UK Chinese food firm targets exports – to China

Ming Foods – which produces Chinese pancakes for food manufacturers and restaurants nationwide – has announced plans to expand its exports worldwide.

The company said that its growth plans were helped by funding secured by small and medium enterprise funding company Bibby Financial Services (BFS).

Ceo of Ming foods Sam Duong told FoodManufacture.co.uk how Ming Foods would expand by increasing its exports.

Duong said: “We’re aiming for 15% growth year-on-year for the next five years. There are several ways of doing that. One is increasing our export footprint and about 20% of our revenue is through export.”​​  

He disclosed that up until the deal with BFS, the company was focused on survival rather than innovation and growth.

‘Tough to raise capital’​

He said: “In the past, it was tough to raise the capital we needed to grow the business and realise the potential that we believed it had.”​​

“However, both funding and expertise from BFS have relieved the cash-flow pressure we faced and it has allowed us to think about growth and innovation.​

“Now our ambition is to be a UK-based business selling Chinese food products to China and our ongoing funding has brought us one step closer to achieving this goal.”​​

The pancake manufacturer faced a cash-flow crisis when it lost its funding facility in 2012. Ming Foods approached BFS in 2015 to help fund the business with an invoice finance facility.

Zero waste manufacturing​

Ming Foods also announced it was looking for ways to achieve zero waste manufacturing by developing new ways of using excess pastry to create new products.

“Our priorities for the future are to build upon out improved productivity and efficiency at our new Swanley factory and to drive down operating costs while expanding our production,” ​added Duong.

“It’s a high aspiration and it’s always challenging – with the amount of resources we have – to do it successfully.”​ ​

Established in 2002, Ming Foods doubled the capacity of its production facility in Swanley, Kent in June last year (2015). The business produced more than 3M pancakes a week, totalling 1,500t of products a year.

The business has more than doubled its turnover since 2008, from £1M to £2.2M in 2016.