About Northern Foods Plc
Northern Foods plc is in the business of making great tasting food. We are one of the UK’s leading food producers with around 11,000 employees based at sites across the UK and Ireland.
Our business is focused around five markets; pizza, biscuits, ready meals, sandwiches & salads and puddings.
We are well known for the quality of our food and our commitment to customer service. We also enjoy a long-standing reputation for innovation.
Northern Foods was behind the creation of the chilled ready meal; we’ve led the frozen pizza market with our Goodfella’s range, and we’ve built on a heritage dating back to 1853 to develop our Fox’s biscuits brand.
Today we continue to innovate, developing great new food ideas in line with changing food trends.
Our Strategy
The company has a clear strategy to:
- Focus on attractive market segments
- Partner with customers who require quality, innovation and high levels of customer service
- Delivery through a low cost, high performance business model
Key Facts
- Northern Foods has 20 operating sites across the UK and Ireland specialising in chilled, bakery and frozen food production
- Each of our chosen markets - biscuits, ready meals, sandwiches & salads and puddings - has strong potential and satisfies one or more of the consumer drivers of convenience, indulgence and living a healthy balanced lifestyle
- We produce innovative own-label ranges for the UK’s leading retailers across all of our chosen markets - biscuits, ready meals, pizzas, fish, sandwiches.
- We also produce a wide range of well-known branded products for UK and Irish retailers including Fox’s, Goodfella’s, Holland’s Pies, Grassington’s Food Co, Dalepak, and, in Ireland only, Donegal Catch and Green Isle frozen foods
- Our brand and own-label split is approximately 60:40 and sales to our top five customers – Asda, Marks & Spencer, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco - represent 76% of total revenue
- Northern Foods formally began life in 1937 as a family-run dairy business. In 1942 the business was registered as Northern Dairies and became a public company in 1956. The company changed its name to Northern Foods in 1972 to reflect the range of food it sold
Plans For The Future
These are exciting times for Green Isle, part of Northern Foods PLC. The company has major plans in place for the pizza business which resulted in a marketing re-structure designed to transform the brand’s performance across UK and Ireland.
A new Head of Marketing has been recently appointed and the business is now in the very early stages of implementing a five year plan to step-change the level of consumer engagement with Goodfella’s. There is a clear requirement for a larger pizza marketing team and to bring in energetic and creative people who can lead and shape the next phase of the Goodfella’s story.
There has been a move away from centralisation within Northern Foods with a new focus on driving and delivering individual business units. Green Isle is a vibrant business which likes to develop and promote high achievers.