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Spooner Vicars has been associated with the baking industry for more than 150 years as a leading name in the design, manufacture and supply of high quality equipment. Through alliances formed with other leading suppliers of dough forming and ancillary equipment, Spooner Vicars can offer a complete turnkey solution to its customers, starting from the initial bakery plant design to full installation and commissioning of the equipment. Bruce Stimpson, the managing director of Spooner Vicars, says: “We manufacture heavy industrial equipment for the global food industries encompassing biscuits, bread, buns, cereal, crackers, confectionary, pet foodand snack food.
In today’s world it is important to have a competitive advantage. Spooner Vicars prides itself on offering the complete service to its customers. With this long and continuous history in the baking industry the company has built up an unrivalled level of product and process know-how. Blending together the latest technological advances and innovations enables it to provide a full service from product development through equipment selection and installation to after sales service and maintenance. The result for our customer is an efficient, innovative and profitable operation.”
On June 10th this year, Spooner Vicars was acquired by Avalanche Holdings Ltd, a UK corporation wholly owned by Bruce Stimpson and Wayne Poteet. Avalanche Holdings will activate a long-term investment programme to maximise Spooner Vicars positive position in the global marketplace, focusing on product development, increased quality and improved service. Bruce comments: “The biggest plan for the company is investment, investing in the people, investing in the business and investing in new technology. We decided to buy Spooner Vicars because it has a very good global reputation. Over the last few years, the company has lost focus, but it was an acquisition where we knew that we could make major improvements in a very short time period. We are planning to turn the company around primarily with direction, which they haven’t had for a few years, and by bringing in new technology, technology that we have as a group as well as new technology that we will design over the new six to nine months. We’re going to develop new bread ovens, for markets that require a different technology. We are bringing in very unique designs where there is zero competition in the world and so we will be the market leader rather than a market follower.”
Bruce continues: “We are actively looking at several other acquisitions. Our aim is to be a £200 million a year turnover company within the next three years. We will acquire companies that will give us an additional £150 million in turnover. No market is a good market to be in unless you are a market leader. At the moment the companies that we are acquiring are not the market leaders but have the opportunity through the strategy that we have put together under Avalanche Holdings to become the market leaders in their sectors within twelve to 24 months.”
Innovations
Since the business started many innovations have been credited to Spooner Vicars keeping it at the forefront in design and this philosophy continues today. In baking technology, the most important features, now and into the future, are those that optimise production. If changeover time is reduced production capabilities can be expanded. Getting more out of current lines adds to productivity rates and the bottom line. With this in mind, the Spooner Vicars’ continuous proof and bake system utilises a magnetic conveyor system which enables indented or flat pans to be randomly loaded onto the conveyor surface maximising throughput on all varieties of baked product from tinned bread, buns and rolls to croissants, American muffins, Danish pastries, pies, Kaiser rolls and pizzas. The continuous proof and bake system compliments the company’s more traditional tunnel oven technology, providing an alternative process for a wide range of end products. The oven is available in a figure of eight or twin spiral configurations, dependent on capacity and available space, with many combinations of infeed and outfeed positions to suit the bakery layout.
Another new product for Spooner Vicars is the pro series rotary moulder for the cookie, biscuit and pet food industries, which offers unrivalled features on hygiene, flexibility and accuracy of production. The new machine has been designed taking all the strengths and weaknesses of existing equipment into account, adding user’s operational experiences and desires, to create the most user-friendly machine combined with excellent operational performance. Innovative design reduces product change over times and improves product flexibility allowing soft and hard sweet doughs to be run on the same machine. The usual features of automatic adjustment of all major adjustments and recipe settings – feed roll, moulding roll scraper position and extraction roll pressure are available for fully automatic recipe control providing the benefits of improved consistency and repeatability of product. The new machine is available in standard, wipe down and fully wash down specifications.
