Couch’s mission to feed the nation

Armed with more than £500m to invest, Adam Couch is on a mission to feed the nation with healthy, homegrown and sustainable products. Yet red tape, an archaic planning system and government inertia is thwarting his plans. He tells Sheryl Moore why food security is one of the biggest threats to our nation.

“We are a great story waiting to happen,” says Adam Couch with a mixture of pride and frustration.

As chief executive of poultry and pig powerhouse, Cranswick, Couch certainly has a lot to be proud about. Since taking over at the helm of the Hull-based company back in 2012 after running its largest pork processing site in Preston, the company has grown into a £2.6bn enterprise, employing 15,000 people

From its farms and processing plants across the country, Cranswick is the UK’s largest pork producer, with around a million pigs on the ground at any one time. It also houses 10 million chickens. From farm to fork, animal welfare is paramount at Cranswick and its commitment to regenerative agriculture and sustainability is unrivalled.

Cranswick operates in the ‘value-added’ end of the market with premium products. The company largely produces own label products for UK retailers, which account for 75% of the group’s sales, are also recession resistant. “In tough economic times, people tend to eat out less and buy higher quality products to eat at home as an alternative. It’s our value-added offering that gives us a competitive edge,” says Couch.

Cranswick, which under Couch’s leadership has extended further into  Mediterranean products and moved into pet food.  It has a healthy worldwide export market, particularly to China where the firm send the cuts which are largely unconsumed in the West, such as heads, tails, stomach and bones. “You name it, and we’ll export!” says Couch.

The strategy to add value and diversify has seen 35 years of unbroken shareholder dividends and bumper profits that allow the firm to invest around £130m a year in the business.

Huddersfield-born Couch, who joined the company back in 1991 as a graduate trainee when it was GrampianCountry Food Group employing 250 people, says: “We were always looking to add value to the products we produced and ensure we could produce the best quality available.  We were competing with cheaperEuropean imports, so the whole idea was to premiumize our products. Take bacon for instance, our bacon is dry cured and air-dried in the traditional manner. If you buy Danish bacon, it will be injected  with brine. So, that was the principle behind it all, it was a way of differentiating our products versus European imports.”

Yet despite the success, Couch’s frustrations, mainly with the UK’s archaic planning system and crumbling infrastructure, are palpable. He says: “As a nation we rely heavily on imported meat, and we shouldn’t have to. There is a huge requirement  to become more self-sufficient and we could achieve this it wasn’t for the current planning laws.

“Together with our chairman, Tim Smith, we are constantly pressing  the government to grant planning permissions and improve British food security.  Consumption of poultry, for example, continues to experiencestrong growth. It is a protein that is both healthy and versatile, as is pork.

“At the moment we have a situation where beef is in short supply with prices rising significantly as is the price of lamb. While there are inflationary pressures on most products, pork and chicken are better value to the consumer. They are also healthy,      versatile, sustainable and affordable and we could produce so much more in the UK.”

The numbers are stark and sobering. The UK is only 50% self-sufficient in pig meat and 70% in poultry – a vulnerability exposed during recent global disruptions. While politicians debate geopolitical tensions, the real national security challenge lies, says Couch, in food production.

But despite Couch saying that Cranswick do things the right way, every expansion is a battle. The planned redevelopment of a pig and poultry farm has been trapped in the planning system for four years – a timeline that Couch says would be comical if it weren’t so economically damaging.

“We’re looking to deploy half a billion pounds of capital into the sector,” he says. “The growth potential is immense, especially with increasing health consciousness. But we’re constantly fighting a system that seems designed to obstruct, rather than enable, growth.”

While the UK increasingly imports potentially lower-standard meat products, homegrown producers like Cranswick are ready to invest, expand, and create jobs. Its model isn’t just about production – it’s about premium quality, enhanced animal welfare, improved sustainability, and local economic development.

Take its approach to pig farming, around 50% of its pigs are outdoor-reared, a standard rarely matched by European competitors. All Cranswick’s chicken are reared in modern, sustainable farms where 100% of the chickens are hatched in the sheds and stocking density has been reduced by more than 20%.

The food and drink industry is the UK’s largest manufacturing sector, employing more than four million people. Yet, says Couch, it receives a fraction of the policy attention given to profile industries like technology or renewable energy.

“People have been used to seeing fully stocked supermarket shelves.  It’s only when those shelves start looking empty that food security becomes a conversation. But the shelves are certainly not as full as they were, and people are still expecting cheap food.

 “When I was born in 1968, a chicken would have cost 41p – around £6.50 when adjusted for inflation. Yet consumers can still buy a whole chicken for just over £4 which is cheaper than a takeout coffee in central London. The price is a testament to the efficiency of British food producers.”

But efficiency comes at a cost. Continuous investment, rigorous standards, and sustainable practices require supportive policy frameworks, particularly around planning laws.

As global supply chains become increasingly unpredictable, the importance of robust domestic food production is paramount.

“Food is one of the three main necessities in life, and it should hold more prominence. I’m constantly telling those who will listen just give us the tools of supportive planning and infrastructure and we’ll deliver a revolution in home grown, healthy food that will feed the nation.”