Palethorpes
Palethorpe's is a British producer of cooked meat and pastry products and was particularly well known for its branded sausages. Founded in 1852, it was bought by the Bibby Group in 1969 and then by Haverhill Meat Products (a J Sainsbury and Canada Packers joint venture) before becoming part of the Northern Foods Chilled Foods division in 1991. Palethorpes was then part of Pork Farms before being taken over by the Addo Food Group (now the Compleat Food Group since 2021) in turn owned by PAI Partners. History Henry Palethorpe was born in 1829 in the Black Country. Setting up business as a butcher in Birmingham in the 1850s, he realised that the United States was flooding the United Kingdom market with cheap bacon and pork. Palethorpe decided to move into value-added meat processing products, specialising in sausages, with which he had success. The company moved to Tipton in 1896, claiming at the time to be the world's largest sausage producer. The company expanded during World War I, supplying canned meat products to the British Army. However, it lost market share during and after World War II, with restrictions on meat sales due to the amount of meat that was