Crawshaws: 354 jobs gone and hundreds more at risk as butcher chain goes under

Yorkshire butcher shop chain Crawshaw Group plc has fallen into administration with the loss of hundreds of jobs.

The fresh meat and food-to-go retailer, headquartered in Rotherham, has this morning (November 5) confirmed plans to make 354 staff redundant.

Hunter Kelly and Charles King from the restructuring team at professional services giant EY are joint administrators for the company.

Crawshaw and its subsidiaries operate 54 stores across the North of England. The firm’s Derby shop saw the most jobs lost, with 16 redundancies. At Crawshaw’s processing and distribution centre in Hellaby, 11 employees are being made redundant.

EY’s Hunter Kelly said: “Crawshaw has not been immune to the well documented issues on the high street, which has resulted in a number of stores becoming loss making.

“Despite the new management team’s best efforts, it was not possible to raise additional investment to restructure the business by reducing the number of high street stores and expanding its successful factory shop format and instore SPAR butchery offering.”

Hunter continued: “As a result the Group would have run out of cash due to the loss making high street stores and therefore administration was necessary.

EY’s Hunter Kelly (pictured) is joint administrator alongside Charles King

“Crawshaw’s out of town factory store format has proved to be successful and we are hopeful that a purchaser can be found who can take forward management’s plan for these profitable stores.”

Speaking further, Hunter explained that the business continues to trade “19 profitable stores” and the Hellaby head office “as normal”, adding: “[We] would encourage interested parties to come forward.

“Unfortunately it was necessary to immediately close 35 stores in mainly high street locations that were no longer viable, which resulted in 354 redundancies.”

The joint administrators now hope to conclude a sale and preserve the remaining 261 jobs.

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