Three weeks after the Covid-19 outbreak swept away three quarters of its business, the British Premium Sausage Company has saved itself by creating new links with supermarkets Tesco and Asda.
Thirty five jobs were threatened when the British Premium Sausage Company lost 75% of its businesses operations, however, the business, based at sites in Bradford and Normanton, near Wakefield, is has since started supplying 220 Asda stores and almost 100 Tesco outlets across the Midlands and Yorkshire.
Managing director Ian Cundell said: "I’m really proud of the initiative we’ve shown and the way the staff and our suppliers have responded, it’s testimony to the people we have working for us that we’ve been able to do this and, most importantly, it’s saved jobs and saved the business.
Prior to the lockdown, the firm made two million sausages a month, plus a million meatballs, burgers and Chorizo sausages. Most of its products went to hotels and restaurants. It also supplied around two thirds of the UK’s airports.
Cundell added: "When the Prime Minister made the announcement that all the hotels and restaurants should close, that got rid of 50 per cent of our sales. When the airports shut down as well, that accounted for a further 25 per cent.
“In some ways, the British Premium Sausage Company may be in a stronger position than before all of this happened. We’ve opened a door into the supermarkets that we wouldn’t have got into before..."
"I was preparing for this to happen but I didn’t really want to believe it. I thought we were going to have to furlough at least half of the staff and I didn’t know whether we’d survive as a business. I was quietly panicking.
"We contacted Asda a week before the lockdown. Usually, being listed by a supermarket takes time but we had supplied them in the past so, within a week, we were accepted by them. We are now supplying our Yorkshire Cuisine Premium Pork Sausage and our British Premium Sausage Company Cumberland Sausage.
“We dropped an email to Dave Lewis, the CEO, saying we had spare capacity. The result is that our Yorkshire Cuisine Premium Sausages can now be found in 93 stores across Yorkshire."
The company has seen its own retail online sales increase by 400 per cent and sales from other online butchers and meal-kit providers have also helped, as have exports.
Cundell said: “The British sausage is very popular worldwide. We shipped big orders to Hong Kong, Denmark and Malta during March and we also regularly export to Jordan, Singapore and the Falkland Islands.
“In some ways, the British Premium Sausage Company may be in a stronger position than before all of this happened. We’ve opened a door into the supermarkets that we wouldn’t have got into before but, having said that, I think the economic recovery from this, nationwide, will be very slow."
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
