UK fresh produce wholesale: the giants work for the supermarkets

About 132 UK fruit-and-vegetable wholesalers publish a full profit-and-loss, booking £13.8bn of combined turnover — and the first thing the map tells you is that the biggest “wholesaler” isn’t a wholesaler at all. International Procurement and Logistics — £941M of turnover, the largest company on the map — is Asda’s in-house produce-sourcing arm, buying fruit, veg and flowers for one customer: its owner. Work down the top of the table and the pattern repeats — dedicated supply ventures, grower groups locked into supermarket programmes, and foodservice arms of larger distribution groups. The independents underneath split into two very different trades: pack-houses employing hundreds to grade and pack perishables for around 2p in the pound, and lean import desks — five to twenty people turning over £4M–£15M per head — where the real margins in this market quietly live. Figures are approximate — verify against a company’s own accounts before relying on any single number.

Two trades behind one market stall

Before reading any margin in the tables below, separate the models:

• Pack-houses, processors and foodservice distributors (Stourgarden, Uren Food Group, R.D. Johns) run real operations — grading lines, cold stores, delivery fleets. Headcount is the tell: roughly £200k–£500k of turnover per employee. Their 2–7% margins cover genuine fixed costs, and weather, energy and wage inflation land on them first.
• Import trading desks (Iberveg, Mercian, Darta, Pacific Produce) buy from overseas growers and sell on to retailers, processors and other wholesalers. A dozen people can turn over £70M–£90M — £4M–£15M per head — because the goods often never touch a warehouse the desk owns. Their 3–7% looks similar on paper but it’s trading economics: thin per-box, huge per-employee, and exposed to currency and crop shocks in both directions.

A desk’s margin and a pack-house’s margin are not the same kind of number, and neither is comparable to the near-zero margins of the dedicated supermarket suppliers at the top — whose job is explicitly to pass value through to the retailer, not to retain it.

The giants: the supermarkets’ invisible layer

*Headcount is the filing entity’s, and the filing entity isn’t always the whole group: G’s Fresh is the G’s group’s sales-and-trading company — the growing operations, and their far larger workforce, file elsewhere in the group.

…and two more above £250M: The Menu Partners (£289.7M, £4.2M, a foodservice supplier feeding restaurants and caterers) and AM Fresh UK (£271.5M, the citrus-and-grape arm of the Spanish AMFRESH group — the only loss-maker at the top, revenue down 12% while headcount rose 17%).

Two of the ten are really broader businesses that happen to sit on this map: Henderson Wholesale supplies the full grocery range to SPAR stores across Northern Ireland — produce is a slice of that £840M, not the whole — and LDH (La Doria) imports own-label ambient goods (tinned tomatoes, pulses, pasta) rather than fresh produce. Read them as neighbours of the trade, not competitors in it.

The striking line is what nobody at the top earns. IPL is the best of the giants at 3.9p in the pound — but it’s a captive whose profit is really a transfer price set by its owner, and over half of that £37M is intra-group dividend and interest income rather than trading profit; the trading margin is under 2p. It held turnover up 4% while cutting a tenth of its 2,000-plus staff. Everyone else clears 3% or less: Fyffes keeps 1.2p per pound of bananas, G’s Fresh 1.3p on £505M of salads, Fresh Direct just £421k on £318.7M — barely a rounding error. When the buyers are four supermarkets and a handful of foodservice groups, scale buys volume, not margin. The value passes straight through to the shelf.

The shape of the market

There is almost no small tier on this map — four companies under £1M and none at all between £1M and £5M publish full numbers. The greengrocer and market-stall economy files abridged accounts and is invisible here; what’s left is a genuinely mid-market trade, 94 of the 132 companies above £25M. And it is strikingly, uniformly profitable: 84–92% of companies in every band above £5M make money. Fresh produce doesn’t produce many corpses — it produces survivors on 2p in the pound.

The best-run independents — count the staff before the margin

Profitable operators between £5M and £100M, at a 2% margin or better — a bar that sounds low anywhere else but excludes nearly half this trade. The headcount column is the one to read: it separates the pack-houses from the desks.

…and eight more between £39M and £65M, including Griffin & Brand (4.7%), Asco Foods (7.0%) and Rush Group (4.9%). We’ve left one raw-ranking entry out of the table: DPS (M&S) (£76.4M, 2.3%) is a dedicated supply vehicle inside the Direct Produce Supplies group, not an independent competitor.

The pattern is unmissable once you look for it. The double-digit margins belong to the smallest payrolls trading the least perishable goods: Premier Fruit & Nut turns £46.3M into £6.2M — 13.5% — with ten people, trading nuts and dried fruit that don’t rot on a delayed vessel; read that 13.5% carefully, though — roughly a quarter of the profit is interest on the company’s own £30M-plus investment pot, the trading margin is nearer 10%, and the year before it was 2%. Innes Redmond makes 11.5% with 39 staff; Melon&Co — a company only incorporated in 2021 — already books £80.7M at 7.3% with 21; Iberveg runs £77.6M through six employees. Meanwhile the biggest workforces in the table (Stourgarden’s 385, Uren’s 211) earn steady low-3s doing the physical work of the trade. The exception proving the rule is R.D. Johns, a West Country foodservice distributor holding 7% with 327 staff — delivered-catering economics, where the service is the margin.

