Last updated 11:24, Monday, 01 December 2008

Late one night in 1762, John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, was busy playing cards. Sarah Laurie is grateful for that. Sarah is manager of The Sandwich Mill on Shaddongate, Carlisle, and business is booming.

• View more pictures...

Calder Foods: Expanding its sandwich-making empire

The earl was hungry but he did not want eating to disturb his gambling.

He needed something tasty, filling and quick.

A servant was dispatched to bring back some roast beef between two slices of bread.

And so the sandwich was born. Now, 246 years later, hundreds of millions are sold in Britain every year.

The fillings for many of these are made by a Cumbrian firm which is defying the recession by extending its premises and preparing to double its workforce.

Calder Foods is one of the county’s most successful companies, employing 100 people and hoping to take on another 100 in the next 12 to 18 months.

Even if a credit crunch is beginning to bite, it hasn’t stopped us biting into sandwiches.

Calder is doing so well that it has just built a £2.5 million extension to its factory at Burgh Road Industrial Estate in Carlisle.

While other firms fear for their future, bosses at Calder are currently concerned with keeping up with their bulging order book.

The firm began life in 1991 – in the back of a van. Its founders, Paul Barker and Nigel Harrison, sold their cars and used the money to buy a Transit van from which they sold sandwiches made by another firm.

Six years later they began to make their own fillings from small premises in Harraby Green Business Park.

The business grew rapidly. Calder began supplying hospitals and schools in Lancashire and Cheshire.

By 2002 it had outgrown its premises and moved to Burgh Road. It also opened a depot in Birmingham, allowing it to do business in the Midlands and south of England.

Calder now makes sandwich fillings for many major retailers including Harvey Nichols, O’Briens and Spar as well as supplying Cumbria’s secondary schools and schools and hospitals further afield.

It seems people are still buying sandwiches, even in these economically troubled times.

“Pretty recession-proof” is a bold claim to be making right now but Jim Winchip, director of the British Sandwich Association, has 246 years of history on his side.

“The industry seems to be doing all right,” he told the News & Star. “Things haven’t really changed that much with the recession.”

What about all those people who are saving money by making sandwiches at home?

“There’s going to be an element of that but there’s a bit more to it. Some people who would have gone to a restaurant for lunch are now buying sandwiches instead.

“And those who do make their own sandwiches at home don’t tend to do it for very long because they get bored. People tend to use whatever’s in the fridge and they can’t face doing that every day.”

“It’s picked up quite a bit,” she said. “The best sellers are the more expensive fillings, like chicken and bacon and crab and prawn.”

But selling sandwiches is not quite a licence to print money. Many sandwich shops come and go quickly. Just down the road from The Sandwich Mill, Munchies has closed down in the past couple of weeks.

And closer examination suggests that the future of the traditional sandwich may not be quite as rosy as statistics suggest.

About 2.8 billion sandwiches are sold in Britain every year. But the industry definition of “sandwich” also includes newcomers such as baguettes and wraps.

Sarah Laurie confirms that baguettes are easily her most popular product, accounting for more than half The Sandwich Mill’s sales.

Rolls are the next most popular item. “We never get asked for sandwiches,” says Sarah.

Her claim was borne out during a busy lunchtime. Orders included a jacket potato with pepperoni and jalapeno pepper.

Kieren Bell, 16, was buying a chicken and sweetcorn baguette. He sometimes has a jacket potato, but never a sandwich. John Harrison, 18, is a chicken wrap man.

None of this need concern Calder Foods, whose products are used in far more items than the dictionary definition of a sandwich, but it may alarm traditionalists.

Sadly for them, the sandwich world is a fast-evolving place. “It’s a very innovative market,” insists Jim Winchip. “Wraps suddenly emerged about five years ago and there is a constant flow of new recipes,”

Chicken is the most popular ingredient for shop-bought sandwiches, baguettes and wraps. Mr Winchip has not peered inside the nation’s fridges but he suspects that cheese is found most often in homemade sarnies.

But can the shop-bought sandwich survive against the onslaught of baguettes, rolls, wraps, and even more modern rivals such as sushi and salad boxes?

The fourth Earl of Sandwich, gambler that he was, would surely have bet on the sandwich’s survival. His creation long outlasted him and it has continued to satisfy men, women and children – and hungry earls – since 1762.

SANDWICH BOX

n The UK commercial sandwich market employs 330,000 people and is worth £4.6 billion a year. The commercial definition of sandwich also includes baguettes, rolls and wraps.

n About 2.8 billion sandwiches are sold in shops every year and another 2.7 billion are made at home and taken to work or school.

n A further six billion are made at home and eaten there.

n On average each of us eats about 200 sandwiches per year.

n The most popular fillings are chicken, cheese, ham, egg and fish.

n Men buy 58 per cent of all sandwiches sold. The biggest sandwich-buying age group is 25 to 44-year-olds, who buy more than half of them.

n Over-55s account for a third of the population but buy only 13 per cent of the sandwiches sold.

n About 178,000 tons of bread are used in the sandwiches sold every year.