Pilgrim Foodservice is an independent, agile, family-run business with a foodie hunger. Its people embrace and embody the family values of trust, integrity, respect and innovation.
These values have helped Pilgrim to build a proud history of forging loyal relationships with customers.
Founder Peter Bateman is now Chairman and Peter’s son Charles is Managing Director. From a depot in Boston, the company serves a diverse range of customers in 17 counties across the Eastern side of the UK. Pilgrim has more than 4000 products across chilled, ambient, frozen and non-food categories. Its own brand, Chefs’ Selections, is award-winning and ever-expanding.
Charles Bateman, MD at Pilgrim Foodservice tells Wholesale Manager what Pilgrim Foodservice is doing to be green and where the company is going.
Charles, what does your job as Managing Director involve?
I love my job because is incredibly varied. One day I’m working on strategy, the next days it’s leading teams to deliver our goals or overcome challenges.
I am particularly motivated most by leading our teams to take our business forward and grow. This growth comes in all forms: through our customer, our people, or projects.
Do you personally get involved with looking after customers and developing new foodservice products?
We pride ourselves at Pilgrim Foodservice in forming lifelong partnerships with our customers. Therefore, I have known many of our customers personally, for years. I enjoy seeing them succeed. My aim to get out to customers more in 2023.
How big is Pilgrim Foodservice in turnover?
This year we will exceed £50m revenue in turnover.
How big a priority is using UK-grown ingredients?
We are based in Boston, Lincolnshire. Supporting local independent businesses like us is hugely important to us. We particularly like to ensure wherever possible all the veg that goes into our preparation facility is locally sourced straight from the farm. We also support Yorvale, Belvoir, and Lymbank Farm to name a few suppliers within a 40 mile radius.
Do you cover the whole UK?
We cover 17 counties on the Eastern side of England of the UK from just inside M25 all the way up to Bridlington and Sheffield. We even go as far west as Birmingham.
What has the last year’s trading been like?
This year’s trading has proved challenging from a logistics and supply perspective; however, we are still seeing very positive sales growth despite this.
What kinds of foodservice and catering operations does PFS supply?
The majority of our customers are independent pubs, restaurants, bistros and cafes. They are eateries that like us pride themselves in putting great quality food and customer service at the heart of what they do.
What different kinds of food products do you offer – how many food product lines do you offer, across how many categories?
We offer a huge range of over 5000 products. This includes fresh produce; store cupboard staples; frozen; chilled; and cleaning and disposables.
We are particularly proud of our purpose-built butchery: ‘CJ butchers’, with our very own team of in house butchers. We even have our very own Himalayan salt wall producing the finest quality results and meat products with distinctive depth of flavour.
We also have a specialist fresh produce preparation facility on-site. The range was established by our development chefs who created a solution to save time and food waste in the kitchen without compromising on quality. From chunky cut jenga chips to finely shredded cabbage we can help our customers run a more efficient kitchen.
What’s your lead time for orders?
We are very proud of the growth of our online offering. This has enabled us to allow our customers to order up until 8pm for their next delivery slot which for the most will be the next day.
We’re all under pressure to be green. What are you doing to reduce your environmental impact? Do you have any electric vehicles in your fleet? How many refrigerated vans and lorries do you have?
• We have introduced Solar panels which will provide nearly a third of our annual energy consumption.
• We have zero food waste as everything is sent to an ad plant to produce energy.
• All our damaged fresh produce goes to Boston College as animal feed
• We have also introduced LED lights throughout the site.
Finally, where do you see Pilgrim Foodservice going?
It’s a very exciting time for Pilgrim Foodservice, we have ambitions to double the size of our business in the next five years, but this will definitely not be at expense of our service level or product quality. That includes expanding the areas we can supply; our product range and of course investing in a great people.
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