A Yorkshire court has ordered a schools food supplier to pay costs and damages of over £6,000 for “bread basket abuse”.
Bakers Basco also succeeded in winning a restraining injunction against the supplier, Gilmoor Foods, to stop the company using its bread baskets for the storage and transportation of its meat products.
Steve Millward, general manager of Bakers Basco - which was set up by five of the UK’s leading plant bakers 10 years ago to buy, manage and police the use of a standard basket - said its recovery team tracked “a sizeable amount” of its baskets to Gilmoor Foods using GPS technology.
Gilmoor’s owner Brian Fawcett told The Grocer after the case, heard on 27 January at Skipton County Court that his company did not “go around nicking baskets” and accused Bakers Basco of “just going for the small people. We’re just a little company in the sticks.” : “The people who deliver the bread aren’t anything to do with Basco Bakers, they never pick them up… so our drivers used them. When you have 200-300 trays here at a time, it’s natural people pick them up.”. We thought it’s not worth fighting it so we paid a settlement of £1,000 last year.”
Fawcett said he had now taken action to ensure the problem did not reoccur and gets bread delivered to a different area.
Bakers Basco says bread trays and equipment worth several million pounds are misappropriated and converted by third parties every year who have no contractual relationship with the bread manufacturers.
It uses S3 Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977 to seek damages and seeks injunctions in cases of “repeated offenders”.
It has initiated more than 250 court actions seeking damages and has secured about 20 injunctions to protect its equipment
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