Country Range Group outperforms the wholesale market

Martin Ward: Country Range Group has an ambitious new five-year strategy and plan.

Country Range Group has achieved 9% growth year on year, outperforming the UK wholesale marketplace, which is up by around 2.4%, reported chief executive Martin Ward at the organisation’s exhibition and conference, held last month at Telford International Centre.

Ward told the 650 delegates that CRG is also the biggest it has ever been – it now has 17 wholesaler members in the UK, Ireland, Spain and the Channel Islands – including the newest recruit Peterborough-based King Brothers, which joined in January.

“All that adds to our scale,” said Ward. “There are some impressive numbers: 375,000 deliveries being made per month to 47,000 customers, and a really nice split across education, health and welfare, and hospitality. In terms of our turnover, we exited 2025 on about £1.1 billion, and this year we expect to top £1.2 billion.”

He added that group purchasing should be in the region of £370 million by the end of this year.

Over 650 delegates attended the CRG event, where £4 million in orders were placed.

The event at Telford included CRG’s largest exhibition to date, with 125 stands and £4 million in orders placed – another record for the group.

Notwithstanding this positive news, the group and its members have to be “extremely resilient” in the face of numerous macro challenges, said Ward. He pointed out that the Middle East crisis has brought difficulties from a buying perspective, including the price of fuel, packaging and fertiliser. Climate change resulting in crop failures is also causing issues with the supply of some CRG products.

“Then closer to home, we’ve got our own economic pressures: rising labour costs, national insurance, energy prices, and so on,” he said.

“We’ve also got regulation pressures in the industry. A good example of that is the School Food Standards currently under consultation and ready to come into effect in September 2027. It’s really important that we get that right as 25% of the group’s business is in education. Yes, we want healthy meals, but we don’t want children to turn away from school meals, so we need to make sure that we’re involved in that consultation.”

CRG is aiming to help caterers mitigate industry challenges through margin protection, helping them to simplify their operations, securing their supply, and assisting them with the latest trends in the marketplace.

Last summer CRG conducted in-depth interviews with customers, members and suppliers. As a result, the group has an ambitious new five-year strategy and plan.

Ward reported: “The mission stays the same – to enable foodservice wholesalers to achieve faster, more profitable growth – but we’ve tweaked our values: Collaboration – that’s collaboration between all wholesalers and our suppliers as well; Respect – that’s respect for all our stakeholders and for the planet; and Growth – we all want growth as wholesalers and we want to deliver growth back to suppliers too.”

CRG’s five strategic pillars are:

Scale: CRG is targeting £1.5 billion turnover by 2030. It also wants to increase purchasing through the group from 32% to 35% of overall sales.

CRG wants to grow its own-brands to £250 million turnover by 2030.

Own-brands: CRG wants to grow its own-brands to £250 million turnover by 2030. It currently has five own-brand ranges, and it plans to launch a new front-of-house range early next year.

ESG: All CRG members have finished measuring their carbon footprints for 2025 for scope 1 and 2, and CRG is busy with its members and suppliers measuring scope 3.

Socially, CRG continues to support Springboard FutureChef and to work with Natasha’s Foundation.

A new initiative from Country Range is CRG Impact. “We’re committing to raise £1 million over the next few years for national and local charities,” Ward announced.

Digital: CRG is supporting its members to make the right choices in the digital space, whether AI or automation, and is continuing to create content that will increase traffic and engagement to their e-commerce platforms.

The group has also been running trials with members on click-throughs for promotions to make sure that it can deliver useful data back to suppliers.

Data: CRG is investing hundreds of thousands of pounds into what it describes as a new industry-leading portal.

“We think that this will be the best out there, and we think it will save a lot of time for our members and suppliers,” said Ward. He gave the example that if someone searched for baked beans, all the information that CRG has on baked beans would come up in the portal, whether pricing, terms, imagery, or specifications. The portal should go live in the first quarter of next year.

CRG is also aiming to “reduce the friction for suppliers” in filling out new product line forms. Within the next couple of months, it will have just one new product line form at the centre that can be sent to all of its members.

Commenting on the group’s overall plan, Ward said: “If we can deliver that, we’ll certainly maintain our position as the leading foodservice buying group in the UK.”

Emma Holden: ‘Success in our market isn’t just about what we sell.’

CRG’s head of marketing Emma Holden drilled down into the specific challenges that different types of caterers are facing.

In hospitality, consumers are being more selective about where and how frequently they spend their money, while operators are being more selective about who they buy from and what they buy.

“Innovation is so important, as are trends,” said Holden. “If we are bringing a product or a trend to them, it must be backed up by insight-led positioning – that multi-use, multifunction, and lots of examples about how they can use it across different menus.”

Holden emphasised the importance of meeting the requirements of consumers taking GLP-1 medication. Some 6.2 million people in the UK have taken or are currently on the medication – double the amount of people that identify as eating a strict vegan diet.

“When you go to visit your customers or when you eat out as consumers, you would open a menu and the large majority of the time you would see multiple thoughtful options for someone who follows a vegan diet but there aren’t necessarily those options for someone taking GLP-1 medication.

“And it’s not just people that are taking the medication that want to prioritise fibre or protein or would like a smaller portion when they’re dining out, so it’s much bigger than that in terms of the opportunity,” she said. CRG recently released a GLP-1 friendly menus guide to help caterers tap into this opportunity.

In the care sector, demographic shifts mean that there will be “huge growth in demand”, said Holden.

She added: “This sector is already under pressure from a cost perspective but also from the complexities and the nature of the menus that the operators have to provide for their patients and residents,” she pointed out. For example, care operators have to adapt meals to cater for people with dementia, dysphasia and diabetes.

“Because of all these complexities and constraints, a care operator is looking beyond the product and the service and availability; they want support with training around factors like this [catering for people with different dietary needs].”

In the education sector, operators are very tightly budgeted and regulated, Holden noted. “The overhaul of the school food plan is going to accelerate the pressure of an already underfunded policy of free school meals,” she predicted. Because of the need to be compliant, educational caterers want support on choosing the right products and also help with services like breakfast clubs.

“As you can see, there are lots of challenges within our marketplace but what those challenges give us is actually a huge amount of opportunity,” she maintained.

She concluded: “Increasingly, success in our market isn’t just about what we sell. It’s about how well we go beyond the plate to help our customers operate in all areas. If we do that, then collaboration isn’t just one of our values that we refer to, it actually becomes our competitive advantage.”

• CRG will host its annual ’An Evening With’ event on 17 December at Raffles London at The OWO.

• The group’s 2027 exhibition and conference will take place in Glasgow on 10 June