An appetising prospect in the food industry

by cambridge-news.co.uk - 02/11/2010

"Never mind the wind chimes, it’s the delicious wafting aroma that is beckoning Jenny Chapman as she visits CP Foods and talks to joint site manager Helen Mepham, who has built a £50m business from scratch...with a little help from feng shui."

The smell is yummy. What is it? Can’t quite pinpoint it. ‘’Chicken tikka,’’ says Helen Mepham. ‘’Of course.’’

We are sitting in the meeting room at CP Foods on the Fordham Road outside Newmarket. To get this far I have had to join a queue of enormous lorries turning into the equally enormous Turner depot, where CP found a disused fruit ripening store and turned it into the factory from which the delicious aromas now emit.

Charoen Pokphand Foods are a very big name in Thailand. The company, begun by a farming family more than 100 years ago, began by supplying fodder for chickens, then rearing the birds themselves and ultimately cooking them.

Today, a vast amount of cooked and frozen chicken is sent from Thailand to Newmarket, where it is defrosted, sliced and packed before going off to Tesco.

Helen Mepham, 36, opened the Newmarket operation five years ago, just her and Andrew Bourne, who heads production, and a couple of staff.

‘’We started in a temporary office on the Turner site, with a fridge from someone’s garage, two computers and a dodgy printer,’’ Helen tells me.

‘’We were pitching to retailers to get business, turning up at Tesco with a box of samples. It was a real leap of faith for Tesco, we weren’t exactly slick, and didn’t even have a factory at that stage.’’

But there was the provenance. CP had been supplying Tesco and other leading supermarkets for years, indirectly, until they decided to cut out the middle man, as Helen puts it.

She, too, had the connections, after studying biochemistry at Birmingham she took a master’s in food science at Leeds before joining Northern Foods, then Tesco as a product development manager.

She developed pub grub for J D Wetherspoon’s chain, then she was asked by CP, who had got to know her at Tesco, whether she’d like to get the Newmarket project off the ground.

‘’We started with party food, wrapped and breaded prawns, spring rolls, chicken kebabs. Party food was quite small as a market then and tended to be sausage rolls and mini pizzas.’’

Actually, you can thank CP for adding the Thai element to home entertaining, and crispy aromatic duck, and all the other stuff that smells so mouth-watering beyond the meeting room door.

‘’I suppose you get fed up with smelling it all the time?’’ ‘’I like the food we do here,’’ Helen says. ‘’And I do love oriental food, but I tend to cook shepherd’s pie at home – I’ve got a two-year-old son.’’

Things took off straight away at the new business and today there are more than 200 people working there, a force which will swell to 350 coming up to the Christmas rush.

‘’Getting foot soldiers is not too much of a challenge,” Helen says. “We have a lot of Poles and Lithuanians who do an incredibly good job for us. It’s more difficult attracting the professional types, engineers, accountants.

The location is perfect for us, close to the A14 and Felixstowe, but getting people to relocate here is difficult. Putting ‘Cambridgeshire’ in the job ads rather than ‘Suffolk’ helps. We’ve learnt that lesson – people like the idea of Cambridge.”

An aspect of life at CP Foods – the one which first brought the company to my attention – is the application of feng shui. Okay, so it’s in a field in the middle of nowhere and why should it matter which way what faces, and all the rest of it? Well, the chairman of CP in Thailand has great faith in feng shui, and as there doesn’t appear to be any harm in it . . .

‘’If the company is building a factory they will consult about the luckiest positions and colour schemes. It’s all about the spiritual well-being of the people who work there.’’

Doing her bit, Helen has hung wind chimes at the entrance to the plant and there are various symbols inside, such as a clutch of coins, in this case 20p pieces stuck to the wall, strips of colour.

‘’Has it made any difference?’’ There is a diplomatic hesitation: ‘’The wind chimes make people smile,’’ Helen says. ‘’It’s slightly off-beat and different, and quite nice.’’ I forget to ask whether it was before or after the wind chimes went up that the £9m order for prawns came from Tesco.

Turnover the first year was £3m, this year it’s £50m. ‘’It’s grown so quickly and, yes, it has been more successful than we anticipated. Also, we’ve ended up with not what we thought. What we sell most of is value chicken, 100k packs a week.

‘’We never thought it was going to be as big as it is, but it’s to do with the recession. People put it in sandwiches and we can see the drop off during the school holidays.

‘’Also, people are cooking at home more, which has been good for the Finest range we supply Tesco.’’ But Helen says it is a confusing picture as far as long term trends are concerned. The move toward healthy living was growing apace before the recession took hold, but became less of an issue as the cost of organic food failed to stack up against the wicked, more attractive-looking and cheaper produce.

Christmas will be the telling time. ‘’It can be a big barometer, but last year we thought people would be cutting back, so we cut the amount of Tesco Finest, but sold out. This year we’re going to be a bit bolder.

“Our big risk is bringing product half way across the world. For this reason we have our own feed mills, hatcheries, farms and processing plants to make sure everything is all right and we avoid expensive mistakes.”

Part of this thinking also means that Helen and her staff make frequent visits to Thailand, where CP is the largest agro-industrial conglomerate in the country.

It is also the largest supplier of shrimp/prawn in the world (although Forrest Gump might be a close second), and the second largest producer of chicken, turning over $5bn.

The Thai supermarket chain, Tesco Lotus, is a joint venture with CP, and Tesco is CP’s main customer in the UK, although Helen and her team also supply Morrisons and Sainsburys.

Looking ahead, Helen says a lot of different options are being considered: ‘’We’re not full here yet,’’ she says, but it won’t be long.’’

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