AC Goatham & Son are celebrating success by receiving two prestigious national industry awards last week, the overall Fresh Produce Business of the Year Award and the Supermarket Supplier of the Year award.
The awards, organised by the Fresh Produce Consortium, are the fresh produce industry’s most sought after accolades and were presented on Thursday 5 June at a black tie event in London. The nominees for the overall Fresh Business of the Year Award are those firms who have won one of the Fresh Produce individual award categories. A & C Goatham & Son triumphed despite stiff competition from many national organisations including Asda, Tesco, Aldi, Waitrose, Morrisons, Worldwide Fruit, Nationwide Produce PlC, Mack Multiples and those closer to home Thanet Earth and Hadlow College.
Clive Goatham, director of A C Goatham & Son comments: “This is fantastic news for a Medway farming business to be recognised nationally for our work and contribution to the industry. The management team here at A C Goatham & Son would like to dedicate this award to our hard working team of 230 full time staff employed locally, Without them the continued success of the business wouldn’t be possible. Also, we mustn’t forget the important role of the 300 seasonal staff who harvest the fruit, our 20 partner farms and the many other businesses we work with across the region.”
The judges of the award said of the decision: “A C Goatham & Son is committed to sharing the benefits from its trading relationships as it spreads its knowledge and resources. This has been recognised by Sainsbury’s, which named it Produce Supplier of the Year in 2013 and now it is recognised by the wider fresh produce industry.”
A C Goatham & Son has grown rapidly in Medway since 2006 and last month published a 20-year Strategic Vision for the growth of the firm and investment across the business. Investment into the business has topped £30 million in the last seven years, which has resulted in the expansion of facilities at the Flanders Farm site, the creation of new jobs and supported an ambitious programme of planting new fruit trees. This is helping restore an orchard landscape to large areas of Medway and Kent. Over the next two years alone, 268,500 new fruit trees will be planted, taking the total planted in the last several years to 2 million.
Clive Goatham concludes: “We are committed to this ambitious 20 year growth programme, which is a first for fruit farming not just in Medway, but in Kent and probably the UK. Apples and pears grown in Kent will increasingly be on the shelves of British supermarkets for a much greater period, meeting the public’s demand for home grown produce and helping reduce the need to rely on imported fruit.”
