Combining health and convenience with a premium product has tripled sales to almost £20m, says Alex Faulkner, operations manager of Daniels Chilled Foods' fresh fruit arm Our parent company is better-known for its New Covent Garden Company range of soups, risottos and porridge, but since we moved to a purpose-built 30,000 sq ft factory in Leeds in August 2004, the salads side has stolen the headlines. We have invested in staff training rather than mechanisation and produce mixed or single fruit pots for all the major retailers entirely by hand. Consumers can tell the difference between hand-cut and machine-cut fruit, which can also have a different shelf life. People produce the cleanest cuts, and a machine can't distinguish between a good and bad piece of fruit, so people provide higher quality control. Fruit salad is sold on its appearance and we sell it in transparent packaging so that customers can see it has been cut properly. We use many different types of fruit from the UK and around the world in our mixed-fruit combinations, which sell chilled in 160g to 400g pots and have a shelf life of two to four days. We offer every fruit that you can buy in the supermarket, but make sure it is of premium quality and don't use anything to preserve or alter it. Our 380 workers prepare 150 tonnes of fresh fruit a week in the peak summer season. That means labour costs are higher than for some of our competitors, but efficiency can be achieved by good management. Happy members of staff are more productive - our turnover is less than 3%. Market growth in fresh fruit salad is phenomenal. More than 600,000 households joined the market last year alone. Growth in prepared fruit salads is similar to that of bagged salads 20 years ago, when you had to buy a whole lettuce and prepare it yourself. We are seeing fruit experience exactly the same stratospheric growth, and in the next two years we will be building another fruit factory. New product development takes the shape of new fruits, new varieties of existing fruits and new packaging formats. We have a dedicated on-site team who have a customised development kitchen, and we meet daily to benchmark our products against competitors. Mango is becoming an essential component, and there is huge growth in superfruits, with more blueberries and pomegranates being used in products than ever before. The healthy food drive isn't a fad. There is so much bad press about excessive, indulgent eating that fruit consumption is definitely here to stay.

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