Wrights Food Group – maker of popular Wrights pies – will stage a series of celebratory events throughout 2016 to mark the family-run company’s 90th anniversary.
Founded in 1926, Wrights has gone from John James Wright and his wife Elizabeth selling savoury pies made in their kitchen to friends and neighbours, to a £47m-turnover business employing more than 470 people at state-of-the-art facilities that produce a remarkable 150m-plus products every year.
As well as staff, the company wants customers, its shops, suppliers, and the wider community to join in and help it mark 90 years.
Under the slogan 90 Tasty Years, Wrights has planned a string of events that it hopes will involve as many people as possible whose lives have been touched by the company since its Stoke-on-Trent beginnings.
Chairman and CEO Peter Wright said: “Details will be announced nearer each event, but our staff and the public should expect a variety of exciting, colourful ways in which we’ll be marking this milestone year.
“We want to involve as many people as possible. Wrights is a household name in the Potteries and North Staffordshire, and our products have become a part of the lives of thousands of people, while many more have worked for the company down the years.”
Some details can be revealed now, though: dozens of 90th anniversary hampers are to be handed out to local people celebrating their 90th birthdays in 2016; and to those nominated to receive one by friends, relatives or acquaintances.
The specially produced wooden hampers, filled with a selection of celebratory goodies, including a bottle of Wrights own-label Champagne, will be presented to those people living in and around Staffordshire and Cheshire who nominees feel deserve one, whether for an act of charity, kindness, dedication to a cause, being helpful, or running a club or organisation.
Peter Wright said: “We want to reward local people who’ve made a contribution to the community with a 90 Tasty Years hamper; a ‘Thank you’ for what all sorts of people do all the time to benefit others, often without any recognition.”
To nominate someone for a Wrights 90 Tasty Years hamper, people should email a short nomination to shellie.ball@wrightsfg.com
As well as supplying the likes of pies, sausage rolls, savouries, sandwiches and cakes to its 19 shops across the Potteries and North Staffordshire, Wrights also develops and makes a wide range of products for customers including independent bakers, supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurants, pubs, and the foodservice industry.
And still at the heart of the product range, after 90 years, is founder John James Wright’s meat and potato pie, which features the same 11 ‘store cupboard’ ingredients it was created with in 1926.