While many businesses have struggled to operate during the recent wintry weather, one Lincolnshire business bucked the trend and recorded its busiest ever week (10 - 16 January 2010) outside Christmas.

Figures released today by Branston Ltd, the UK's leading supplier of potatoes, show that demand from customers, including Tesco, increased dramatically during the arctic conditions. Although its sites in Lincolnshire, Scotland and Somerset were struggling to deal with the effects of snow and ice they managed to step up production to meet the increase in demand. 

Staff at all Branston's sites, and hauliers alike, have been praised for their outstanding efforts. Close co-ordination between the sites, working longer hours and manning extra shifts in the factories enabled the team to rise to the challenge of preparing, packing and despatching over 300 lorry loads of fresh potatoes.

"The second week in January was a real challenge but our team rose to the occasion and we managed to deliver more packs than during Christmas week. Christmas is normally our busiest period and we spend weeks planning and building up to it. This surge in demand was very sudden, but we all rallied round to deal with it," said Managing Director Graeme Beattie. "We've always said that we'll go the extra mile for our customers when we need to and last week we stayed true to our word. It was a fantastic effort by everyone here at Branston."

Output between 10 and 16 January was over a third higher than the same period last year, with a total of 6,200 tonnes (over 3.7 million packs) of potatoes produced between Branston's three sites.

The company has some way to go to beat its busiest ever week, which was just before Christmas 2006 when Branston delivered 8,284 tonnes of potatoes (equivalent to 3,313,600 2.5kg bags or 436 lorry loads).