Hill Biscuits is one of the UK’s leading biscuit manufacturers, producing more than 30 million biscuits each week for the retail and foodservice markets.
Originally founded as a small shop in Dukinfield, Manchester by John and Sarah Hill in 1855, Hill Biscuits’ key products include digestives, ginger nuts, custard creams, bourbons, malted milks and gingerbread men.
Multi-faceted strategy
The management team of Hill Biscuits turned to LDC for support in April 2017 to complete a management buyout the firm from existing owners and push forward with its business improvement strategy.
With LDC as its investment partner, the 150-year-old business started a multi-million-pound capital investment programme to expand its production capacity and develop new products in order to take advantage of rising demand from current and new customers.
Hill, which has annual sales of over £20m, plans to seek strategic acquisitions to build further scale and diversity, as well as implement a new international sales strategy to accelerate growth in overseas markets.
Hill Biscuits worked closely with the LDC team to deliver substantial savings through updating our supplier model.”
Creating value through collaboration
Part of the partnership with LDC involved the support of its Value Creation Partners team to support Hill Biscuits’ improvement strategy.
Hill’s management team found that it was spending over £500,000 each year on packaging as a result of having over 100 product lines and producing over 30 million biscuits a week for the retail and foodservice markets.
Through close collaboration with LDC, Hill reduced the number of product lines, reduced costs via value engineering and established a broader list of suppliers.
As a result, LDC has helped the management team deliver nearly £100,000 savings on annual packaging spend, simplify its product packaging range and introduce a multi-supplier model to provide more flexible and resilient network of sources.
