Buchanan's Aims to Cook up a Storm

Northern Ireland based Buchanan's Quality Foods is growing its business throughout the UK by developing a network of leading distributors, including the Sterling Group, a buying consortium for independent wholesalers UK-wide, and Nisa-Today's Foodservice.

In the past three years, Buchanan's turnover has grown over 200 per cent, primarily as a result of developing its presence and availability throughout the UK. Established in 1871, Buchanan's processes, packs and distributes a wide variety of dried foods, including cereals and pulses, rice, pasta, dried and glacé fruit, nuts and seeds for both foodservice and retail.

Commenting, Buchanan's Managing Director Jonathan McVeigh said: "We offer over 70 different products, which are sourced from all over the world and mixed (for example, soup or dried fruit and nut mixes) and packed at our purpose-built factory in Carrickfergus in County Antrim. The Buchanan's brand is very well established in its home market of Northern Ireland, where it is the brand leader in a number of sectors in both the local independent and multiple retail trade.

"What sets Buchanan's apart is the quality and competitiveness of its product range, backed by the top class service we provide to our customers, including EDI trading facilities for 'just in time' ordering where required. We can offer a real alternative to current market leaders, delivering consistent quality and pricing that competes very favourably with any of our competitors in both the foodservice and retail sectors," stated Jonathan.

"We have the production capabilities and expertise to bring our excellent product range to a much wider market and that is what we are currently concentrating on. We now have an excellent route to the foodservice market in the UK, but are now also seeking to grow our business in the retail sector where, of course, there is huge opportunity due to current consumer eating and cooking trends, with increasing numbers of people returning to home cooking and baking from scratch as a lifestyle choice.

"To that end, we are in advanced negotiations with a number of leading distributors to the independent retail sector and hope to have some announcements on that front in the very near future," concluded Jonathan.