Awards for Dunbia Academy and Northern Irish poultry student

Leading UK meat processor, Dunbia, which is headquartered in Northern Ireland, gained a major award at this year's Institute of Meat (IoM) and Worshipful Company of Butchers Annual Prize-giving ceremony.

Dunbia Academy's Joshua Bridges, based in England, won the Best Meat Processing Student Perpetual Cup. The award was sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Butchers and is among the most prestigious in the meat industry.

Dunbia pioneered the innovative academy at its base in Dungannon, county Tyrone. The academy, which has won a series of meat industry awards, also operates at the company's processing plants in England and Wales.

Dunbia's Butchery Academy is a practical training programme which offers a mix of one-to-one training and mentoring, class-room based learning and a proficiency-based qualification with the ultimate aim of developing trainees to become managers in the future.

The academy was formed to help address the requirement for skilled butchers in particular and has since expanded to cover other roles for students in the processing operations.

And there was another major award for a student from the Southern Regional College, a major further education institution, in Northern Ireland. The college's Sinead McVeigh won the Best Poultry Industry Student, an award sponsored by Poulters.

The ceremony took place at Painters' Hall in London and was attended by more than 100 members of the meat industry.

Thirteen awards were presented, with this year seeing the first 'Best Abattoir Worker achieving WATOK' Award, in recognition of the importance of this element of the meat industry.

As well as the awards ceremony, eight professional butchers were also awarded IoM Accredited Master Butcher status.

Bill Jermey, IOM chairman, says: "The meat and poultry industry is not only a proud industry, but a forward-thinking one too. It is our mission at the IoM to encourage, inspire and reward; this is at the heart of the prize-giving event.

"I'm especially delighted to see our colleagues in the abattoir sector joining the event this year. I hope that, with the new abattoir apprenticeship standard now approved, we'll see more nominations for abattoir workers in the years to come."