Northern Dairies supremo quits

Northern Dairies marketing director Martin Jamieson is leaving the UK’s largest milk deliverer a week after parent company Northern Foods an-nounced massive redundancies.

Jamieson’s departure after three years in the post follows swiftly on the heels of the 2,200 redundancies from Northern Foods’ 30,000-strong workforce, which were announced last week.

The dairy side of the business will bear the brunt of the job losses, which will take place over the next two years.

Northern Dairies is the operating company responsible for Northern Foods’ milk interests in England and Wales.

The company’s doorstep delivery operations trade under the Express Dairy brand in the London area and as Dale Farm in the Midlands and the North.

The company blamed the job losses and £91m restructuring costs on the Government’s shake-up of the milk distribution system last year.

Its abolition of the Milk Marketing Board and the creation of Milk Marque has resulted in rising milk prices.

Northern Dairies set up the Northern Milk Partnership to compete with Milk Marque last year, though it is understood that it failed to gain as much trade from farmers as the company had hoped.

For its part, Milk Marque claimed the bulk of Northern Dairies’ redundancies were in the doorstep bottled deliveries. It says this was due to price wars in the supermarkets, which have been hitting doorstep deliveries for some years.

Since 1990 the proportion of milk delivered by the traditional milk round has fallen from 60 per cent to just 45 per cent.

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