Growth, read with care

Fast growth in produce is usually a contract moving, not a market being won. DPS (M&S)‘s +53% with staff up 52% is a dedicated vehicle ramping as supply is routed into it — group plumbing, not share gain. Fresh Produce Partners’ doubling to £72.2M with staff up 42% looks like real operational scale-up, but a company doubling at a 1.3% margin has taken on a lot of volume for £905k of profit — a contract win priced to win. Agrovision UK Holdco (+25%, staff +95%, loss-making) reads as an overseas grower building out its UK arm and paying for the build; Family Tree Farms UK is growing 33% while losing 8.9p in the pound — buying shelf presence. The genuine article is rarer: Innes Redmond growing 29% at an 11.5% margin, and Fresh Stream Services compounding 25% with hiring to match. Those two are what profitable growth actually looks like in this trade.

Market structure: the flattest curve we’ve mapped in food

The top five companies hold just 27% of visible turnover — against ~66% in pubs and 38% in road freight. Even the top 20 hold barely half. This is what a genuinely fragmented trade looks like: a thin captive-and-venture layer serving the supermarkets, then a long, deep mid-market of independent importers, packers and regional distributors, none of whom has found a way to consolidate a business where the product lasts five days and the customer holds the pricing power. The supermarkets themselves — the layer that has concentrated — sit on our grocery retail map, and the parallel drinks trade, where consolidation did happen, on the drinks wholesale map.

An old family trade, barely touched by the buyout machine

This is one of the most founder-held maps we’ve drawn: 73 of the 132 companies are individually owned against 51 corporate-owned, and only about 9% carry a Holdings/Bidco/Topco-style name — the fingerprint of private equity — versus mid-teens in trades the buyout funds actually like. A third of the companies predate 1990, and the trade’s history runs deeper than its registrations. But the young cohort punches above its size: the six companies incorporated since 2021 include Melon&Co, already at £80.7M and a 7.3% margin — proof that in a trading business, a new desk with the right supplier relationships can reach the top table in four years.

What the map shows

1. The top of the trade is supermarket infrastructure, not a market. The biggest company is Asda’s own sourcing arm; dedicated ventures and grower groups locked into retailer programmes fill out the top ten.
2. Nobody big keeps even 4p in the pound. The captive IPL tops the giants at 3.9% — under 2% from trading once intra-group dividend and interest income is stripped out; Fyffes keeps 1.2p, G’s 1.3p, Fresh Direct almost nothing. Scale buys volume in produce — the margin passes through to the shelf.
3. Count the staff before the margin. Pack-houses run hundreds of people for low-3% returns; import desks run five to twenty people at £4M–£15M of turnover per head. Same map, different businesses — never compare the two.
4. Shelf life is margin. The best returns sit with the least perishable goods — Premier Fruit & Nut’s ten people trading nuts and dried fruit earn nearer 10p in the pound from trading (13.5% only once interest on the firm’s own investment pot is counted), against 1–3% for anyone handling salad.
5. It’s the flattest concentration curve in our food coverage — top 5 = 27% — and one of the most family-held: 73 of 132 companies individually owned, with private equity largely absent.
6. Growth is mostly contracts moving, not markets won. The rare genuine signal is profitable, hiring-backed growth — Innes Redmond (+29% at 11.5%) and Fresh Stream (+25%, staff +27%) — not the loss-priced doublings above them in the table.

Methodology and caveats

This covers only the 132 UK fruit-and-vegetable wholesalers that publish a full profit-and-loss; the greengrocer, market-stall and small-trader tail publishes no figures and doesn’t appear, so the £13.8bn understates the full trade. A couple of the largest companies are broader grocery businesses (Henderson Wholesale, LDH (La Doria)) whose produce activity is only part of the figure shown. Group structures can overlap — Direct Produce Supplies and its dedicated M&S vehicle both publish accounts, and holding companies (S H Pratt Holdings, Agrovision UK Holdco) consolidate subsidiaries — so combined-turnover totals modestly overstate the distinct-group figure, and different companies report to different year-ends; where a company’s newest accounts arrived as a scanned document our extraction hasn’t processed (AMT Fresh), the row reflects the prior year’s figures. Captive suppliers’ profits reflect transfer pricing set within their groups rather than open-market margins, and pre-tax profit is statutory — it can include non-trading income such as intra-group dividends or interest on a company’s own investments, which we flag in the text where it moves the picture. A handful of overseas-owned filers report in euros or dollars; their figures are converted at prevailing rates for the period. Pack-house, trading-desk and foodservice margins are different economics and are never directly comparable; business descriptions are directional. Figures are approximate — verify against a company’s own accounts before relying on any single number. This is analysis, not financial advice.