News on Food Trends from United Kingdom

The total area in Great Britain planted with potatoes is estimated at 119,000 hectares(ha), a fall of three per cent on the previous year. This would represent the third-lowest planted area on record, with an agricultural drought likely to affect yields.

Earlier this month, KP Snacks, part of the Intersnack Group, announced it had reached an agreement to acquire Popchips Ltd, which owns and operates the Popchips brand for Europe.

Heat and Control and Ishida have demonstrated their complete solutions in snacks food production Open House event at the Ishida factory facility in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Earlier this month Nomad Foods Limited announced that it had completed its previously announced acquisition of Aunt Bessie’s Limited from William Jackson & Son Limited for a purchase price of approximately €240 million.

Albert Bartlett, leading supplier of fresh potatoes in the United Kingdom, is to launch chilled potato products with major UK retailers and food service customers.

McDonald’s restaurants in the UK and Ireland will complete transition to paper straws in 2019; In Belgium the QSR chain is testing alternatives to plastic straws and trials are planned in the United States, France, Sweden, Norway and Australia later this year.

Last month the Intersnack Group announced that it had reached agreement for its KP Snacks business to acquire Tyrrells, Inc. and its global portfolio of better-for-you, premium snack brands from The Hershey Company.

Ishida Europe has introduced an internal moisture sensor and monitoring system for its latest multihead weighers, which will enable fresh and frozen food producers to more easily control and prevent water ingress into their critical production equipment.

This spring Kettle Foods launches in the United Kingdom a new range of price marked packs (£1 per bag) to target the growing sharing snacks market.

Google research, developed on behalf of McCain, showed how ‘Micro Moments’ in consumer search habits are impacting eating out.

Merger talks between British supermarket chains Sainsbury's and Asda are at an "advanced" stage, Sainsbury's has confirmed.

The weather has not been kind to potato growers in the United Kingdom. AHDB potatoes offers some helpful tips and guidance to make it a successful potato growing season nevertheless.

United Kingdom potato trade saw strong performance from its processed potato sectors in the first seven months of the 2017/18 marketing season. Trade of frozen potato has seen strong growth both leaving and entering the UK, although imports still outweigh exports by ten-fold.

Late Blight control strategies in the United Kingdom will have to change this season if potato growers are to combat the spread of a new aggressive, fungicide-insensitive/ resistant strain of the disease, leading agronomy firm Hutchinsons says.

Tong Engineering offered the option of integrated optical sorting within its market leading grading machine, the Caretaker, back in 2016. This has proved to be a very welcome addition.

The potato growers supplying McDonald’s in the United Kingdom can get a free agronomy skills training to improve crop performance and quality with the launch of the MacFry Potato Academy.

A research project aims to improve the accuracy of the ‘AHDB Potatoes potato cyst nematode (PCN) pallida calculator’ which is currently used as an educational forecasting tool for potato growers in the United Kingdom.

Fairfields Farm Crisps has agreed to acquire Ten Acre Crisps, in an ongoing concentration of smaller premium brands focused on high quality and free-from attributes in the UK snack market