The South West of England is at the forefront of the UK’s food and drink industry. Rooted in a rich and varied landscape, and drawing on its tradition and heritage, the sector is now one of the most advanced in the country, if not Europe.
South West Food & Drink (SWFD) works with the sector to help it do better business and in turn generate more jobs and build a stronger local economy.
We do this through:
- ...developing new approaches to solving supply chain issues;
- ...improving workforce skills, from leadership and management to the shop and factory floor; and
- ...through helping businesses to promote their products to new markets.
We are here to add value to the sector, foster innovation and investment, help to create new jobs (and safeguard existing jobs), and help the sector achieve sustainability – all key policy threads of the coalition Government.
We are ideally placed to work with Local Enterprise Partnerships and provide specialist expertise to the food and drink sector; together we can support local economic development, generate new investment and improve employment.
In the last six years we’ve worked with 3,750 businesses through about 100 projects which addressed trade development, consumer awareness and business competitiveness.
As a direct result an extra 750 jobs have been created; and that figure could be as high as 1,900, according to research and evaluation undertaken by Ecotec.
Our input into the South West’s food and drink sector adds up to net additional gross value through employment and productivity gains of £17.5m per year.
We are currently delivering 17 projects by working with several thousand more local businesses.
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www.love-local.com is a new website, launched in October 2011 and winner of the national EXPO Ecommerce Awards 2011, to bring together fantastic producers and artisan makers from the South West under one website and help internet shoppers easily find and buy locally made products.
The new Food Information Regulation (FIR), designed to make food labelling easier to understand for consumers, has been published by the European Union.
The Exporting for Growth Prize competition offers SME’s the chance to win over £5,000 worth of advice, support and professional services to help their company grow internationally. Winners will also have access to expert business mentoring from HSBC Bank plc and PwC.