our investment at Long Sutton includes a new raw materials warehouse which will significantly reduce road miles between site and the existing location. The same investment includes an onsite Anaerobic Digestion plant for raw material waste that cannot be donated, and which will generate energy for the site, part of our long term plan to generate 50% of our own energy needs on site by 2030.
In 2018 we signed up to the Champions 12.3 Food Waste commitment and in our first year of reporting – Year Ending March 20 – we reduced food waste across our 10 UK sites by 7%. We
have also encouraged suppliers to join with the C12.3 initiative and support Sustainable Development Goal 12.3
We’re also very proud to say that we’ve removed non-recyclable PVC and EPS (expanded polystyrene) from our manufacturing sites and introduced cardboard sleeves to replacing plastic on our Princes tuna and Napolina tomato multi packs. In our UK manufacturing sites, our average recycled content of plastics reached 45% (UK Plastic Pact target is 30% by 2025) and 98.6% of our plastics are “widely recyclable” as defined by OPRL.
Suffice to say that we’re delighted to have won this award and we are incredibly proud of the Princes teams that made it happen.
Thank you to Food Manufacture and a grateful thanks to all of our colleagues.