Northern Foods shares were delisted from the London Stock Exchange from 13 May 2011

Industry-leading, Quality-assured Production

Consumers expect factory-prepared and packaged food always to be perfectly safe to eat. All food producers know that to deliver this mandatory standard requires complex technical skills and disciplines, minute attention to detail, and assiduous scrutiny and checking.

Northern Foods has long been recognised internationally as a leader in the field, and has helped to shape many of today's national and global food-safety standards.

Our central technical services function, based in Nottingham, sets the company's policies on food safety and testing, while each production site has its own dedicated technical team putting the policies into practice.

We are the only British and Irish food producer with sufficient accreditation and trust in food-safety testing to be entirely self-governing in site certification.

Our central laboratory services and site technical audit processes are accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, the sole national body recognised by government to assess, against internationally agreed standards, the competence, impartiality and performance capability of organisations that provide certification, testing, and inspection services.

We expect the highest standards of our suppliers, all of whom are audited against robust and comprehensive benchmarks on the quality of their products and the good practice of their businesses. Our programme of continually raising the bar on standards is achieved in part by consolidating our supplier base, focusing increasingly on those suppliers who consistently provide high-quality raw materials, a high level of service, and who work continually to be the most innovative and efficient.

As raw materials arrive at our factories, they are tested to ensure they conform to our detailed technical specification, and recorded and coded on our production IT system so that at any stage in the factory process we can always guarantee full traceability of all ingredients. Testing continues throughout the production processes and even during transportation to our customers' depots.

Food Safety