Alistair Houghton meets PAUL DEAKIN, managing director of Meadow Foods
DRIVING along the Chester bypass, it would be easy to miss the cluster of roofs tucked away up a small country lane.
But if you did miss it you’d be missing out on dairy ingredients business Meadow Foods – one of the region’s biggest companies and among the UK’s biggest suppliers of dairy products.
Its managing director Paul Deakin says Meadow Foods’ products, from cream and butter to chocolate crumb, are found in foods from shortbread to ready meals. Its customers include Cadbury’s, Nestle and Thorntons.
In the year ending March 2008, Meadow saw sales rise 22% to £243m, with profits of £5m. Its headquarters and processing plant at Marlston-Cum-Lache, Chester, employs 150 full-time staff, but Deakin estimates another 375 people in the region are indirectly employed.
With pressure from supermarkets seeking to offer cheaper milk to cash-strapped customers, and rising feed and fuel prices, the dairy industry has had a tough time of late.
But Deakin says Meadow, which has just opened a new butter warehouse and is looking for new milk suppliers, remains well placed for growth. He says Britain’s move towards lower-fat milk can only benefit a company like his that makes products from cream skimmed off at dairies.
“The irony of this business is that dairy companies are generally promoting lower-fat milk,” he said. “We’re busy taking the fat out of milk and on the other hand putting the fat back in other products.”
In Cheshire, Meadow produces butter, cream, ghee (clarified butter often used in Indian cooking) and anhydrous milk fat (AMF), a key ingredient in ice cream and chocolate.
Perhaps surprisingly, the single bigger use for Meadow’s butter is in shortbread, made by manufacturers such as Walkers. The next biggest is on garlic bread.
“We’re the largest independent cream processing business in the UK,” said Deakin.
“There are only two AMF producers in the UK and we’re three times bigger than the other one.
“With the brand new butter plant we built last year, we’re the largest independent butter producer in the UK.”
Meadow acts as a middleman to make sure dairy producers, including industry giants Arla, Dairy Crest and Wiseman have enough milk to meet their needs.
It handles about 400m litres of milk a year. That milk is either supplied to dairies, largely on the basis that when the dairies have skimmed the milk it gets the cream back to process into other products, or is processed directly by Meadow.
Meadow also has a Yorkshire factory producing chocolate crumb, the base ingredient for making chocolate, and sweetened condensed milk used in products such as fudge.
