In Northern Ireland, the Linwoods brand was for most of its history best known as a bread and milk producer and wholesaler but, amid changing economic fortunes and increased competition from multinationals, the family-owned company began to struggle. In the two years before the Covid pandemic hit, things got to the point where the Woods family made the difficult decision to lay off two-thirds of its employees, 160 staff.
“My father always says ‘evolve or die’,” says Patrick Woods, who is managing director of Linwoods, having taken over the business from his father John three years ago. “He talks about the number of businesses in Armagh that are no longer there, because they didn’t evolve and they didn’t change.”
Eager not to join that group, Linwoods has evolved into one of the largest health food companies in Ireland, with distribution links with big retailers across the UK.
The company began as a family shop and small-scale egg wholesaling business back in 1965. When John’s father, the founder, died, the business was taken over by John’s oldest sister Genevieve, who was then aged 17. Three years later, John left school and went straight into the family company. “At 21, he took over the running of the business along with his siblings,” says Woods.
John had “always seen himself as destined to be the leader of the business” and eventually bought out his siblings to control and own it exclusively.
The family business had its corporate hand in many economic pies, from agricultural construction and international transportation to growing mushrooms. The company even secured a licence to import turf from Bord na Móna in Northern Ireland.
But it was when the business ventured into baked and dairy goods wholesaling that it really took off.
“In 1980, he started importing bread into Northern Ireland and began wholesaling bakery products around 1,000 small convenience stores, before doing the same with milk. He had a fleet of trucks on the roads every morning,” says Woods, recalling his own experiences as part of that convoy on Saturday mornings as a teenager. “There were a lot of life lessons learned by getting out and meeting our customers,” he reflects. “It was a great way of seeing the countryside too.”
It wasn’t all rosy, however, from being hounded out the door for 3am starts on mornings so cold that running milk turned into icicles (“not a particularly fond memory”) to spending one summer travelling to every shop they supplied in order to “document every fridge we had in every shop in Northern Ireland”.
“We were so involved in the business as kids, we really grew up immersed in it,” says Woods. He recollects working in the shop after hours and spending mornings before school and weekends helping to sort bread deliveries from the Old Mill bakery in Dublin.
Woods stayed involved in the business throughout his school years. In 1996, Linwoods built its first manufacturing plant, a bakery. Six years later, the family business expanded into processing liquid milk. It was during this period that his father ventured into health foods. Initially it was a very small part of the business, dwarfed by the core business sectors.
For most of the next decade, “the business continued to grow. peaking in 2010 or 2011 with about 250 employees and an annual turnover of £36 million. It was a considerable business”, says Woods.
Linwoods had its own eponymous milk brand which was sold in Northern Ireland, but it is a space Woods says is “very hard to differentiate yourself within”.
During the Troubles, before the arrival of the large retail chains into the market, Linwoods was selling to “around 80 per cent” of convenience stores in Northern Ireland. “Then the multiples came in.”
The arrival of retail chains resulted in fewer convenience stores and Linwoods’ share of the dairy market shrank. “You would still have good years, but you would have bad years with milk, and then milk prices went up, you lost money ... We had a business of considerable size, but it had very tight and very fine margins.”
Profitability began to decline steadily until, in 2016, Linwood’s bread and milk operation was no longer turning a profit. “We had to make the very difficult decision to divest out of bakery and dairy,” says Woods. “We sold whatever elements of the business we could.”
A lot of the people who were impacted I have sat on football committees with or I played football with their sons, or I’m friends with their family members. That was very difficult time for everyone involved
— Patrick Woods
The company initially closed down its milk production plant in 2018, with a loss of 100 employees. The bakery was left to “stand on its own feet” for just over a year, but it too was closed, its lack of long-term viability becoming increasingly clear to the company.
While it was a “very easy decision” based on the balance sheets, management had tried to resist the inevitable for several years. It was only when his father saw that there was “no light at the end of the tunnel” that he was willing to close the division, says Woods. “Ultimately, we ended up having to make about 170 of our team redundant. That was a very challenging time.”
It wasn’t just challenging for the business or for those the company employed. It was also challenging for the Woods family.
“A lot of the people who were impacted I have sat on football committees with or I played football with their sons, or I’m friends with their family members,” says Woods, noting that many had worked for the business since they had left school. “That was very difficult time for everyone involved.”
During the stress of two rounds of lay-offs, Woods, who suffers with alopecia, says his hair fell out twice.
It took a couple of years for the company to “get over the trauma” of the reset. After paying out enhanced redundancy packages to its staff, the business was cut back to a “much leaner, smaller, more manageable” and self-supporting level; about 80 employees.
Health food business
The one bright spot during those tumultuous times was Linwoods’ health food business. It had seen impressive growth, with annual revenue rising to £9 million coupled with healthy margins. While that amounted to less than a third of the company’s overall turnover, the division was “essentially supporting the bakery and dairy business”.
John Woods had opened the business following a heart bypass in 1994 which gave him a renewed perspective on the importance of diet to health, but it was his son who ended up on the health foods factory floor.
