Camgrain
has today (3 July) formally opened its new 90,000-tonne grain
storage and processing site at Wilbraham, southeast of
Cambridge.
The “Advanced Processing Centre” cost £16m to build and will
process all of Camgrain’s Group 1 bread-making wheat from the
coming harvest, including the 65,000t of wheat needed to supply all
of Sainsbury’s in-store bakeries.
Speaking at the opening, Camgrain chairman John Latham also
announced that the farmer-owned company had just received planning
permission to expand the site by another 210,000 tonnes and on the
same day had received the go-ahead to develop a similar-sized
facility in Northamptonshire.
Once completed, these new facilities, plus an existing 150,000
tonnes of storage at Linton in Cambridgeshire, would take
Camgrain’s total grain storage and processing capacity to over
500,000 tonnes.
“Camgrain represents a huge step forward for the industry,”
shadow agriculture and rural affairs minister and
local MP James
Paice said. “The mid-term review of the CAP six years ago
effectively signalled the end of direct market support and there’s
no doubt many farmers were very apprehensive about the new world
they’d been thrown into. The relationship Camgrain has with the
whole food chain demonstrates how we can go on from this and work
together to produce exactly what the market and consumers
want.”
“The next major CAP reform is in 2013 and we may well see the
single farm payment disappear altogether by 2020, so increasingly,
farmers’ income will depend on the marketplace.”
Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King said the provenance of
the supermarket’s products was crucial going forward and customers
were increasingly looking for British produce, despite the
recession. “The tougher times get, the more people get concerned
about the quality of their food and where it comes from.”
He said the supermarket had completed its conversion to using
100% British flour in its in-store bakeries and was introducing a
new range of branding to highlight the fact to consumers.
In-store bakery bread buyer Sarah Callanan said two-thirds of
customers buying bakery products regarded buying British as being
important to them in a recent survey, so the supermarket planned to
move to using 100% British wheat for all of its own-label sliced
bread by this September. And by April next year she said it would
use only British wheat in all of its ‘bake-off’ bread.
