Craigavon’s Snack Trailblazer in Exciting Business Boost in Britain
Coffee lovers in one of the UK’s biggest and most successful café networks in Britain can now enjoy gourmet snacks crafted by a leading family business in Co Armagh.
Caffè Nero has recently listed an award-winning range of chocolate-coated fruit and nut snacks from Forest Feast in Portadown, hugely successful snacks developed by Kestrel Foods, owner of the Forest Feast, Acti-Snack and Just Live a Little granola brands. Kestrel is a FoodNI member.
Forest Feast’s range of chocolate-coated fruit and nut ‘impulse’ snack bags are now being displayed prominently on the counters of Caffé Nero outlets. The coffee house has more than 600 stores in Britain and around 900 globally. Bronagh Clarke, Kestrel’s marketing director, described the agreement with the premium coffee house as “an immensely important breakthrough with a prestigious client in Britain”.
Kestrel, now among the most respected creators of premium snacks, is a successful family business founded and owned by Michael Hall in 1996 as an important importer of dried fruit and nuts. The business subsequently developed an innovative range of snacks and has become a trailblazer in the fast moving category.
Extensive investment at its modern plant in Craigavon included technology to enable it to create a winning range of chocolate-coated fruits and nuts and to grow sales in the United Kingdom, Ireland and even as far as Hong Kong. In addition to Caffé Nero, Kestrel now supplies most of the leading supermarkets in Britain and has become a leading innovation in the industry. Plaudits have included UK Great Taste Awards for its snacks and premium breakfast granola.
Kestrel has long been at the forefront of innovation in pioneering snacks and convenience foods and has won a series awards for its enterprise. For instance, an original healthy snack created and manufactured at the Craigavon plant, Nutmilk Choco Corn, won gold in an influential UK event for vegan foods. Forest Feast gained the top award in the prestigious Nourish Vegan Awards in Britain.
The company picked the award for the snack, part of a quartet of vegan, dairy- free chocolate treats launched by the UK and Ireland’s leading fruit and nut snacking brand.
The Nourish competition aimed “to find and reward food or beverage products that provide a nutritious plant based alternative with no compromise on taste and texture”. The awards specified that products should “provide a healthy alternative with less sugar, less processing, good nutrition and ingredients.” They also recognise “wholesome and nutritious plant based food and beverage products that will appeal to a wider market”.
Bronagh continues that the company is “continually pushing the boundaries on innovation and driving new consumers to our brand and to the category”. “We wanted to create chocolate snacks for anyone cutting out or cutting down on dairy, but found that a lot of the products on the market were closer to dark chocolate than the more mainstream milky offering,” she continues. The Nutmilk snacks, which meet stricter UK Government rules on fat, salt and sugar in foods, are coated in Forest Feast’s in-house vegan chocolate, that’s made using almond milk in place of dairy.
Kestrel also has a strong commitment to ethical trading and sustainable sourcing, dedicating to working with smallholder farms and organisations like Preda Fairtrade in the Philippines. This ensures fair prices, sustainable environmental practices, local education and empowers indigenous farmers through the sales of dried fruit and nuts.
Among other recent innovations is a world first ‘Double Dipped Peanut Butter and Milk Chocolate Dates’, joining the range of fruit snacks produced in-house by the industry leader. Other products in the novel range include sour cherries in dark chocolate and dark chocolate figs.
Caffé Nero is a premium coffee brand under The Nero Group – the largest independent coffeehouse group in Europe – and is headquartered in London. The brand, as it’s recognised today, was established in 1997 and has grown rapidly to over 1,000 coffee houses in 11 countries: the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Poland, Cyprus, Croatia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the United States.
In 2009, Caffè Nero bought and opened its own coffee roastery in Battersea, south London, which supplies the coffee to all its coffee houses and coffee brands worldwide.
Caffè Nero’s coffee has been acclaimed as the best-tasting among five major UK brands by experts at the independent consumer magazine, Which.
In August 2022, Caffè Nero was awarded a Princess Royal Award For Outstanding Workplace Training in recognition of the impact of its workplace leader development courses
