Frozen food retailer Farmfoods has reported a 19% jump in sales to make it one of the top 100 privately owned companies in Britain, according to the Scotsman website.
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The Scottish firm, which was established 50 years ago in Aberdeen, boosted turnover to £421.3m (US$740m), from £354m the year previously, according to its latest accounts.
And pre-tax profits were improved by 15% to £9.8m, from £8.5m last time.
The growth, most of which has come in the past two years, has helped push the company – majority owned by Eric Herd, the publicity-shy Bridge of Allan-based tycoon – firmly into the upper ranks of Britain’s leading private firms and in Scottish terms it rubs shoulders with the likes of motor dealer Arnold Clark and car repair-to-insurance services company Kwik-Fit.
Farmfoods currently has more than 300 British stores, including 104 in Scotland. But the Cumbernauld-based group is actively chasing further expansion and has Edinburgh-based property agent Eric Young and Company scouring Scotland for further properties in places such as Leith, Kelso, Haddington, Falkirk and Helensburgh.
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By GlobalDataSome suppliers have said that supermarket giant Tesco has built its recent success partly by adopting the kind of low-price modelling used by the likes of Farmfoods and peers such as Lidl, Netto and Aldi.
Herd, is the company’s main shareholder after buying out his brother Gordon’s 21.2% stake for £10.2m in January.
According to the company’s latest set of accounts which revealed the group’s phenomenal growth, Herd, who has a near-99% stake in Farmfoods, paid himself about £1m last year.
William McCreadie, nother director at the firm, owns the remaining 1.4% of Farmfoods, whose success in recent years has had experts in the food retailing sector tipping the firm as a takeover target.
