Here we put the spotlight on Andrew Hargraves who joined Princes in 2004 as Corporate Development Manager responsible for managing investment assignments from acquisitions to significant capital projects. In 2017, he spent a year in Italy as interim Managing Director to Princes’ Italian subsidiary. In September 2019, he became Group Commercial Director. Andrew says:
“On my first day at Princes, they sent me from Liverpool to Mauritius to check out a second production site for our world-famous tuna. Day two was spent in a boardroom with the CEO of one of the largest Mauritian companies talking strategy.
“It all sounds very glamorous, but I was the only person in a suit in the baking heat and humidity and I spent most of that week in a fish factory!
“Over the years, I’ve led the £80m transformational programme at our Long Sutton site, our largest food production site in the UK, and been responsible for the strategic direction of Princes Soft Drinks with, at one point, nearly 1,000 colleagues reporting to me.
“That was during the pandemic, a very challenging time, and one of my proudest moments was being able to support our teams to deliver record production outputs whilst being able to keep everyone safe and ensuring our colleagues had access to food parcels.
“Today, I’m commercially responsible for the Drinks side of the business and we’ve got lots of exciting things going on, including some brilliant new business co-packing for some major brands and long-term contracts with our retail partners.
“We’ve got new production lines going into our factories in 2024 and 2025, new jobs being created and we’re making some great improvements in how we handle our logistics which will reduce food miles and CO2 emissions, as well as saving costs.
“Bradford is home to our carbonated and diluted soft drinks production, while Cardiff is a Centre of Juice Excellence and in Glasgow, we make our carbonated canned soft drinks.
“I’m very proud of what we do in Drinks and what we have achieved, particularly during 2023. We are a growing sector and we have an exciting future. As part of our net zero strategy, we’re doing some great things to reduce our carbon emissions and the volume of plastic that we use.
“We led the way within the soft drinks industry when it came to removing and reducing sugar and we were trailblazers on double concentrate squash which is now the industry norm.
“More recently, we’ve developed and launched quadruple concentrate squash with our patent pending technology which has further reduced the volume of plastic and CO2 emissions of our products.
“One of the great joys of working at Princes is being able to see the results of what you have been working so hard on, on the shelves when you do your weekly food shop.
“Career journeys can take many forms from straight paths to squiggly lines and I’ve definitely enjoyed a squiggly career at Princes, working across many product areas, with multiple functions and in different countries.
“I love it here and it’s a very exciting place to work. You never stop learning and are always developing yourself.”