Food Manufacturer News: November 2009 Archives

One of the UK's leading food retailers and top graduate employers, Waitrose, has launched a new online tool to enable them to identify high quality graduate applicants for their food job vacancies. Waitrose receives thousands of applications every year, and it is hoped that this new online test will make the recruitment process much easier and more efficient for both graduates and the company.

Alongside their existing recruitment procedures, Waitrose will now be using an online Situational Judgement Test, which will assess judgement and decision-making skills in commonplace work scenarios. 150 applicants who score highly on this test will then be sent through to the company's Graduate Selection Centres, where employees of the highest calibre will then be placed into store-based retail management roles.

The new process comes as a response in the recruitment market, where a larger number of applicants than ever before are competing for food jobs, and Waitrose hopes that the new selection tool will be efficient enough to address this challenge.

Most importantly, Waitrose bosses are aiming to find future employees who are committed to a retail or food job as a career, rather than those who will settle for any form of employment. Once they have found these dedicated applicants, they then hope to fit those with the best possible skills into the most appropriate available roles.

Hain frozen foods have just finished their new £1.5 million dessert plant, only 16 weeks after the contact was awarded in May.

The frozen food firm has created 35 new food jobs at its plant at Holt Road, Fakenham. The plant, which currently provides Linda McCartney meat free foods, will now add a range of crumbles and sponge puddings to its production which will be supplied to a major retailer.

Turnover at the factory is expected to double to £25 million over the coming year and the factory recently featured at the Food Manufacture Excellence awards. Hain frozen foods have turned around its fortunes of late and with this new investment and the 35 food jobs created, the business has firmly laughed in the face of the recession.

The factory have recently introduced a 4 day shift pattern to improve efficiency and with lean manufacturing techniques now part of the day to day business plan it is important that improvements are sustained to move the factory to new levels over the coming years.

On 16th November 2009, leading dairy company Arla Foods UK confirmed reports that it is to invest more than £70 million in a new milk processing facility in the outer edges of London. The company have already started the project and are currently occupied with finding an adequate site for the facility which, when completed, will be the largest dairy facility of its kind in the world.

The dairy will also be world's most technologically advanced milk processing facility; not only using the most sustainable building techniques in its construction, but will also be able to efficiently and ecologically handle one billion litres of fresh, liquid milk every year.

Arla Foods already processes approximately 28% of Britain's milk, but has been planning this cutting-edge project for some time as part of strategies to expand its UK fresh milk business. The new facility will not only help them to become a world leader in the dairy industry, but it will also provide over 500 food jobs for the area.

The site for the facility is yet to be confirmed by Arla Foods UK, but they have said that they expect it to be fully operational by 2012.