Delightful Food Group is a family business through and through. The Flax family has been operating in the food industry for multiple generations; ever since Ricky Flax’s great-grandfather first came to the UK.
“After running his own fresh food factory, my father (Sheldon Flax, Chairman) moved into the coffee syrup markets,” said CEO Ricky Flax. “This was pre-coffee boom; it was hard to even get a takeaway coffee then. But the business grew into IBC Simply and started distributing across the UK.
“I joined around 2012, initially just to help. I was about to start my own company at the time, but I got completely swept up in IBC Simply and fell in love with the industry, and the brand. Together, we have gone on to develop it to what it is today.”
Indeed, the company has grown by 600% since 2012 and supplies most of the larger coffee chains, restaurants, pub groups and food service companies across the UK. Turnover at Delightful Food Group is now about £25 million.
“We have a large capacity, and work predominantly with medium to large companies, including blue chip, household names.”
A match made in heaven
With the steady guidance of this father/son management team, IBC Simply made the strategic acquisition of March Foods in December 2023. Bringing together two well-established businesses under the umbrella of Delightful Food Group has guaranteed expertise in innovation and product development.
The two companies had already been working successfully together for many years, and the synergy between product and manufacturing proved the perfect match to grow both businesses to the next level.
Delightful Food Group offers a wide range of food and beverage solutions including co-packing and co-manufacturing, supporting customers with branded, private or white label products. The advent of the Group marks the recent merger of IBC Simply and March Foods. Ricky Flax, CEO, explained more to Hannah Barnett about this groundbreaking move.
The result of the acquisition is that Delightful Food Group can now offer the full 360 process to customers. This means from the initial stages of sourcing a product, to helping with the NPD process, sourcing the raw materials and the packaging, manufacturing, and distribution.
“I’m taking a very organic approach,” said Mr Flax. “We were clear, we were not going to bring in outside investors. This is a family-run business; and we want to keep it that way. We didn’t want to buy March, just to sell in five years. This is a long-term investment and we will be making more acquisitions to build something really special.”
Delightful Food Group runs several flagship machines in leading packaging formats, including cordial shots, small packaging portion pots, pouches and stick packs. The company is looking to invest into automation but will do so carefully and conscientiously
“People are everything to us,” Mr Flax explained. “I’m not looking to suddenly bring in machinery that’s going to replace staff. As our capacity grows, and with the labour shortages that are around, we will automate some of our machinery to assist the process. The investments are towards making operations run better.”
Best-in-class
One of Delightful Food Group’s core values involves ensuring the sustainability and traceability of all ingredients. The company is currently gathering further data and statistics to create a strong CSR statement.
“It will be mainly around wastage, carbon footprint, plastic usage and having a hard look at our supply chain to ensure it meets our vision as a company,” added Mr Flax.
The company values strong relationships with its suppliers: “It’s something we’re really good at,” as Mr Flax put it. In a similar vein, Delightful Food Group keeps its customers close.
“Customer service is key,” said Mr Flax. “I speak to clients myself; everyone knows who I am and there’s no red tape. We
communicate openly and honestly, and if there was ever an issue, we would speak to the customer and find a solution.”
The strength of the company’s partnerships, some stretching back years, evidently contribute to the strength of its output too. Before anything new is launched, superior product quality is ensured by running it through a blind taste test panel against competitors’ products. “Everything we do has to be best-in-class,” said Mr Flax. “I literally can’t remember the last time we lost a taste test.”
Future perfect
While labour and skillset challenges remain a challenge in the industry, Mr Flax’s vision for the future offers a solution to overcome them.
“I’m passionate about the future food and beverage market,” he explained.
“We all need a basic education around farming and the ingredients that are in everyday products and what they do.
“Food is so important to the economy. So, let’s make it part of the curriculum. And not just from a cooking point of view, but from a full cycle perspective. We need to excite the next generation, and get them passionate about food and manufacturing, to bring new ideas and technology to the industry.”
The company itself is used to overcoming adversity and experienced a boom in growth during the Covid pandemic, thanks to internet sales. These proved instrumental, as regular operations had ground quickly to a halt. But the
business became so successful online during lockdown that it lost no turnover at all.
“We couldn’t believe it,” said Mr Flax. “It was literally my dad and one other person in the warehouse, pretty much operating the business. Amazon, and a lot of other online retailers we work with, suddenly were doing crazy volumes, because no one could get their coffee shop fix anymore and everyone wanted it at home.”
Now, with the acquisition, the company is accommodating a further boost in growth, increasing from 40 employees to over 200. But the ethos remains the same – Delightful Food Group is a family business.
“From the cleaner to the CEO, we want everyone to understand our beliefs, values and objectives,” Mr Flax concluded. “How we communicate that is probably the biggest challenge that we have at the moment.
“Personally, I love working with my dad. We’re very lucky, we do different roles, so we don’t clash. We do argue every now and then like all families, but we choose to share an office. And that motivates me on a daily basis because I think that’s brilliant.” n
