Palethorpes
| Private company, Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Meat processing |
| Founded | 1850's |
| Headquarters | Market Drayton, Shropshire, UK |
|
Key people
|
Henry Palethorpe (founder) |
| Products | Sausages |
Palethorpe's is a British producer of cooked meat and pastry products and was particularly well known for its branded sausages. Founded in 1852, it was bought by the Bibby Group in 1969 and then by Haverhill Meat Products (a J Sainsbury, Canadian Meat packers Joint Venture) before becoming part of the Northern Foods Chilled Foods division in 1991. Palethorpes is now part of Pork Farms.
Henry Palethorpe was born in 1829 in the Black Country. Setting up business as a butcher in Birmingham in the 1850s, he realised that the United States was flooding the United Kingdom market with cheap bacon and pork.
Palethorpe decided to move into value-added meat processing products, specialising in sausages, with which he had success. The company moved to Tipton in 1896, claiming at the time to be the world's largest sausage producer. The company expanded during World War I, supplying canned meat products to the British Army. However, it lost market share during and after World War II, with restrictions on meat sales due to the amount of meat that was being imported; this gave an advantage to fishmongers such as Macfisheries, who boomed during the war.
By the 1960s, with the development of supermarkets in the United Kingdom, the company was experiencing additional pressure. In 1967 Palethorpe's constructed a purpose built factory employing 400 people in Market Drayton, at a cost of £650,000. This resulted in the closure of the Tipton factory in 1968, after which it was demolished and redeveloped as low-rise council flats.
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