Recent developments at FWP Matthews

FWP has recently opened a new warehouse and an office building, and has invested in an unusual new piece of machinery called a 'colour sorter'.

New warehouse and offices: in around 2005, the combination of several factors meant the business was running out of warehousing space:

• One of the unique aspects of FWP Matthews is that they regularly telephone their customers to see if they'd like to place an order. This customer focus has resulted in an ever-widening range of flours to choose from, available in quantities from 1.5Kg bags for domestic use, to tanker loads for large-scale bakeries.
• Once milled, flour needs to rest for a while and must be stored correctly
• The production capacity of the mill has been increasing year-on-year as technology and manufacturing practice have produced greater and greater efficiencies.

The company also needed new offices as some staff were based in Portakabins. So in 2006 planning permission was requested for a new warehouse with an office suite above, as well as for a mixing plant. The planning application process took a while as it was for a relatively large building in an area of outstanding natural beauty.

Planning was eventually granted and the new building was officially opened in February 2009 by HRH the Princess Royal. In September 2009 David Cameron, the local MP, will be visiting.

Investment in a 'colour sorter' machine: Organic farming means that no chemicals may be used. So when organic wheat is harvested, the crop is very likely to have other plants naturally occurring amongst it. And these other plants get processed along with the wheat.

Customers however don't always like having non-wheat seeds mixed in with their organic flour and to deal with this, FWP have recently installed a cunning machine called a 'Colour Sorter'. This identifies seeds that are not wheat coloured and gets rid of them to produce an organic product that is purely wheat.

The future

Some flours needs to be mixed with, for example, raising agents for self raising flour, or with flakes and seeds for FWP's ‘Cotswold crunch' product. Mixing is currently done off-site and this represents an added cost to the company, some of which has to be passed onto the customer. So the next investment will be to install a mixing plant. This big investment is currently scheduled to be finished in Autumn 2009.