Crawshaw looks to national expansion
MEAT retailer Crawshaw is rolling out national expansion plans as it announced an increase in like-for-like sales this morning.
The Rotherham-headquartered business, which has two distribution centres in Grimsby and Rotherham, opened its latest high street store in Sheffield in March, bringing its number of retail locations across Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to 21.
Chairman Richard Rose said the group is now working on a plan to “greatly accelerate” its store roll out and to build a national network of stores.
“Having proven our retail model in the North of England we believe we are ready to take the concept across the UK,” he said.
“We will be building our resource to support this strategic move, and intend to begin by recruiting a chief executive with relevant experience to lead this exciting phase of our growth and to support Kevin Boyd who will remain our managing director.”
As a first step Crawshaw has signed a 10 year lease on a new factory and distribution centre in Rotherham and will consolidate its two existing sites in Grimsby and Rotherham into the new facility.
“The space at the new site will give us much additional capacity and is better located which we believe will lead to a more productive and efficient operation. Running costs are expected to be slightly less than our current set up, and we will open a factory shop on the site which we expect to trade well given the performance of our existing out of town store in Scunthorpe,” said Mr Rose.
“We are extremely excited by this opportunity and look forward to the future with great confidence.”
The company announced today that for the year to date, like-for-like sales were up 13.4%.
“We are delighted with this performance given LFL sales were up 8% through May and June last year. The strong performance is widely spread across our store portfolio,” the company said.
