Nick Frost has been appointed as the new UK sales director for bakery equipment firm Unifiller.

The Canadian company, which manufactures portioning depositors and cake automation systems for the baking industry, revealed the news to British Baker at last week’s iba show in Munich, Germany.

Frost said: “It’s a great feeling to be part of such a welcoming and professional team, both in Canada and Europe. Our plans are quite clear – we aim to continue the work started by Normech and have a bigger presence with the larger groups within the UK. The purpose of the UK office is to enable Unifiller to respond to customers’ demands more efficiently and to give us a more competitive pricing structure.” 

He added that Northampton-based Normech UK, where Frost previously worked and has been Unfiller’s UK partner since 2008, will cease trading with a view to dissolving the company to avoid confusion among current and future customers. 

“We want to remain single-branded, and Normech could be associated with previous suppliers,” said Frost.

Unifiller’s UK sales had a combined turnover of almost CA$500,000 (£314,105) in the latest 12 months, for which Normech was responsible for 80%. 

Frost said: “Unifiller has set in place a five-year plan to become the pre-eminent supplier of depositing equipment within the UK. As we only gave the equipment around 25% of our time and energy, we feel that we should be in the CA$1m (£627,533) region for year one to two, with ambitions of being between CA$3m (£1.8m) and CA$5m (£3.14m) by year five."

Unifiller’s UK arm currently consists of Frost and Paul Watson, technical support manager, with a third member joining the team at the start of next month. The company said it will look to hire a further two members of staff within the next six to 10 months for its UK operations.

Stewart MacPherson, vice-president of sales and marketing at Unifiller, said: “We’re seriously getting settled in the UK. We’re focusing predominantly on cake production in the UK market, based on our expertise and technology.”

Unifiller’s newest piece of kit, called the Multi Station, which claims to be the world’s fastest depositor, was also launched at the international trade show.

“During the first four days of the show, the depositor had already run 131 cycles non-stop. Each cycle can consist of a maximum of 160 rows per minute, with between four and eight products on each row, which can give an overall deposit total of 1,280 per minute,” MacPherson added.

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