Frozen food specialist Frank Dale has invested £400,000 in new equipment to boost production output.
The brand – which produces a range of premium buffet food including quiches, pies, tarts, Yorkshire puddings, and cakes for own label and foodservice ranges – made several improvements to its production line over the course of 2022. This included the purchase of more blast freezers, rack cooling (to utilise blast freezing capacity), more power to the site to run the new kit and the purchase of automated quiche cutters to remove production bottlenecks.
Other investments included a new metal detector, a pastry mixer dedicated to larger quiche production, more racks, and the replacement of older equipment to cope with the larger volumes.
“The investment into new production equipment has allowed us to facilitate running more lines at the same time,” said Edward Miles, managing director of Finedale Foods which owns the Frank Dale brand. “In effect we are producing twice the volume that we did in 2017, which is considerable when you take into account the negative impact of Covid for two years of trading.”
Sales of Frank Dale products were “completely decimated” during the pandemic as its core markets were impacted by lockdown rules, Miles added. As a result, the business diversified into the independent retail market and direct to public sales in late 2020. The business also appointed Central Foods as its exclusive distributor.
Volumes have since returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, the business noted.
“This has enabled us to focus on business recovery and manufacturing, which has given us more time to deal with industry wide supply chain challenges,” Miles said.
Frank Dale has several objectives for 2023 including a rebrand as well as reviewing and expanding its range.
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