LOCAL STATS & FACTS
- Population of Birmingham
- The population is just over 1M (info taken from here).
- 45.7% of Birmingham residents are under 30, compared with 36.8% for England. In contrast 12.9% of our residents are over 65, compared with 16.9% nationally.
- In addition, ~170K people commute into the city centre every day.
- ~65,000 undergraduates at our five universities (info from here).
- The population is just over 1M (info taken from here).
- Consumer stats
- Total consumer spend on food, drink and catering in the UK is £196bn (Food Statistics Pocketbook 2014, see below).
- The average individual spend is therefore over £3000 a year, giving the Birmingham total spend as over £3.4bn.
- Large food and drinks organisations based in Birmingham and its environs
- Amadeus is the catering arm of the NEC Group. It’s proved difficult to find info about them on-line other that they serve 3.5M covers annually.
- Aston Manor Cider is the UK’s largest independent cider maker with sales of over £120M.
- Birmingham Wholesale Markets: Data is hard to find: Wikipedia says there are 235 units; an FOE blogpost states they have a aggregated turnover of ~£275M and employ over 1,000 people (FOE blogpost, 2013).
- Compass Group UK HQ (Operations) is in Rubery. Their factsheet gives this info (plus a tad more); they employ 60K employees across the UK and Ireland, and serve 1M meals a day, and has an annual turnover of £1.8bn.
- East End Foods has an annual turnover of £180M supplying over 1250 ‘ethnic food’ lines sourced from across the world. In 2006, they opened the first rice mill in Europe.
- Minor Weir and Willis is one of the largest fruit and vegetable handlers in the UK, with a turnover of ~£250M per year.
- Mitchells & Butlers: The UK’s largest operator of pubs, restaurants and bars, serving 120M meals a year, had a turnover of £1.9M in 2013.
- 2 sisters is one of the UK’s biggest food companies with a turnover of ~£3.2 billion per year. With its HQ in West Bromwich, it supplies 50% of the poultry and 10% of the beef and lamb eaten in the UK.
- Wing Yip supplies 4500 products to, among others, 2000 Chinese restaurants. They employ 350 people, have a turnover of ~£100M, with a pre-tax profit last year of £4.9M.
- SMEs & other organisations within the city with renown outside its borders
- Among a plethora of great dining places, there are four Michelin starred restaurants here: Adam’s, Purnell’s, Simpson’s and Turners.
- The Balti Triangle lists 28 restaurants, a small fraction of the ~200 or so curry houses across the city, worth some £4bn a year to the city economy.
- Digbeth Dining Club won the best British Street Food Event 2014 for the second year running.
- CAMRA lists eight Birmingham pubs in Good Beer Guide 2015, the Good Beer Guide listed ten.
- International food companies with significant operations in Birmingham
- Brunei Halal owns Ghanim International UK Ltd (registered in 2011) from whose base in Saltley Business Park, they are responsible for imports into the EU from Australasia, manufacture for Europe and sales to the Middle East. Its 2013 Annual Return was submitted as a ‘small’ company; its target is to have a turnover of £200M by 2015-2016.
- Kraft Foods owns Cadbury in Bournville where nearly 1000 people are currently employed. In 2014, Mondelez, the brand under which Kraft’s confectionery operates, announced a £75M investment on the site conditional upon changes in work practices. Wikipedia lists the 2011 Cadbury revenue as over £11.3bn, presumably globally. The Cadbury HQ is now in Uxbridge.
- Large companies that provide significant services to the food sector
- Euro Packaging is a sales, manufacture and distribution packaging company whose HQ is in Yardley. They employ over 1000 people worldwide and have revenues of over £170M.
- The Food Packaging Federation 2012 briefing to MPs and Peers said the industry employs 85K people (3% of the UK workforce), and the industry has a value of £11bn — and claim the food supply chain wastes only 3% in the supply chain because of packaging, cf 40% in Russia, India etc.
- I can’t find any stats regarding the % of packaging that’s used in the food supply chain.
- Euro Packaging is a sales, manufacture and distribution packaging company whose HQ is in Yardley. They employ over 1000 people worldwide and have revenues of over £170M.
- Other food companies in the conurbation
- A. F Blakemore, HQ in Wolverhampton, employs 7,900 people and has a turnover of over £1.2bn. Operates eight businesses, including the Spar retail outlets.
- Eurofins is a Luxembourg-based company, with a turnover of €1.1bn and 16K+ people, providing laboratory testing. A major UK food testing centre is in Wolverhampton.
- Middleton Food Group & Middleton Cash and Carry, part of the Middleton Group. The Group, based in Willenhall, has a turnover of £70M and employs 250 people.
- MKG Foods, based in Aldridge, is a multi-temperature food distribution business. (No more info available . . . as yet.)
- FSE 250 company Poundland, rarely thought of as a food company, nevertheless in 2008 food products, mostly confectionary, crisps and drinks, comprised 14% of its floor space and brought in 28% of its profits. With its HQ is in Willenhall, it has a turnover of £880M and employs 10K people serving 2.75M customers a week.
- Further & Higher Education & CPD courses
- The University of Birmingham School of Chemical Engineering undertakes significant work about and for the food industry led by nine senior academics, including CPD courses.
- Aston University School of Life Sciences also provide accredited CIEH courses in food safety.
- University College Birmingham provides both vocational and higher education course in hospitality, tourism and leisure management, including culinary arts.
- Their website says they have 8000 students on one page and 7500 on another, including 1100 international students from 65 countries.
- In contrast, Wikipedia says HE Statistics Agency say they have13,970 students in total, including 440 postgraduates, 3,195 undergraduates and 10,335 further education students, around 10% of whom are from outside the United Kingdom
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UK FACTS & STATS
- The value of the food chain
- Total UK consumer expenditure on food, drink and catering is £196 billion. (This works out at an average of £3062.50 per person or £58.89 a week or £8.39 per day.
- Supermarket employees
- 984,000 people (i.e. nearly 1M people) are employed in the UK by four supermarkets, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Morrisons (according to Xanios Thrasyvoulou founder and CEO of PeoplePerHour reporting his company’s research, unattributed, in the Huffington Post in February 2014).
- Hospitality: Employees and value to the UK economy (note: compare these figures with those on the DEFRA diagram at the bottom of the page)
- The British Hospitality Association figures are that 2.7M people (10% of the workforce) are employed in the UK hospitality sector, and that it’s the 4th largest industry sector, contributing £53bn GVA a year.
- The Caterer reports that Mintel figures are these: The UK has 56K restaurants worth over £25bn per annum, employing over 500,000 people, with fast food outlets accounting for for £6.7bn and stand-alone restaurants £5.4bn.
- According to the Food Industry Sustainability Strategy (DEFRA, 2006) the food industry accounts for
- about 14% of energy consumption by UK businesses
- 7M tonnes of carbon emissions per year
- ~10% of all industrial use of the public water supply
- ~ 10% of the industrial and commercial waste stream
- 25% of all HGV vehicle kilometres in the UK
- 12.5% of the workforce
- The economics of obesity
- Estimates vary wildly; all agree that the cost of obesity runs into billions per year. (see National Obesity Observatory papers here.) Birmingham has one of the highest obesity rates in the UK.
See also: The Food Statistics Pocketbook, published annually by DEFRA since 2012 — and from which I gleaned the stats about the value of the food chain; their flow diagram giving info about the whole chain is below:
