Crawshaw escapes horse meat scandal to pay maiden divi
CRAWSHAW, the butcher’s shop chain, is to pay a maiden dividend after improving annual like for like sales.
The Rotherham-based group operates around 20 shops and two meat distribution centres covering Yorkshire and the Humber, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.
For the financial year ended January 31, sales fell by £100,000 to £18.8m. Full year like for like sales were up 3% after dropping by -4% in 2012.
EBITDA improved by 15% to £700,000 and the group posted a £300,000 pre-tax profit after not making one last year.
Chairman Richard Rose said the reduction in total sales was down to the planned scale back of its less profitable sales channels.
Average spend per retail customer was up 9% after Crawshaw introduced price and multi buy offers. However, this was partially offset by a 5% reduction in customer numbers driven by the VAT changes on the full cooked product offer.
Mr Rose said Crawshaw’s had invested in additional equipment, staff and training to implement processes required to sell certain lines “on the cool”, meaning no VAT is added.
The strategy was introduced after the Government added VAT to certain, previously exempt, cooked products from last October.
“Our cooked chicken and joints are therefore now sold on the cool, although certain take away lines are still kept hot and have therefore now attracted VAT at 20%,” he said.
“Our hot sales have indeed been adversely affected, particularly initially as our staff and customers adopted the new process, but are not down nearly as much as the recent figures from the British Poultry council suggest, showing sales in the UK of rotisserie chickens down 18% in the 23 weeks since the VAT change.
“We are therefore pleased we adopted this approach. Nonetheless it was a disruptive, expensive and challenging development that we could have done without, and our performance would have been better without the change.”
Crawshaw is proposing to pay a maiden dividend of 0.2p per share.
Mr Rose added that Crawshaw had not been implicated in the horse meat scandal as it sourced its meat from accredited suppliers.
“Our food safety management systems have been in place for a number of years and we continuously review and update them to ensure our procedures are in line with the highest standards,” he added.
Looking ahead he said: “The retail climate remains challenging; however I am encouraged by the continued improvements in trading over the first 12 weeks of the current year. Like for like sales are ahead and we are particularly pleased with the further increases in gross margin and improvements in cost we are achieving.”
