Ingredients group consolidates

THE Real Good Food Company is to merge its Liverpool-based bakery ingredients business with its sugar division, as part of a series of cost cutting measures.

Renshaws will be merged with Wakefield-based Napier Brown Foods into one business unit called Renshawnapier, which will be based in Liverpool.

The company will be run by a single management team. A spokesperson for the company told the business desk that the move would affect “less than 20” management positions. Production will continue at the Wakefield site, which employs around 170 people.

Renshaw’s employs 175 staff – the figure rises to 240 in its peak period between August and November, when it is preparing for the Christmas rush. It supplies ingredients to cake manufacturers, bakers and retailers.

The reorganisation, which will be completed by early March, is expected to be cash neutral in 2009, but after that will produce cost savings of around £800,000 a year.

The group said that the new business unit’s focus will be to build value from a broader portfolio of both raw and value-added ingredients.

In early December, The Real Good Food Company announced it was moving its London head office to its Liverpool manufacturing site, to reduce costs. It said that the deterioration of the economic climate had affected trading and that it expected its results for the year to the end of December to show a pre-tax profit of around £0.5m.

Stephen Heslop, chief executive of Real Good Food, said of the merger: “I am extremely excited about this new development and the prospects it brings to the group. Our new and flatter management structure, with head office and principal business now consolidated onto a single site, will be better able to manage the challenges and seize opportunities within our market places.”

Haydens Bakeries, based in Wiltshire, will continue to be managed as a separate stand-alone business unit.