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Food manufacturing site in England From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unilever Gloucester is a large food manufacturing site in the north-east of Gloucester, England, that produces all of the makes of Unilever ice cream for the UK.
| Unilever Gloucester | |
|---|---|
Unilever Ice Cream, Gloucester Factory | |
Looking north-west from the footbridge over the A417 (for the Premier Inn Gloucester) in November 2008 | |
  Location within Gloucestershire | |
| Former names | Cotswold Factory |
| General information | |
| Type | Ice cream factory |
| Architectural style | Factory |
| Address | Corinium Avenue, Barnwood, Gloucestershire, GL4 3BW[1] |
| Coordinates | 51.867°N 2.2014°W |
| Elevation | 25 m (82 ft) |
| Current tenants | 500 staff |
| Construction started | 1959 |
| Completed | 1962 |
| Cost | £4m (1962) |
| Client | Unilever |
| Owner | Unilever UK |
| Dimensions | |
| Other dimensions | 74 acres |
The site was built by Unilever from 1959. The site was officially announced on Tuesday 16 April 1962.[2]
No ice cream was made by the company during the war. In March 1958 Unilever had approached Gloucester Corporation for a site of 20-30 acres, to employ around 400-500 people. [3]
Construction began February 1959.[4] Previously Unilever made ice cream in Edinburgh, Godley, Greater Manchester,[5] and London, but could not keep up. A cold store next door, with the area of a football pitch, would hold 750,000 gallons of ice cream, at the time that would be worth £1m.[6][7]
The plant consumed 53,000 gallons of milk, 20,000 gallons of liquid sugar and 25 tonnes of butter per week. The wafer factory produced a billion wafers per year.[8]
The Edinburgh plant at Craigmillar would close in October 1962, but the cold store would remain, to supply the seven depots in Scotland.[9]
Unilever is the world's largest manufacturer of ice cream, and also has large manufacturing sites in Hellendoorn in the Netherlands, Saint-Dizier in France and Caivano in Italy. Nestle and Unilever have about a third of the global production each.[10]
The site was built to supply 25 million people in the west and north of England, and Wales. In the 1960s the site had over 1,000 employees, and was the world's largest ice cream factory.[11] When opening, the site could produce 90,000 gallons of ice cream a day and 2 million lollies a day.
Over five years in the late 1980s, £60m was invested on the site.[12] In the mid-1980s £45m was invested to put all UK ice cream manufacture at the plant, to be the biggest ice cream plant in Europe. Plants in Acton and Eastbourne would close.
The site became 74 acres, with 1,200 staff.[13] In 1993 the site consumed 150 million litres of milk per year. It could make 340 Mini Milk lollies per minute.[14]
In the early 1990s, Mars UK entered ice-cream production, with a better product, so Unilever under Simon Rhodes, the division chairman from 1985 to 1995, developed a new product, Magnum, but the head of Unilever UK strongly questioned whether customers would pay 80p for 'a glorified choc ice', as it had Belgian chocolate and real dairy ice cream. But despite much reservations by Unilever management on the increased cost of production, Magnum became the UK's best seller in one year, and has been for thirty years; without that intervention and innovation from Mars UK, the Unilever Magnum product would not have needed to have been developed. In response to British sales of Häagen-Dazs, Unilever introduced production of Ben & Jerry's, when Unilever bought the company in April 2000.
The site was one of four main factories in Europe that could make more than 100 million litres per year.[15] It made 110,000 tonnes of ice cream a year.[16]
In late 1997 the original Cotswold factory closed; it was making the much-loved Arctic roll product, with around eighty redundancies; the site was largely totally redeveloped from the original 1960s site; automation was now advanced.[17]
In 1996 Nestlé complained to the OFT that Unilever operated unfair practices.[18] and Mars also complained that Unilever had exclusive deals with food distribution networks, that gave Unilever 70% of the UK ice cream production.[19]
In August 1998 the company was told to change its distribution 'sweetener' deals by March 1999.[20]
In the 1960s there was a two story office and production buildings, and a cone and wafer factory called Embisco. The site was opened as the Cotswold Factory.[43]
The site runs 24 hours a day, all week. The site is situated on the A417, to the west of the large A40 roundabout. It is around a mile west of junction 11a of the M5, and situated to the east of the main Cross Country Route railway.
The site employs over 500 people.
The site makes around 5m Cornetto products and about 10m Magnum products a week. It makes around 1.5 billion ice cream products a year.
By 1995 it was the second-largest ice-cream producer in Unilever; with the addition of three more lines, it would become the world's largest ice-cream plant in 1996
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