Iceland Seafood International (ISI) has announced it is to merge its two UK operations and moving them into a newly acquired manufacturing site in Grimsby in eastern England.
It plans to merge Iceland Seafood Barraclough, based in Bradford, Yorkshire, and Grimsby-based Havelok into one legal entity – Iceland Seafood UK.
To own Iceland Seafood UK 100%, ISI has acquired a 33% minority share in Havelok.
To house the merged operations the seafood giant has bought the former Five Star Fish site on Great Grimsby Business Park. ISI said it is investing GBP5m-6m (US$6.44m-7.73m) “in a significant processing and cold store capacity” in Grimsby to increase its presence in the UK seafood processing market.
ISI told just-food the move is likely to create 30 new jobs.
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The company said: “Following a period of refurbishment, we are planning to transfer both the existing Havelok and Iceland Seafood Barraclough operations to the [Five Star Fish] site. This process will be complete by early 2021, by which time we expect to have created substantial new business and new jobs associated with that.”
It said the site includes a cold store capacity of about 2,000 metric tons of products and three processing areas in total of about 10,000 sq m.
ISI said a newly-enlarged product range will reflect current offerings but on a larger scale. These will include coated products, both chilled and frozen, natural products, both chilled and frozen and various shellfish productions for the UK retail and foodservice market.
It is paying GBP3m for the 33% of shares owned by Havelok’s management. As a part of the agreement, Danny Burton, the managing director of Havelok, will continue as a director in the new merged entity.
That UK business will be led by Burton and UK managing director Peter Hawkins with Hawkins heading up the overall operation and Burton overseeing the refurbishment of the site and operational teams.
Bjarni Ármannsson, Iceland Seafood’s CEO, said ‘following our NASDAQ main market listing in Iceland in October 2019 where we raised EUR15.2m (US$16.9m) of new equity, we announced our intent to make strategic investments in our key markets. The announcement today represents one of these.
“We have strong businesses and management teams in the UK and with the continued support of our existing customers, our people and our suppliers are confident that we can become stronger as a result of the merger of the two businesses on a new, large, well invested site. We look forward to grow in both our existing retail and foodservice markets and within this increasing the opportunities for Icelandic products in the UK market.”
ISI has annual revenue of EUR450m. It has seven factories and 12 businesses across eight countries. Last month it announced it was merging operations in southern Europe.
Five Star Fish, which had been owned by 2 Sisters Food Group, ceased production in November 2018. Earlier in the year 2 Sisters had said the business was “not sustainable in its current form for the long term”.