Sorting through product and filling bags by hand, Patrick Woods saw the business “grow from scratch” from a single-unit business to the future of the family enterprise. He eventually graduated from the factory floor to managing the brand’s health food sales.
The health food division showed “strong growth” through its early years. Unlike bread and dairy, it was easy to build a brand and to secure enough of a margin to reinvest to fuel growth. Woods credits his father with having the “foresight” to invest in the Linwoods brand by hiring a marketing adviser which was “instrumental in shaping the early brand structure and strategy”.
In the last financial year, we grew 20 per cent year-on-year growth to about £15.5 million in turnover. Focusing on the last 52 weeks, we are 25 per cent up on the previous period
— Patrick Woods
Initially, the company brought in milled seed from Canada, eventually building its own milling and pasteurising facilities in 2005, but retaining its North American relationships.
Linwoods secured its first listings in stand-alone health food stores in Northern Ireland and the Republic. Its big break came with a listing in Holland & Barrett.
“Holland & Barrett were probably our first big retailer. At that point we started to realise that there was something in this, there is a real business here,” says Woods.
Celebrations echoed down the halls of the Linwoods office when orders from speciality stores such as Holland & Barrett and Nourish came in. “Those were heady days when the business was building up from very humble beginnings.”
Once its products proved a commercial success in speciality stores, orders began to come through from big supermarket chains: “First Dunnes approached us for the Republic of Ireland, then we got SuperValu.”
The Republic was the first market in which the company secured listings with grocery retailers and it remains core to its business today. With that success to point to, Linwoods got listings in the UK.
“We got Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and, eventually, Tesco as well. The business was growing, going from strength to strength and showing a margin that was far above what we could have achieved in bread and milk.”
Making the difficult decision to part with the production operations in its more traditional businesses allowed the health food business to thrive and be more competitive.
“Ultimately, none of our competitors in the health food space were subsidising other parts of their business so they were able to reinvest and grow,” says Woods.
Linwoods is now considered a “heritage brand” in the health foods space by the “newer, trendy brands” comings into the space and is seeing consistent growth.
“In the last financial year, we grew 20 per cent year-on-year growth to about £15.5 million in turnover. Focusing on the last 52 weeks, we are 25 per cent up on the previous period,” says Woods.
Headline growth statistics such as these give the business “confidence going forward to continue to push and grow the business further. There is definitely a growing interest and demand in the space,” he says.
Woods says retailers in the Republic are ahead of retailers in the UK “from a health food perspective”, with defined sections for those products in SuperValu, Dunnes and Tesco Ireland. In the UK, their products sit in the home baking section. Despite this, the UK is Linwoods’ biggest market.
To fuel further growth, Linwoods acquired Waterford-based health food company Chia Bia in 2020. “They were a brand we always admired. We were primarily focused on flax and they were focused on chia seed to it felt like a good fit for our business.”
Chia Bia will be kept as a stand-alone brand to take advantage of its “great name”. Linwoods is not anticipating further acquisitions in the near future but would consider one that would help the company develop its reach in different geographical markets.
Woods took over the reins of the business in 2022 after sharing the running of the company for a number of years with his father who, at 83, remains involved. Woods admits he was “probably straining on the leash” before getting control of the company but says, in retrospect, that the timing was ideal.
“People say I am slowly turning into him, maybe faster than I would like,” he says.
Since taking the helm, he has focused on decreasing the company’s carbon footprint, including planting 6,000 trees on the old farm beside its production plant in a biodiversity renewal project. He has also diversified the company’s offerings and expanded its market reach into Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands.
Linwoods has also expanded into the breakfast product market, seeing it as the meal around which consumers are most health conscious.
“We did not want to just make another granola or meusli; there are hundreds of them out there already,” says Woods. Instead Linwoods launched an overnight oats range.
The company doesn’t see itself competing with other big oats companies, such as Flahavans. Instead, it is targeting a younger audience in which 33 per cent of Gen Z consume overnight oats as part of a wider generational focus on health.
Having looked to the success of protein products and powders, it has and included protein offerings in its range in an effort to “straddle the line between core breakfast and sports supplement, to tick both boxes”.
“First we evolved from bakery dairy into health foods. We have evolved into overnight oats now.”
The product is listed in 1,600 stores in Ireland and Britain, after initially establishing consumer interest by launching as an online-only offering. The company sees significant growth potential in the product category, expecting it to drive the business beyond £18 million in revenue; it is hoping, in short, that its new offering will be an “overnight” success.
CV
Name: Patrick Woods
Age: 38
Title: Managing director
Family: Married to Laura, with two children – Aoife (6) and Ruairi (2)
Hobbies: A passionate GAA fan, not getting to compete in the Sigerson Cup is his only regret about not attending college
Something you might expect: He is very health focused: “I’m into fitness and running, you’d definitely expect that.”
Something that might surprise: He is big into “rave music”, such as Swedish House Mafia and David Guetta.
