The Poupart Group has completed its acquisition of specialist cherry importer and distributor Norton Folgate Marketing Ltd (NFML).
NFML will now sit alongside BerryWorld, OrchardWorld and Poupart Citrus, to reinforce the Poupart Group’s strategy of dealing with the major supermarkets using product-specific companies.
The company will continue to operate out of NFML’s existing Battersea offices and its Spalding distribution depot, and it will remain as a stand-alone business within the group, under managing director Matt Hancock.
He said: “This move represents the best platform available for Norton Folgate to pursue growth in the cherry sector. For all our staff, growers and customers, being part of the Poupart Group of companies will be a fantastic asset.”
Mike Lloyd, who founded NFML in 1995, and had been a partner in the business with Hancock for the last five of those years, will join the Poupart Group in January 2008, to work on new business development.
“The business has been very successful, but we decided it was time to move it onto the next step,” Lloyd told FPJ.
“Growing the business has been a fun time for me and I have enjoyed that challenge. After 12 years, you can get a bit trapped and become myopic about your product area. I am at my best and enjoy myself most when I have those challenges, and there is a time in any company’s life, as well as any individual’s life, when it is right to move it in a new direction. It’s a funny feeling - but it feels right.
“Matt will maintain and expand that business very well with Poupart’s backing, and Poupart will be given supply base opportunities it didn’t have before.”
Poupart Group chairman Laurence Olins said: “We have long admired the business, the management and especially their produce. Cherries are a great fresh product with plenty of growth potential, not dissimilar to the soft-fruit category within which we are very experienced.
“It is our joint intention to support NFML’s independent status, as well as helping to develop the company further by using all the benefits that being part of a larger group can bring to bear.”
Lloyd, who set up Norton Folgate in Folgate Street, by the old Spitalfields wholesale market site, 12 years ago, said that in handling cherries, he feels lucky to have been on “one of the last carriages out of the station”.
The category has undergone a significant transition in the lifetime of the company - one which is not lost on Poupart md Adam Olins. “We have not bought the company to leave it exactly as it is,” he told FPJ. “It is predominantly a Tesco supplier and we are not looking to change that, but we do want to expand the business to its full potential.
“I believe that the cherry category has not performed quite as well as it perhaps should have done yet. When a product is top shelf like cherries, to move it down to become mainstream is a difficult stage and cherries does have that problem. The category goes from a very high price to being cheap in the summer and it is hard to manage from a retailer’s point of view,” he added.
“There are definitely similarities with the berry category 10 years ago and we have learnt a lot from the way we have dealt with that.
“The biggest thing with berries was confidence - once that had been instilled in the supply chain, and the right marketing plans were put in place, the products began to sell,” Adam Olins said.
