HEARTBEAT
Huge variety at the press of a button.
The moment you step inside the superb Direct Table Foods plant at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK, you know why it’s so successful.
There’s a ‘can do’ atmosphere and a spirit of friendship and loyalty. It’s just the same at their Cuffley, Hertfordshire plant where, back in the 50’s, the Stanton family established what has become one of the UK’s biggest and most successful processors of quality bacon and bacon products.
In 2001
we reported on Direct Table’s remarkable progress (Advantage
issue 11) and boasted of our long standing involvement and friendship
with them. Now, in 2004 we’re celebrating 25 years – a Silver
Jubilee
of being associated with one of the best in the business.
As you might expect, much has happened since then. Direct have always known that in order to survive and indeed, flourish, a constant, reliable supply of high quality raw material is essential, so in 2003 they became part of Tican, a Danish cooperative with over 795 members and an enviable reputation for consistent quantity and all important quality of supply.
“You have to be big and very efficient to be able to serve today’s big, fast moving and highly demanding retailers. When they order you deliver – on time, every time,” said managing director, Tony Stanton.
As the photographs on this page clearly demonstrate, Direct produce a very varied range – currently 38 – of ‘top notch’ products from 8 different cures of Danish, British and Dutch bacon, including speciality cures like organic, sweetcure, dry cure, maple, tendersweet, Olde English and reduced salt – all done in-house. Both plants are EFSIS Higher Level and British Charter Mark approved and Bury is approved by the Soil Association.
Each week output grows in response to the increasingly large orders placed by their famous multiple retailer and foodservice customers who demand – usually at short notice – fixed weight packs of varying configurations of the wide variety of Direct’s products in quantities often exceeding 640 tonnes. Some companies would face a task of this nature with considerable trepidation, but to Direct it’s all in a day’s work, thanks to that all important special team spirit and a formidable inventory of AEW Delford machines.
At the time of writing, Direct’s AEW Delford ‘fleet’ comprises:
ten IBS Predictive Bacon Slicer lines (5 at Bury, 5 at Cuffley) complete
with G2200 checkweighers to monitor sliced bacon stack weights as they
come off
the slicers, together with end of line checkweighers/metal detectors and
weigh price labellers.
An APC Slicer linked to a G2200 checkweigher producing fixed weight horseshoe
gammon steaks and a SmartSlice Vision producing fixed weight gammon joints.
Tony Stanton has looked at just about every competitor to AEW Delford’s IBS2000 Predictive but his company’s long and favourable experience of the machine has convinced him that it’s the best slicer in its class. “We just press the button and it runs and runs, with the steady rhythm of a heartbeat, producing a flow of superbly cut products – day in, day out. It’s so easy to operate, too. That’s why we’ve bought more of them,” he said.
SmartSlice Vision and APC Slicer work at equally high levels of integrity and efficiency in tandem with the many checkweighers and weigh price labellers, making their major contribution to the ever increasing, high yield, low giveaway output of superbly presented, high quality products that is uniquely Direct Table Foods.
Remarkably, despite its size and the fact that it belongs to a large group, this is a company with the air of a family run business. That’s because it’s managed by the same canny, creative and caring boss it’s had for years, a man who cares about healthy relationships with everyone connected with his business and sees each member of his 400 strong team as a member of the family.
A man with heart
