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The
Hale Trent cake group, once the fifth
largest in the UK packaged cake market,
were acquired in April 1974 when Lyons
bought the entire share capital of
Hale-Trent (Holdings) Limited from Fitch
Lovell. Hale-Trent consisted of two cake
companies, Hale-Trent Cakes Ltd with a
head office and factory in Clevedon,
Somerset, and the Far Famed Cake Company
Ltd based at Poplar, east London. The Far
Famed Cake Company had been started in
1881 and became part of Fitch Lovell in
1950. About 320 people worked in the
London factory producing almost 25 per
cent of Hale's total sales. The output
went straight into the Hale's distribution
system apart from the own-label products
for F. W. Woolworth.
The Clevedon factory with a workforce of approximately 900
manufactured a range of cakes similar in
some respects to those of Lyons Bakery.
They included Swiss rolls, crunch cakes,
eclairs, Battenberg, fruit pies, jam tarts
and their biggest seller line, Grannie's
cake, a fruit cake with a home-made
appearance. Distribution was by feeder
vehicles direct to the sales vans, the
product being off-loaded from one to the
other at pre-arranged times and transfer
points. The cakes were sold over a wide
area of England and Wales but not in
Scotland. The sales force numbered about
280 which satisfied 200 journeys.
The Hales business, acquired by Fitch Lovell in the middle of
the Second World War, was started in
Clevedon in 1926 by Frank Hale who, it is
said, baked his first cakes (Hales
Farmhouse Cake) in the kitchen of his
home. He began production under the name
Farmhouse in Old, Clevedon, Somerset. By
1932 the business had grown enough to be
formed into a limited company and Hale's
Home Bakery (Cleveland) Ltd was formed. By
the mid-1930s the business was employing
200 and sales depots had been opened in
Swindon and Southampton. In 1938 the
business was sufficiently profitable to
justify the purchase of a Swiss roll
production line, only the second in the
country, the first had been producing
prodigious quantities of Swiss roll at
Lyons' Cadby Hall factory many years
earlier. In the 1940s shortly before he
died, Frank Hale sold a majority interest
in his business to the food wholesaling
group Fitch & Son. Fitch already had
the John Trent cake business in East
London and in 1962 the two companies
merged to form Hale-Trent Cakes. At that
time Hale-Trent had a work-force of 1,330
producing 600 tons of cake a week which
was sold all over England and in most
parts of Wales. Product included Swiss
rolls, crunch cakes, eclairs, Battenberg,
fruit pies, jam tarts, Maderia cake, cup
cakes, Neopolitan slice and the biggest
seller, Grannies Cake, a fruit cake with a
home-made look which was not too different
from the cake on which Frank Hale had
founded his business. They introduced a
method of distribution by dispensing with
depots completely and used public car
parks and lorry drive-ins where large
lorries would unload product from the
factory to smaller local delivery
vehicles. Lyons acquired the business in
1974, along with the Far Famed Cake
Company, which had been owned by Fitch
since 1950. In 1985 Hale-Trent's sales,
marketing and distribution functions were
merged with those of Lyons Bakery Ltd and
the whole business integrated with Lyons
Bakery the following year. Two years later
the Hale-Trent factory at Clevedon was
closed and production moved to Carlton and
Wakefield.
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