Owner ensured hard-up families who were struggling could have meal for four for £5 and experienced so much demand the firm created seven new jobs.
Lockdown demand for homebaked frozen pasties has helped a family-owned bakery in Cornwall achieve record orders, create seven new jobs and send baked goods all over the UK.
Prima Bakeries, in Scorrier near Redruth, has seen demand go “through the roof,” especially from people who might have been shielding or wary of going into shops.
The 96-employee firm “sold over 80,000 homebake frozen pasties during the lockdown,” according to owner and managing director Mark Norton, “as well as hundreds of boxes sent all over the UK via our mail order service. We continued to trade through the lockdown. We didn’t lay off staff or furlough anyone and it’s been so busy we have actually recruited seven new people.”
Prima Bakeries operates mainly as a wholesale business, with a single shop at the front of the bakery which has done good trade through the pandemic – especially its frozen section, which opened to help people when supermarkets shelves were empty.
Mark said: “Our retail trade went down when the hospitality sector closed down but our home delivery and wholesale trade to Spar, Co-op, Costcutter and other convenience stores went up as bigger supermarkets struggled.
“I didn’t want us to profiteer from Covid and the lockdown so I made sure we sold our classic steak pasty for £1.25 so hard-up families who were struggling could have a meal for four for £5.
“Our pasties and other frozen baked goods did tremendously well. It’s been so successful that we had to open a special extension to the shop at the front of the bakery.
“Through our partnership with the Cornish Hamper Company we’ve seen our mail-order side of the business go through the roof.
“We’re still very small compared to Ginsters, but to make sure we continued to make our pasties by hand we recruited more people and continued to focus on making the best top-quality products possible.”
Mark and Lynne Norton took on the long-established bakery business in 2010 when they relocated to Cornwall after running their own holiday home business in Brittany for several years.
Prima was just the challenge the Nortons were looking for, and they knew they could raise the finance they needed on top of their own funds – until the sale of their French property fell through, and the bank wouldn’t consider it as collateral for further support.
Mark contacted responsible finance provider, SWIG Finance, which helped complete the financial package required with a loan of £20,000, safeguarding 19 jobs and enabling Mark and Lynne to usher Prima into a new era.
Fast forward to 2020 and Prima’s headcount has increased from 19 to 96 employees, 3 vans to 12 and 500 pasties a week to 30,000.
Mark added, “I’ll always be grateful to SWIG who moved very quickly to solve our funding dilemma and were key to making all of this happen in the first place.”
SWIG Finance is a not-for-profit social enterprise, passionate about bringing social and economic benefits to people, places and the business community in the South West. It aims to make finance accessible by providing small business loans to viable SMEs and startups in the South West region, which have the potential to grow and benefit the economy.
