2023 Annual report
A strong year of operational progress delivering robust financial performance.
Hilton food group plc, the leading specialist international food packing business, announces its results for the 52 weeks to 31 December 2023.
“Hilton Foods has continued to make good strategic progress in a year of continuing global and economic challenges.”
Hilton Foods has continued to make good strategic progress in a year of continuing global and economic challenges. We have become a multi-category and multichannel business, constantly and rapidly building our expertise, breadth and scale in all four food categories and in our supply chain services offer and we remain on the journey to our ambition to be the international food and supply chain services partner of choice.
We have deep retailer partnerships with leading automation and processes including physical automated conveyor air bridges installed in facilities in Australia and New Zealand that link our processing facilities directly to our customers’ distribution centres to optimise the supply chain process bringing significant logistics efficiency savings with lower carbon emissions.
During the year we signed a long term supply agreement with Walmart, a new customer, and will build a green field facility in Eastern Canada to supply a range of protein products to include beef, lamb, pork, seafood as well as some added-value products. This new Hilton Foods facility will provide robotised store order picking into Walmart's distribution centres.
We have also worked to develop our Greenchain Solutions business which offers an integrated tech stack proposition combining our existing end-to-end supply chain, manufacturing control and automation software expertise together with a specialist flexible factory wide ERP system.
We continue to explore opportunities to develop our cross-category business in both domestic and overseas markets as well as applying our state-of-the-art skills and experience to deliver value to our customers.
2023 saw a recovery in profitability with sales and volumes increasing which continues a trend of continuous volume growth achieved in every year since Hilton’s flotation in 2007. Our UK Seafood business recovered strongly during the year although market challenges in our vegetarian/vegan business remain. We have taken steps to consolidate this business into a single operating facility and we are confident in the opportunities that the category will present for Hilton Foods over the coming years.
Hilton Foods generated strong operating cash flows during 2023 enabling further significant investment in our facilities to increase capacity, improve operational efficiency and offer innovative solutions to our retailer partners. Hilton Foods has a robust balance sheet and operating well within our banking covenants. This enables us to continue to invest to support the growth of the business.