Faccenda Foods
Faccenda Group is a mulit-million pound business owned by Robin Faccenda. It is the second largest processor of Chicken in the UK.
It handles more than two million birds a week.[1]
It was created over 40 years ago and has an annual turnover of £300m.
In 1986, the Faccenda Group made legal history in the case of Faccenda Chicken vs Fowler. The plaintiffs owned a number of refrigerated vans and operated a mobile service selling frozen chickens to retail shops and catering companies. Fowler, an ex-employee set up in competition with his previous employers and they attempted to prevent him from doing so by raising an action for breach of confidence. The plaintiffs alleged that Fowler was using confidential information in breach of his obligation of confidence by using his knowledge of sales information and customer lists to compete with them.
Goulding J held that information acquire by an employee during the course of employment could be divided into three categories -
1. Information either trivial in nature or available from public sources which could not be regarded as confidential. For example, details of van routes which could be ascertained by following the plaintiffs delivery vehicles would fall within this category.
2. Information which an employee must treat as confidential either because this is expressly communicated to him or because the information is obviously confidential in nature. This information may become part of the employees own skill and knowledge and, if so, can be protected during the continuance of employment but can be used to the employees benefit once they leave. If an employer wishes to protect such information he must do so by express contractual provision usually in the form of a confidentiality clause or restrictive covenant. Price lists and sales information fall into this category.
3. Specific trade secrets so confidential that they cannot lawfully used for anyone's benefit except the original employer notwithstanding that the employee may have learned this information by heart.
It was held that the information used by the defendant fell into the first two categories as it had not been restricted to high-level employees in any way and he could not therefore be prevented from using it. Since Mr Fowler was simply making use of information obtained in the course of his previous employment rather than disclosing it to a third party for gain he escaped liability for breach of confidence.
Twenty illegal Brazilian immigrants were arrested in a raid at the Faccenda chicken factory, in Sutton Benger, in September 2003. Gordon Wilson, who is the treasurer of the Sutton Benger action group, which has been involved in long-running protests against noise and smells from the factory said: "I regularly see people being bussed into the factory and many seem to be of foreign origin, so I'm not exactly surprised at this."
In March 2002, Faccenda was fined £14,000 by Chippenham Magistrates Court when it pleaded guilty to failing in its duty to protect the health and safety of its staff, after a teenage worker lost two fingers in a chicken-skinning machine.
Surgeons amputated 17-year-old Martin Major's little finger and ring finger from his mangled right hand after he reached into the machine to free a stuck chicken carcass in August 2001.
In June 2002 the company was in the spotlight again when it was revealed that the toilet seats had been removed from the gents toilets. It was rumoured that it was done to stop workers spending too much time in the toilets.
Two months later, the Faccenda group was fined £75,000 for polluting the River Avon from its Sutton Benger factory.
It's headquarters are in Brackley, Northamptonshire and other sites are based at Okeford, Telford, Wiltshire and Dudley. The site at Okeford Fitzpaine in Dorset closed on 31st August 2007 with a loss of 120 jobs.
On the 15 April 2008 Faccenda announced the closure of its Sutton Benger plant with the loss of at least 450 jobs, much to the relief of local residents for whom the presence of a chicken processing plant in the middle of their village has long been a source of considerable annoyance.[2]