Sheffield Foods, Knowing their onions

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer
Published : November 2005

Sheffield Foods is the last specialist supplier of pickling onions to food manufacturers in the UK, but CEO Ken Ellis isn’t crying about anything. Ruari McCallion reports

There’s more to onions than meets the eye. While the regular onion is a year-round food, in demand for hot meals and for salads alike, the pickled onion is a bit different. Demand has peaks and troughs during the year.

“Pickling onions are available year-round but they need a particular structure and integrity to be suitable for processing,” said Ken Ellis, CEO of Sheffield Foods. “Onions bottled in July, following harvest in the preceding autumn, for example, would be mushy and not at all satisfactory.” The peak times for serving and eating pickled onions are at Christmas and Easter but that’s really more about their historic availability as a crop – pickling preserves them and there’s really no reason why they can’t be served year-round. In the past – as late as the 1950s and into the 1960s – the common chicken was also seasonal, primarily available in spring. The development of the broiler bird turned them into year-round dishes. Ken is enthusiastic about pickled onions becoming accepted as a year-round food, too – but he could be said to have a vested interest. Nonetheless, just talking about them as an accompaniment to summer salads stimulates the juices. After all, if pickled beetroot is acceptable, why not onions? That kind of transformation in the market would have an effect on Sheffield’s business, but it’s one Ellis is ready and willing to cope with.

“We have an eight to nine month working season and then a lot of downtime,” he said. “We have about 120 employees working here during the season and that goes right down to eight to 10 in the summer. That flexibility suits our people at the moment: we have staff who have been coming back every year since 1989.” Sheffield Foods

doesn’t actually do the pickling: it prepares the onions by peeling and trimming, before selling them on to food manufacturing companies.

“The onions are de-skinned by a flame-burn process and are then topped and tailed by hand,” said Ellis. The question immediately arises: why isn’t the whole thing automated? “Machinery operates on offset parallel cutting, which is fine if the onion is presented at the right angle. You can’t depend on that with a small pickling onion. There aren’t the specialist machines available and, as this is quite a small, niche market, it isn’t really worth developing them. So we finish it by hand.” The size of the market is a factor in Sheffield’s history. It was originally established by Ellis in the 1970s, in Brandon, Suffolk. The company expanded to Bradford in 1979 for the labour resources and expanded again, 10 years later, to its current home in Sheffield. It was bought by food processor Hazlewood Foods in the late 1990s but it found that other companies in the market wouldn’t buy their surplus production from a competitor. In 2003, it was sold back to Ellis and fellow investors, by which time it was the last operation of its type in the country.

“Back in 1985, 80 per cent of the UK crop was peeled and prepared here: now, that’s down to 25 per cent,” he said. “We process around 5000 tonnes of onions a year, of which about 1600 tonnes is actually peeled in the UK. The rest is done in Poland.” That raises a point about the distance food travels to get onto the supermarket shelves. What is the environmental impact on saving minimal cost?

“Pickling onions for UK use are grown in the Fenlands near to Soham, Cambridgeshire and for Polish processing in The Netherlands and Western Poland. Poland has very low processing costs – at the moment,” he said. “We’ve seen other countries, like the Czech Republic and Slovakia go through a period of wage inflation, as other industries have moved in and offered more attractive, higher skilled work. We can see the same thing beginning to happen in Poland.”

Judging by past experience in other industries, that cost element should have knocked all the domestic players out of the market completely. With the exception of Sheffield Foods, it has. How does it stay in business?

“Polish peeling is excellent – there’s no doubt about it. They peel the onions dry and they have a really firm texture. But peeling and delivery are five days apart,” he explained. “Our onions run on a 24-hour cycle. When it comes to brining and flavour that gives us the advantage. Poland has a 10-year plan to get wages up to average European levels and we’re already seeing an impact. IKEA and a large auto manufacturer have established plants near the main Polish processing entity and people are beginning to move. They will have to streamline their operations and probably have to move to burn-peeling, like we do, and that will have an impact on their suitability for brining following long distance travel. Under our system, onions really have to go into the pickling solution – brine with added acids – the same day. If you do that 1000 miles away, costs go up: it’s expensive to move water across those distances.”

Sheffield Foods is vigorously and regularly audited by both its customers and the authorities to ensure its procedures meet the highest standards. There are language issues in the labour pool: each sign and every written piece of material is presented in five languages, including English. The company has invested in its biggest asset – its people – and isn’t waiting for market forces to move in its favour. The machine that can undertake profile and specialist cutting hasn’t been invented yet, so demand for Sheffield’s products and skills is growing. For instance, uniquely we can create a perfect beetroot wedge with no fragments which can enhance the appearance of a retail pack.

“All the years I’ve been in this business, the traditional market has been in a gradual decline. Recently, it seems to have flattened out and is showing some growth,” Ellis said. “The prepared food sector is growing fast as our eating habits change, and there’s an increasing demand for hand-profiling, which we’re already doing with beetroots, capsicums and other vegetables.”

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