PPS East Celebrates its 25th Birthday.

How the times have changed from when Great Grimsby was a major fishing port, and the filleting of the fish was done outside on the North Wall in all the elements. The packaging of the fish has also moved-on as well…

We’ve seen fish boxes evolve from when merchants packed their catch into wooden boxes, and secured the lids with nails, and then it moved onto single-use expanded polystyrene boxes for when the chilled supply chain was unpredictable, and now a shift back to returnable plastic boxes has started to happen apace.
PPS East now in its 25th year, was originally named TFA Box Company. It has grown from the early days of cleaning fish boxes outside by hand, to the present day of supplying returnable packaging to all food manufacturing businesses from a BRC accredited wash facility.

In the beginning TFA Box Company was just an idea of Icelandic fish selling agency, Fylkir. At the time it was known that fish box hire prices had doubled in price, so the directors of Fylkir put their ‘cod-heads’ together and decided to buy their own box supply to use for Icelandic fish landings on the Grimsby auction. This idea was initially only for Icelandic fish, but as time went by, more and more Non-Icelandic fish selling agents began to use their box services.

Now having their ‘fish-fingers’ in a new type of pie, the co-owners Peter Davey and Ron Woods began to realise this could be a good business partnership, and by 1998 Ron had sold his shares to Quayside Distribution a local fish haulier. They then moved the wash process onto the Grimsby fish auction, where new machinery was bought for the cleaning of the boxes. TFA was then turning over £200,000 per annum, and ‘haddock’ bright future.

In 2002, Quayside’s then co-owner, Steve Moore, sold his shares within the transport company, and part of that deal was the acquisition of the 50% shareholding of TFA Box Company. At this time there were four other fish box rental businesses in the Humber region, but TFA progressed quickly eventually gaining 98% of the available market, and reached a turnover of £1.5 million.

Having taken over most of the fish box rental work in the area, TFA out-grew their facility and moved premises to the Old Pontoon – where trawlers then landed their catch. This is where the business stayed until 2009.

Being solely a fish box business, and having already taken the majority of the work on the Humber banks, TFA needed to look at other opportunities. This is when alternative investment was offered by PPS, a company who already had a wash and rental business in the Midlands of the UK, but predominately supplied crates for meat and other food types.

The two companies had many things in common, but both brought areas of expertise, therefore a natural progression occurred in combining the two. Peter Davey and Steve Moore are still actively involved with the business today and together with PPS’s new dynamic team instigated the opening of a new wash site away from the dock area, which would continue to service the fish industry and Grimsby fish market with all types of plastic containers, but to also reach out to other food manufacturing businesses in Lincolnshire to supply and clean returnable transit equipment helping to reduce packaging waste.

The past 25 years have seen an industry change and evolve, and PPS is making sure that they are always well ‘plaiced’ to move with the times!