Premier Foods Case Study
We have all the right ingredients for a perfect partnership.
Before working with Biffa we found it difficult to find a waste management service able to deliver the results they said they would. Two other national suppliers had let us down and our sites were not keen to engage again ... Biffa changed that.
Background
Premier Foods is the UK’s largest food producer and manufactures some of the nation’s favourite food brands including Hovis bread, Mr Kipling cakes, Sharwood’s Asian foods, Batchelors soups, Lloyd Grossman sauces, Bisto gravy, Quorn meat free products, Ambrosia custard and rice pudding, Branston pickle and Hartley’s jam, marmalades and jellies.
More than 99% of all UK households bought a Premier Foods brand last year, and 47.2 million people consume one of their branded products in an average two-week period.
Premier Foods has a firm commitment to eliminating waste-to-landfill by the end of 2015. Their corporate social responsibility steering group, chaired by Chief Executive Robert Schofield, receives quarterly reports on progress and recent figures show the business has reached 95% zero waste-to-landfill, largely due to their work with Biffa.
Biffa’s Integrated Waste Management Service is responsible for almost three quarters of Premier Foods’ total waste volume at 31 sites throughout the UK
Over the last three years Biffa has saved Premier Foods an estimated £3 million through a combination of reducing landfill taxes and recycling rebates.
The Biffa approach to delivering more
- We are keen to promote the value of waste, ensuring it is a benefit not a cost.
- Our Integrated Waste Management team provides a service which allows customers to achieve their zero waste-to-landfill ambitions as well as get maximum levels of rebate on recycling.
- We are the market leader in terms of capacity in Mixed Recycling Centres in London, Manchester and Birmingham.
- Our contract managers develop close partnerships with our customers to truly tailor-make services.
- Our customers are provided with a full set of documents to ensure sites meet strict legal requirements.
Working with Premier Foods
- We have been looking after Premier Foods’ Worksop site at Spalding, Lincolnshire for six years. The site has up to 40 different waste streams and is now at zero-waste-to-landfill. It is used as a benchmark for other Premier Foods sites.
- One example of our innovation at Worksop is the introduction of a can crusher to eliminate the high volume of cans sent to landfill. Waste food is now sent to compost, anerobic digestion or used as animal feed and the metal cans are sold for recycling.
- As Worksop is open 24/7, Biffa staff adapted their shift patterns to ensure an employee responsible for waste management is always on duty.
- Biffa contract manager Mark Newall works closely with the Premier Foods team on site as well as the company’s national procurement team to ensure effective working practices can be replicated elsewhere.
