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What are their main products?

Kettleby Foods manufacture ready meals. Their main products include Cottage Pies, Lancashire Hot Pot, Beef Stew and Dumplings, Chicken and Broccoli Pies, Cumberland Pies, Shepherds Pies and Beef Rosti.

These meals are produced to meet a range of different markets - finest meals, value meals, standard meals and the 'healthy eating' range.

Image: Ready meals produced by Kettleby Foods for Tesco. Reproduced by kind permission of Tesco.

These different 'markets' mean that there are different specifications for each product in terms of the ingredients used and the quality and quantity of ingredients used. The food industry is heavily regulated so the company have to ensure that quality control is high on its agenda. There are tight tolerance levels for its ranges of foods, for example, if a healthy eating Chicken and Broccoli Pie leaves the production line weighing more than 480 grams, it would have to be withdrawn because it would then have a higher proportion of fat, carbohydrates and so on than is allowed to be able to call a product 'healthy eating' - clearly if you bought a pie like this as part of a healthy eating regime and expected it to only contain 3% or less fat then 3% of 480 grams is more than 3% of 450 grams - the advertised packaged weight! Not only that, it would contain more calories than advertised and Kettleby Foods cannot sell a product that is not what it claims to be.

Other ranges of products also have tolerances but not necessarily as stringent as those on the healthy eating range. For the business, getting the correct combinations of ingredients in the products is also important in controlling costs, maintaining profitability and providing the consumer with a consistent level of quality. If more chicken were added on a regular basis this costs more money and so reduces the margins on the product. Regular consumers would also become frustrated with getting different portion sizes each time they ate the meal.

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