Wholesale is a vital part of the food and drink industry. These are businesses that provide bulk products at a lower cost, due to economies of scale. The contribution of this to the UK food industry is over £31 bn and as a sector employs approximately 90,000 people.

Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) have become a lot more popular in recent years. The need for quality food quickly has increased with everyone on the move more. However, this need has not reduced the quality, restaurants are still expected to produce a great product in a reduced time

FMCG or Fast-moving consumer goods household sector is also known as CPG or Consumer Packaged Goods.

The ingredients sector is a large part of the overall food industry. If you think about how many ingredients are in each product you consume, the list is most likely to be extremely long. Products that are sold in the UK on a daily basis contain a wide range of ingredients that are grown or manufactured both inside and outside of the UK; therefore, the industry relies heavily on imports to fulfil the deficit of ingredients that simply are not available in the UK.

The convenience food market has grown rapidly over the years, the on-the-go or ready-to-eat food industry has boomed.

Business to business is where one food company sells to another certain ingredients that form part of the final product. For example, the bread for sandwich making is supplied from a bakery business into a sandwich manufacturer, who then makes the final sandwich and sells to Retailers.

During recent years and the ever-increasing use of the internet, Direct to Customer has taken off more and more. Let’s take a look at companies such as Hellofresh and Gousto. Both businesses supply their products direct to consumers. They ship you a box which provides you with all the ingredients to make meals for your family.

Foodservice is a large sector within the food industry that may not come directly into consumers’ minds because while they may see the final product, it is not always so obvious how it got to that point. This sector within the industry supplies areas such as hotels, restaurants, universities, nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, and schools. The likes of Brakes Foodservice, JJ Foodservice, Caterforce etc.

There are many different retailers across the world but our focus in on the UK. There are supermarkets like Marks and Spencer, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda. Aldi and Lidl are classed as discounters, but they truly hold their own against some of the larger supermarkets.

All our food requires packaging, the more you look around the shelves of a supermarket, the more you see all different types of packaging. You will see flexible, ridged, and corrugated packaging and much more. In terms of the clients we recruit for, they are generally looking for food or FMCG packaging experience.

According to The Food and Drink Federation, the food industry is the biggest manufacturing sector in the country, with a turnover in 2020 of over £112bn. The industry employs approximately 468,000 people across the UK. Making it a key part in the food and drink supply chain that employed 4.2m people. Interestingly in this same report it showed over 97% of the 11,675 food and drink manufacturing businesses are SMEs. According to gov.uk approximately £120bn was spent on food and non-alcoholic drink shopping in 2021, with a further £60bn spend on alcoholic drinks and just under £60bn on catering.