About Fox's Biscuits
The Company
Fox's
Biscuits is part of the 1.35bn turnover Northern
Foods group, whose interests also include dairy produce, flour,
cakes, convenience foods and meat products.
They supply premium quality biscuits to the UK and to many countries around the world and had a turnover of £120m in 1999/2000.
They also make biscuits for 'private' labels - such as Marks and Spencer, but generally distribute their own brand biscuits to normal supermarket chains such as Sainsburys, Tescos, Safeways and Asda.
They employ approximately 2,000 people spread across their head office in Batley, West Yorkshire as well as their two production sites in Kirkham and Batley and a distribution centre in Wakefield.
How they started
Fox's Biscuits was founded in 1853 when a small confectionary shop in the centre of Batley in West Yorkshire opened it's doors for business.
There, it's owner Michael Spedding, and his wife Susan Fox developed the recipe for making brandy snaps which proved extremely popular with local traders.
Running
of the business was later taken over by Michael Spedding's son-in-law
Fred Ellis-Fox, from whom they took their name.
This is a picture of the main factory building in Batley, Yorkshire.
There is another factory building at Kirkham - near Blackpool, which has more modern upto date machinery, whilst the original Batley building operates on older equipment - which is often more reliable than the more modern.
A often used machine is the 'Rotary Moulding' one, which makes things lie Sports, Jam Tops, and Ham Bottoms and the shell for Party Rings.
Old
Promotional items
In 2005, a nice chap by the name of Trevor, an ex-employee of Fox's got in touch with me and provided me with some old background information about Fox's.
He then sent me these unique pictures of old promotional items which he kindly took himself and sent to me.
This a model of a truck, which - although Fox's never actually used this brand of truck and trailer they did commission a few of these models.
These
models are now collectors items as I believe there were only 200 sets
painted and they are die-cast.
This is a promotional bus model that was done for Fox's some years ago.
They were never sold to the public but used as a hand out to customers who purchased a sufficient amount of biscuits.
About Foxs Biscuits