Going for growth by investing in people, products and plant
Hazlewood Sandwiches
Greencore’s traditional activities lie at the start of the food production chain, whereas the new convenience foods operations are at the end of it, and include many products with high added-value.
Hazlewood Sandwiches is the largest company within Greencore’s Chilled Foods Division. It employs 3,000 people, of whom 2,000 work at Manton Wood and 650 work at the company’s Park Royal site that serves London and southern England. There are also 350 distribution staff employed in 15 depots across the UK. It’s a huge operation – every year the business uses 7 million loaves and 244 million prawns.
Hazlewood Sandwiches’ mission statement is: ‘to lead the UK chilled sandwich market’.
The £25 million invested in the Worksop factory supports this mission by:
providing modern facilities
tripling production capacity compared with the previous site.
The sandwich market
A market comprises all the buyers and sellers of a particular product such as sandwiches or pizzas. Firms need to know the size of the market in which they compete. Market size is measured in two ways:
1. by value – e.g. total sales annually of £100 million for Product A
2. by volume – e.g. 1 million units of Product A sold each year.
Currently the UK sandwich market is worth £3 billion – representing 1.8 billion sandwiches – and is growing at around 6each year. Hazlewood Sandwiches is the world’s largest producer of sandwiches.
The pie chart shows the major sectors (retail suppliers) of the purchased sandwich market. For Hazlewood Sandwiches the major multiples (e.g. Asda, Safeway) provide an important and growing sector of that market.
The market continues to grow because:
People’s lives are becoming busier, leaving them less time to prepare food. More women go out to work (about 50% of the labour force), and many of them have more than one job.
People are taking shorter lunch breaks, leaving them less time for a…