USA – Quorn Foods, an international food business, has announced a 12% sales growth in its H1 2018 results, with like-for-like sales totalling US$147.4 million for the first six months of the year.

According to the company, this growth builds on Quorn Foods’ strongest ever year of growth in 2017, and sees the company stay on track to become a billion dollar business by 2027.

Quorn Foods Core to Quorn Foods’ growth strategy is ongoing investment in innovation and technological capability, to which it is proud to announce a further US$9.22 million investment in a new Global Innovation Centre at its headquarters in the North East.

This will create a high tech British powerhouse and maintaining Quorn’s innovation leadership in the meat-free industry.

This high tech facility will break ground at the end of this summer, and enhance capability in both core protein fermentation, the heart of the Quorn Foods’ success, and innovation capability to develop new and better products.

The company added that it has already created over 100 jobs in the last year as it expands and expects to continue job creation, particularly in the STEM area as it brings the new facilities on line.

There is a clear global trend towards meat alternatives as consumers grow concerned about the health and environmental issues associated with excessive meat consumption.

Around the world the meat-free category is growing rapidly, typically between 10% and 20%, and even a developed market like the UK is up 15%

“With category momentum we are confident we can become a US$1bn business in under 10 years”, said Quorn Foods Chief Executive Kevin Brennan.

“We are seeing lots of Silicon Valley investment and hype in this space but we have already built up 30 years of expertise in the meat-free category.

With our renewed investment in R&D we expect to lead the way for decades to come.

We hope to demonstrate that there are great British businesses in the North that can win on a global stage.

We are already seeing amazing growth internationally: Australian sales are up 50% and US sales are up 23%.

In the US supermarket giant Kroger, we now have the fastest selling product in the category.

With continued investment we believe we can continue this level of performance.”