FDBusiness.com

Premier Foods has concluded its strategic review, which was announced on 27 February 2019, and announced a transformational agreement with its pensions schemes. The pensions scheme agreement is a segregated merger of all the UK-based food group’s pension schemes, which will place all the UK defined benefit schemes under one Trust and is the result of extensive discussions with a number of key stakeholders.

The key benefit of this agreement is that once the RHM pension scheme executes a buyout, a surplus would then be able to be passed to the remaining schemes in deficit, and so would result in a vastly improved funding position of these schemes. As such, this agreement represents a much more secure future for the group’s pension scheme members and has the potential to significantly reduce future funding requirements for Premier Foods.

The merger is subject to agreeing definitive legal documentation with the scheme Trustees, with implementation expected by the end of June 2020.

With the strategic review now concluded, Premier Foods will continue to actively pursue its successful branded growth model strategy, building market leading brands through consumer focused innovation and highly engaging advertising. Following the progress made with this strategy, the board now expects to report trading profit for the 52 weeks ended 28 March 2020 at the top end of market expectations.

The trading performance in the fourth quarter continued the positive momentum seen in previous quarters and volumes in March rose sharply to fulfil increased consumer demand during the outbreak of COVID-19. As a result, group sales in the fourth quarter are expected to have grown approximately 3.6% compared to the prior year and approximately 10.5% in March 2020. In the UK, sales are expected to have increased around 7.3% in the fourth quarter and 15.1% in March.