Our story - from startup to employee ownership

Raynors is a family firm, established in Chelmsford, Essex in 1988. We have grown from a small local operator into a £25m+ turnover national supplier, with a 40-van fleet and over 300 employees. We make over 19 million high-quality sandwiches, wraps, rolls and salads a year.

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Our BRC AA standard manufacturing facility has a completely nut- and sesame-free operation and supply chain and has an outstanding record in food safety, product quality and service reliability.

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Our manufacturing and hygiene expertise is regularly employed in a consultancy role by both regulatory and commercial interests and we continue to set new benchmarks in manufacturing excellence.

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We are widely recognised as an industry-leading innovator and standards-setter, particularly in sustainability. Here are a few highlights from our track record:

• 2009: Raynors pioneered the carbon footprinting of sandwich products.

• 2014: We started zero-to-landfill reprocessing of organic waste.

• 2019: We removed plastics from our entire sandwich and wrap range.

• 2020: We began on-site hydroponic farming of cress.
   

Most importantly, we remain committed to constant improvement - we have been ISO14001 certified since 2013, which means we are independently evaluated every year to ensure our continuing commitment to sustainability at all levels in our organisation.

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And we’re already working on the future. Since 2019, when we helped conceive and design the project, we have been the lead partner in the Digital Sandwich, a UKRI-financed global initiative which is designing the world’s first end-to-end, blockchain-based traceability platform and transactional ecosystem, specifically for the UK food industry.

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Following on from Digital Sandwich, we have started on another groundbreaking project - this time an all-out technological attack on carbon emissions.

 

The S3 project involves teams from Raynors and the Universities of Exeter and Oxford building the next generation of carbon accounting systems.

 

S3 uses live process data gathered second by second, analysed by dedicated AIs and then opened up to the workforce via a gamified interface where they can interact with the system to improve efficiency and try out new ideas, all in real time.

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And now we are employee-owned!

This year we became one giant family, going employee-owned and setting out our stall for an exciting, mutually profitable future.

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We're bringing all of our amazing workforce along with us, because we believe that success is surer when it's shared.