Out and ABOUT United
By Andrew Mounsey I was looked after during my visit by Simon Markham, Head of A Visit to
Molasses Liverpool
Out & About is sponsored by B2B Nutrition, suppliers of
www.b2bnutrition.co.uk
There are not many stories which bring together sugar cubes, the Beast from the East, the Titanic, and the International War on Terror, but this is one …
Although the United Molasses name originated in 1926, the company can trace its lineage back to 1910 when a cattle feed importer by the name of Marquis Clayton entered into the liquid bulk business. A year later its first 3,000 tonne capacity molasses tank was built at Victoria Dock in Hull, and in 1912 the first shipment of 1800 tonnes molasses was brought into the dock on the sailing barque, Sunlight. In 1915, the liquid bulk business was incorporated as the British Molasses Company and then in 1921, Pure Cane Molasses was formed to handle all molasses trading, leaving British Molasses Company responsible for shipping. It was five years later that United Molasses Ltd came into existence as a holding company for British Molasses Company and Pure Cane Molasses. To find out about the dynamics which drive the market for
molasses, and to learn more about the latest developments, I travelled to UM’s Regent Road facility in the Port of Liverpool, staying at a Titanic-themed hotel in a converted rum warehouse on the evening before my visit. Liverpool’s first dock, built in 1715, was the world’s first enclosed
commercial dock; more were added and eventually all interconnected by lock gates extending 7 and a half miles along the bank of the River Mersey. The interconnected dock system was the most advanced port system in the world at the time, and both White Star Line and Cunard Line were based there; it was the home port of many great ships including the Titanic. While much has changed and a great deal of the original port area has been converted to other uses, Liverpool remains the UK’s sixth largest by tonnage of freight handled.
PAGE 26 JULY/AUGUST 2018 FEED COMPOUNDER
Molasses GB, for United Molasses. He has been with the company since 1995, originally as Product Development Manager, later as Commercial Manager for the South of the country and eventually taking on responsibility for sales on a national basis. Simon, who is from a farming background, studied agriculture at Wye College and joined UM after a five year spell with Surrey based compounder J & W Attlee, where he was Operations Manager. When Simon arrived at UM, it was under the ownership of Tate &
Lyle which was originally formed in 1921 from the merger of two rival sugar refiners: Henry Tate (whose fortune was used to found the Tate Gallery in London) & Sons and Abram Lyle & Sons. The two men were bitter business rivals during their lifetimes, even though they never met in person, and so the merger did not take place until after they had both died. In 1949 Tate & Lyle launched its ‘Mr Cube’ brand as part of a marketing campaign to help it resist a proposed nationalisation. From the early 1970s British membership of the EEC had threatened the company’s core activity, with quotas imposed by Brussels favouring domestic sugar beet producers over imported cane. As a consequence, it started to diversify into related fields and in July 2010 announced the sale of its sugar refining business to American Sugar Refining. There was, Simon recalls, an interesting few months during which
United Molasses continued to be part of the Tate & Lyle group after it had exited sugar and before UM was sold in December 2010. The new owner was W & R Barnett, a fourth generation family
business with headquarters in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Besides United Molasses, it has other interests in agribusiness including a joint ownership of John Thompson & Sons, the Belfast-based feed compounder, and R&H Hall, supplier of grain and non-grain feed ingredients to the Irish feed industry. The acquisition included what was then all three arms to the United
Molasses business: Trading, covering international procurement for sale in-house or to third parties of molasses and co-products; Storage, covering provision of bulk liquid storage facilities to third party customers in the UK with over 400,000 tonnes of capacity located in Liverpool, Portbury, Dagenham and Hull; and Molasses Marketing, covering local sales and distribution of molasses and co-products in Europe and Asia, where it operates in 12 countries and is the leading marketer and distributor of these products. Subsequently, in 2013, the group acquired Advanced Liquid Feeds, introducing a fourth arm, namely Vegoils Marketing, the procurement and marketing of vegetable oils for use in animal feed in the UK. In 2016, a further two acquisitions followed: Nordische Futterfette Carroux GmbH & Co Handels KG and Nordische Vermogensverwaltung Carroux Group GmbH, molasses and
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