Avalanche Holding’s investment plan for Spooner Vicars included investment in the people. Bruce says: “People are what make a business at the end of the day. If you don’t have good people it doesn’t matter how unique your technology is. Without good people, you cannot deliver to the market from a sales, engineering, and manufacturing or after sales point of view. People are a number one priority. Since we acquired the company we’ve brought in a training company and at the moment we’re spending about £50,000 on training everybody in all different aspects of the business. We’ve been doing psychometric evaluations to establish what training needs people have.”
Spooner Vicars appreciates it is very important to provide their customers with a good service. Bruce states: “We are an extension of our customer’s business. We are actively talking to our customers every day, and helping our customers in areas of their business where we don’t get any business. Then the customer talks to us first when he does have something that we can do for them. It’s customer service from start to finish.”
Spooner Vicars’ history dates back to 1849, when T&T Vicars started in Liverpool as a partnership, which involved two cousins both called Thomas, whose engineering business was geared to the local shipbuilding industry. Another of the local industries also focused upon the needs of our seafaring nation was the bakery business. A number of small bakeries, which generally operated from basements and cellars, manufactured the so-called hardtack biscuits which were designed to withstand long sea voyages without becoming stale. Baking conditions were crude and simple and the Vicars enterprise soon realised that this was an opportunity to design and build machines to give quicker and easier production. Thus was born the firm of T & T Vicars Biscuit Machinery
& General Engineers.
In 1960 Vicars became a member company of Simon Engineering, a multi-faceted engineering group, containing a food division, which over the next 25 years allowed Vicars to further advance its technological edge. The next significant development came in 1991 when the Bakery Business Area was formed; this comprised many well-known and respected British company names including Spooner, Vicars, Asser, Oakes, Jahn and Klimatank. This combined expertise enabled the company to produce equipment for the biscuit, bread, cake, pie, pizza, quiche and snack industries.
In April 1992 this Group became a part of SASIB SpA and was fully integrated with four other illustrious names - those of G P A Orlandi of Verona Italy; Meincke of Copenhagen Denmark; Ricciarelli of Schio Italy and SPS of Navaro Italy, thus forming the UK division of SASIB Food & Beverage machinery, to serve all the needs of the industry. 2001 saw a change of direction for Sasib and Spooner-Vicars, Meincke and SPS became the Dry Foods Company - still concentrating on total commitment to the customer.
The Company’s Heritage
Today as the Sasib name is no longer applicable to the business, the company recently completed the formalities and changed its legal name back to Spooner Vicars Ltd. Reverting to this name clearly identifies the company’s heritage of both Spooner and Vicars technology in the food processing industry. This long established and well-recognised name is synonymous with the baking industry and reflects its continued commitment to provide the very best quality and service available today. Bruce comments: “Spooner Vicars’ longevity gives it a competitive edge in as much as its name is known. Now we’re like a start up company, because we are now totally debt free, but with 150 years history. But even though our name has been out there for many, many years we’re only as good as the service that we provide today.
“Being debt-free gives us some advantage but it also gives us a disadvantage. The advantage is that we don’t have to keep looking over our shoulder at where the next penny is coming from. However if we’re not careful being a debt-free company can give you the disadvantage of complacency. We plan to avoid this by making sure we have the right directors in the company. We’ve brought some new directors in who are very focused and who are very keen at success, and we are providing incentives to the directors to make sure that they don’t lose that focus.”
Spooner Vicars is being remarketed with the help of a PR company in Liverpool, and has recently changed its logo. Bruce says: “The logo has been given a more up-to-date and slightly futuristic look. The logo before was very old and staid, it was developed back in the seventies. Now we are a new company with new owners and therefore a new image. We have a very positive outlook.”
So far this year the company is already doing just over £18 million worth of profitable business and the future looks very, very bright indeed.
“Avalanche Holdings has made several acquisitions but each of the individual companies like Spooner Vicars cannot do everything for the industry that they serve. We’ve already had three agreements recently with partners and we are going along the strategic route of partnerships that will enable us to give better customer service around the world. The secret of the company’s future success is the people within it and the level of service that we will be giving our customers.” concluded Bruce.
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