Dairy Crest sales driven by growth across top brands
Food company Dairy Crest Group has revealed revenue in the first nine months of its financial year was "well ahead" of the same period a year prior, driven by a strong performance across its key brands.
The dairy products firm, which has its innovation centre at Harper Adams University, attributed its performance in the nine months to December 31 to its popular products.
These include Cathedral City cheese, Clover and Country Life brand butters and Frylight cooking spray. Together, the brands delivered revenue growth of seven per cent in the first nine months of the year.
The company also said spreads brands – including Clover as well as Utterly Butterly, Vitalite and Willow – continued to gain market share during the nine month period.
Dairy Crest recently launched a fresh TV sponsorship campaign and Cathedral City Spreadable won 'Product of the Year 2018' in the UK cheese category of the world's largest consumer survey award for product innovation.
"We have seen strong growth across our key brands, with Cathedral City, Clover and Frylight performing well and all of our spreads brands increasing market share. We continue to build the customer base for our functional ingredients business and we will talk in greater detail about this in May," said chief executive Mark Allen.
Shares in the company were trading 2.6 per cent higher at 574.50 pence in early trade yesterday, the second best performer in the FTSE 250.
Dairy Crest is set to release its results for the year ended March 31 on May 23.
Following the closure of the firm's Crudgington creamery site near Telford in 2015, it consolidated its butters and spreads production into Kirkby on Merseyside.
It then opened a new £4 million innovation centre at Harper Adams where a team of about 40 staff work on new products, including coconut and avocado cooking sprays.
