Mexico deal for Northern Irish family bakery's biscuits

Graham's Bakery, the Northern Irish independent baker, has relaunched its successful range of traditional Irish biscuits and signed a significant deal in Mexico.

The family-owned and managed bakery, which is based at Dromore in county Down, is supplying its Irish shortbread biscuits and oat cookies to a leading food distributor in Mexico.

The deal is the first for the bakery in the country. Graham's also supplies its biscuits and other products to supermarkets in Britain, the Republic of Ireland, the US, United Arab Emirates and Spain.

The bakery provides products to Tesco, Sainsbury's, Amazon in the UK and Dunnes, the Republic of Ireland's biggest food retailer.

Tim Graham, Graham's sales director, commenting in the latest export success, says: "We've a strategic focus on growth through developing sales outside Northern Ireland and have been exploring opportunities in a number of international markets.

"We had the opportunity to meet with the Mexican buyers through our representative in Spain. They were impressed by the quality of our shortbread and oat cookies and also liked our new look packaging which subtly emphasises our traditional Irish identity.

"The new packaging also stresses that the biscuits are produced from an old family recipe. The distributor supplies major supermarkets across the country. We are delighted to have won the business and intend to build on this success.

"Our new packaging has also been redesigned to enable the packets to be stacked upright. Each 135g pack contains eight biscuits," he adds.

Both biscuits have won UK Great Taste awards over recent years. The oat cookies received a double gold award in the 2016 awards.

Established by May Graham in 1956, Graham's Bakery is now into its third generation with Dennis Graham and his family now running the business, which operates from a state-of-the-art bakery in Dromore.