Northern Foods
food company based in Britain
Northern Foods is a British food manufacturer headquartered in Wakefield, England. It was formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the original FTSE 100 Index. The company is credited, together with Marks & Spencer, with creating the UK Chilled Food category. The driver of this growth was Christopher Haskins, the son-in-law of the company's founder Alec Horsley. Haskins became a director in 1967, deputy chairman in 1974, and was chairman from 1980 to 2002. The company was delisted in 2011 when it was bought by the 2 Sisters company.
History
20th century
The business was founded by Alec Horsley in 1937 as a family-run dairy business based in Holme on Spalding Moor. During the war years, Horsley bought up many competing local dairies to become a major dairy force in the Humber region. In 1942, the business was registered as Northern Dairies and became a public company in 1956. In 1958, Alec's son Nicholas Horsley joined the then Northern Dairies as a trainee manager, becoming a director in 1963.
“Northern Foods” enters the record as food company based in Britain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Northern, Foods and food can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Northern Foods” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Northern, Foods and food provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7058350. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1974, 1980 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Northern Foods” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.