21/08/2026
Hi All,
This post has taken us a few days to write as we've had the hardest week of our lives that we never ever thought would happen. As hard as this is to talk about and put into a few words, we wanted to give you an update on our rapidly evolving situation and where we go from here.
Our factory suffered a devastating fire in the early hours of Sunday morning, which unfortunately resulted in the complete and total loss of our entire manufacturing and contract packing factory. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but we have lost all machines in build, all of our co-packing equipment, and everything that we have worked incredibly hard to build up over the last 32 years.
We are still grieving and it's been unimaginably difficult to get through the last few days, but in contrast to this, the support and love we have received from customers, suppliers, friends, family, and strangers has been beyond heart warming. The list of support is still growing, and there will be a big list of people to thank once we are out the other end of this.
It's still very raw but rather than sitting around in sorrow, our incredible team have shown up every day since Sunday working incredibly hard to keep Premier alive as much as we can. Thanks to that hard work, we have managed to secure a lease on a new property just 20 minutes away from our previous site in Harwich. Given the urgency of the situation, we had no choice but to downsize to a smaller property than before, but we believe this is the best choice to protect the core functions of the business.
We want to reassure engineering customers that servicing for your existing machines will not change. The service engineers have their own stock of spare parts and are continuing to support machines in the field. A lot of our common spare parts are on bonded stock with our suppliers, so there should be minimal disruption for common parts, but assemblies will take some time to build whilst we kit out our new premises.
If you are ordering new machines with us, we will likely be quoting a slightly longer lead time than normal as it is going to take us a few weeks to get up and running again in our new workshop. We also have a backlog of a few previously completed machines to rebuild which were destroyed in the fire.
Ultimately the biggest disruption is going to be within our contract packing operation. We know it's going to take a long time for insurance claims to process and to rebuild the level of equipment we had previously. For now, we will be maintaining a smaller volume of core co-packing work with a few machines that were kindly donated to us by other businesses.
As you can imagine, it's been an absolute whirlwind of emotion this week going from watching your whole working life go up in flames at 3am on Sunday morning, to picking up the keys to a new premises on the Friday (just 6 days later). We know there will be questions to come in due course, but for now we want to focus all of our energy on rebuilding what we can to make sure there is some future for Premier and those of you who put your trust in us over many many years.
We are hopeful we can get back on our feet, and we will be hosting an open day once we are in a position to do so. We have a monumental journey in front of us with a hell of a lot to do in a short space of time, but we want to make this work and hopefully you can continue to support us in any way you can.
Lots of love,
Team Premier
