Wholesale meat supplier Rectory Foods has collapsed into administration.

Business recovery firm Leonard Curtis has been appointed administrator at Manchester-based rectory, which has been trading since 1996 and fell into administration last month, show accounts filed at UK Companies House.

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The group’s collapse comes less than 18 months after it restructured its business to create a separate ingredients division, as part of a strategy to reduce exposure to meat.

Neither Rectory’s founder and MD, Charles Woolley, not a spokesperson for Leonard Curtis, were immediately available for comment when contacted by just-food today (7 January).

Woolley appeared confident in the firm’s prospects in an interview with just-food published in August 2011. Of the new ingredients division, he said: “Rectory Foods as a group ended this financial year to 31 July at GBP45m [in sales]. I would expect that the ingredients division would be able to match that certainly within five or six years.” 

Rectory also has a subsidiary business in Lithuania.

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