Marks & Spencer has partnered with a new sandwich supplier on the island of Ireland as it aims to mitigate the impact of Brexit on its supply chain in the region.

16 comments

  1. The retailer has recently started working with Newry-based Around Noon, which now supplies locally-produced sandwiches to its stores across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

    The new Around Noon deal will see M&S sell six new SKUs under the supplier’s Twelve brand – including Chicken & Handmade Irish Stuffing, Chicken & Bacon on Irish Malted Bread, Baked Irish Ham & Cheddar, BLT with Ballymaloe Relish, Chicken & Ham Club, and a Chicken Caesar Wrap.

    “We proposed to support M&S’s current offering with products produced on the island of Ireland, made with Irish ingredients,” said Around Noon’s sales director Philip Morgan.

    “We came up with a small range of products that ticked the provenance boxes, for example the bread and the chicken are produced on the island of Ireland.

    “M&S have stores both in the north and south of Ireland and the ingredients come from both the north and south of Ireland as well.

    “Our Twelve ‘Handmade in County Down’ range has had a very successful resonance with the M&S shopper.”

    M&S currently has 26 sandwich lines for sale in all its 38 stores across the island of Ireland, and it has plans to expand its Twelve range with Around Noon.

    Morgan said the supplier faced some ”challenges” when importing certain raw materials into the region, such as parmesan cheese, but that for this particular M&S tie-up it saw “no impact” on supply as the vast majority of ingredients were sourced from the island of Ireland.

    M&S chairman Archie Norman recently criticised the EU for trying to impose “highly bureaucratic” and “onerous” checks on food being sent from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

    He said talks between the EU and the UK to potentially reform the Northern Ireland Protocol could result in “pointless” checks and further impact to supply chains.

    Under the current agreement, there are no checks on goods moving to Northern Ireland because of temporary relaxations.

    “At the moment, we’re pretty much OK in Northern Ireland. It’s costing more money, but it takes an hour to prepare the documentation to get into Northern Ireland and eight hours to get into Dublin,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today last week.

    “But the EU proposal is that we should have to do the same background checks to go into Northern Ireland. That means that every piece of butter in a sandwich has to have an EU vet certificate.

    “So it’s highly bureaucratic and pretty pointless. There is no risk to safety. There’s no purpose to these checks.”

    Norman added that Brexit-driven bureaucratic processes have cost his company “about £30m”.

    Despite the concerns, the retailer has recently opened a new Food Hall in Banbridge, Northern Ireland – although local customers are not able to access the full food range due to the impact of the protocol on M&S’s supply lines in the region.

    The Grocer understands the company is ramping up its NI commercial operations as it gears up for potential changes to the current trade rules under the grace period.

    In addition to sandwiches, M&S has increased its supply from the island of Ireland in other categories – for instance, its sausages and meatballs are manufactured there.

    During the supermarket’s FY results presentation on Wednesday, outgoing CEO Steve Rowe said more than 70% of its food business was manufactured in the UK with goods from the UK, and about 95% was made in the UK with goods from the UK and Europe.

    “We are trying to shorten supply chains at every opportunity,” he said.

  5. Fairness the M&S sandwich are the nicest packaged type sandwich I’ve had. I haven’t tried the new supplier but saw it instore, I just hope it’s not completely about margins and cutting costs. Some of those pre-packed sandwiches are horrible and you’re eating tomato cores or an strip of undercooked bacon fat.

  6. >“At the moment, we’re pretty much OK in Northern Ireland. It’s costing more money, but it takes an hour to prepare the documentation to get into Northern Ireland and eight hours to get into Dublin,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today last week.

    >“But the EU proposal is that we should have to do the same background checks to go into Northern Ireland. That means that every piece of butter in a sandwich has to have an EU vet certificate.

    >“So it’s highly bureaucratic and pretty pointless. There is no risk to safety. There’s no purpose to these checks.”

    >Norman added that Brexit-driven bureaucratic processes have cost his company “about £30m”.

    Ya, Sanitary and phytosanitary checks are a bitch, but they’re not some pointless bureaucratic nonsense. This has been a constant refrain from brexiteers, and every time they say it they demonstrate that they don’t understand the scale of the problem they have created for themselves and business in the UK.

    Before brexit there wasn’t an issue. The UK, when in the EU, was part of the territory’s intense system of controls over food production, which goes across many tiers of control from the construction of the facility and how it operates right down to how often it is inspected and who may conduct such inspections. They are now outside that system, by choice, and are no longer subject to the regulations that control it. That means that rather than trusting they are doing things properly, the items themselves need to be checked, hence the SPS checks that M&S are whinging about.

    This isn’t just bureaucrats making work for themselves. We’ve seen countless times the consequences of a failure in the food supply chain, you can just look at the [Aberdeen Typhoid Outbreak of 1964](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Aberdeen_typhoid_outbreak). Relevant to M&S it destroyed the reputation of a store, but more relevant for brexit it was this event that showed the need for the kind of multi-tiered system of controls that the EU now has, and that the UK helped to develop when it was a member.

  9. In England Costas all have M&S sandwiches etc as their food options because of how much they’re liked

  12. Still made in the UK though. Really annoys me when M&S try to pass off Northern Ireland products as being from the Republic.

  16. So TLDR, protocol checks between Ireland and GB made M&S to copy Boot’s in changing to a local supplier (coincidentally, both based in around Newry, which makes sense since it’s basically right next to the border).

    It’s almost as if having access to two markets is good for investment into the economy (which would be a better if NI had a functioning government).

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