40 food firm staff fear for their jobs

UNDER threat . . . AAK Bakery in Hathershaw

AROUND 40 staff at a food company are fearing for their jobs after being told its Oldham site could close to save costs.

AAK Bakery Services has begun a business review that could result in the Falcon Street base in Hathershaw shutting so the firm can consolidate to one site. Staff could be moved to its Runcorn site but redundancies have not been ruled out.

The Oldham business supplies a range of products and services to the bakery industry with the sales team based in Oldham.

Formerly Croda Food Services, it was bought by the UK arm of global speciality oils company AarhusKarlshamn in July, 2007, for around £5.5 million.

The Swedish company had sales of more than £17 million at the time and boasted healthy export sales.

It also operates a vegetable oil refinery in Hull and AAK Foods in Runcorn, which offers sauces, dressings and marinades to the retail and food service sectors.

The Oldham acquisition was designed to strengthens the firm’s position in the bakery sector and expected to generate profits.

A company spokesman said: “This is part of a major business review we have been doing across our UK business.

“We are trying to do some restructuring. It’s just a proposal but what we have told our employees in Oldham is that we are trying to reduce our costs.

“We are looking at the possibility of closing the Oldham site in March, 2012. We are trying to consolidate all our activities on one site. Having our commercial development and sales team on one site would improve the customer experience. It’s about trying to build for the future.

“We have just started consultation with our employees and explained the reasons why. We could take a lot of costs out of our business and become a lot more competitive by closing the Oldham site. We have taken the decision to make this announcement sooner rather than later to have this dialogue with employees and explore all possible options at the moment.

“We would look to move and redeploy people if we can. We have a site in Runcorn we can redeploy people to. We can’t rule out redundancies at the moment, unfortunately. We are keen to support people as much as we can. It’s at the early stages so nothing has been decided.

“We have to adapt to the changing world. We have to be more competitive in the food market in general. We have to give excellent customer services to grow the business.”

He said that the recession had not helped with the baking industry going through a bad time, adding: “Most businesses at the moment are having to look at their costs base and we are no different.”

Based in Sweden, AAK has production facilities in Europe, Mexico, Uruguay and the United States, and has three business areas: chocolate and confectionery fats; food ingredients; technical products and feed.