‘Chicken King’ with a plan for UK food chain
Ranjit Singh Boparan is standing in the middle of one of the food aisles in the M&S store in the Birmingham Bullring.
He has grabbed a pack of M&S Collection 8 Hours Slow Cooked Black Dal off the shelf. “There is a lot of debate about homemade versus shop curry.
This matches homemade,” he boasts as he waves the packet in the air.
Boparan was nicknamed the “Chicken King” in the 2000s, but a few minutes in the food aisle of M&S reveals the true breadth of his 2 Sisters Food Group today. The media, which Boparan has usually shunned throughout his career, will have to find a new sobriquet.
Pizzas, produced in a custom-built, 12-metre, £6.6 million wood fired oven in Nottingham, hot cross buns and Boparan’s favourite sweet and sour chicken, not to mention the entire fresh chicken aisle. It is easier to find the food not supplied by Boparan in M&S than to pick out everything that is.
The black dal is one of the items produced in the 2 Sisters Food Group factory in Rogerstone, Gwent, which after a £7.5 million investment last year now produces 1.7 million ready meals a week exclusively for M&S including Chinese, Thai, Indian and British classics.
When Boparan acquired the factory as part of a wider deal with rival Premier Foods in 2011 it was producing 900,000 meals.
The entrepreneur, who now owns and runs one of the UK’s largest private companies, has a similar tale to tell about the former Fox’s biscuit factory in Elkes, Uttoxeter, which he also acquired in 2011.
The site looked set to close in 2021 until Boparan persuaded Stuart Machin, M&S’s chief executive, and Alex Freudmann, head of M&S food, to partner with him the following year to produce a new range of own-label biscuits while on a tour of the factory.
“It is up to M&S to push us and us to push M&S,” says Boparan, who insists on describing M&S as a partner, rather than a customer.
This is very different from the frozen poultry cutting operation that Boparan, who left school at 16 to become a butcher, founded in West Bromwich in 1993. He has since built a family fortune of more than £1 billion, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
The 2 Sisters group now employs more than 15,000 people across 24 sites in the UK and Europe. Other customers include Aldi, Asda, Co-op, KFC, Lidl, Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose. Turnover topped £3 billion in 2025 and operating profit rose to £101.3 million.
The family’s private office business employs a further 10,000, many of them in hatcheries, feed mills and farms as well as restaurants.
Ten years after a string of acquisitions that transformed 2 Sisters — but also took it to the brink of collapse as interest rates rose and lenders lost confidence — Boparan is laying out a plan to invest more than £1.75 billion in the business. He has dubbed the plan “NextGen”.
“We spent £2 billion on acquisitions in the last 15 years, now we are going to spend £1.75 billion on investment,” he explained.
The plan is driven by Boparan’s belief that the food system isn’t working for people or the planet.
“The next generation of consumers will be more savvy about what they eat, where it comes from, how it’s made and how it was treated.”
On welfare, 2 Sisters birds already have 20 per cent more space and the group is on track to be the biggest provider of higher-welfare poultry in the UK within the next two years.
Having developed a new diet for chickens, which replaces about 20 per cent of the usual South American soya feed with UK-grown peas and beans, Boparan is confident that the group will be able to claim early next year that its chickens are raised on a diet that does not cause deforestation (and in the process support UK farmers).
He is also investing in automation. A new £100 million factory in Coupar Angus, Perthshire, will have capacity to process 1.4 million birds a week thanks to a state of the art food processing fa- cility that incorporates AI and robotics.
That is almost double the capacity of the existing factory.
This confidence is a far cry from 2018, when ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the company’s debt into junk territory. The group’s debt traded for as little as 50p in the pound at the time.
Leverage was then more than seven times earnings. By the end of this year it will fall below two and debt now trades at a premium, 105p in the pound.
The acquisition spree began with a deal to buy Northern Foods in January 2011. “It was badly run, sleepy and corporate, but it had good products and a great customer in M&S,” says Boparan.
“It had forgotten about colleagues and forgotten about its customers.”
Later that year he bought RF Brookes, a chilled food and bakery business, from Premier Foods. Two years later came Vion’s UK poultry and red meat businesses, and in 2016 a deal to buy Bernard Matthews.
So did he do one too many deals? Was the group over indebted? “When you buy a broken business it takes you three years to turn it around. I bought four consecutively,” he says.
“But you can’t time when a business is going to come up for sale. Did I buy more than I could chew? I don’t know. We’ve got through.”
“Some days were pretty tough days,” he concedes. But he quickly adds: “I don’t do regrets, because it just eats you up.”
Boparan would like to be recognised as a turnaround specialist rather than a dealmaker. He takes pride in the number of jobs, 15,000, that he believes he has saved. And he stresses that all of the acquisitions fitted into a longer term plan for the group. Buy, fix, sell and reduce debt, is the mantra. “Eighty five per cent of what I bought have all been turnarounds, in some shape or form,” he said.
And as the business has grown he insists that his management style has changed. “I’ve learnt to stand on the sideline and manage the team.”
It is an impressive team that includes Trevor Strain, the former finance director of Morrisons, along with former senior executives from M&S, Tesco and Sainsbury. “I say, it’s your business, you run it. I’m here to challenge it and support it. But if you get into trouble ... I’m available. Come and ask me and I’ll help you if I can or I’ll get someone who hopefully knows.”
His longstanding chief of staff, who has worked with Boparan since 1997, is charged with making sure his diary includes at least ten hours a week of thinking time and he no longer visits factories every week. “I’ve stopped doing that ... They know you are coming and you get the red carpet. They will waste a day preparing. I really don’t want that.”
Richard Pennycook, the former chief executive of the Co-op, chairs the 2 Sisters holding business. “You have an entrepreneur sitting at the top with a chairman who tries to keep me in order,” says Boparan.
So what is his advice to entrepreneurs starting out now? “Think big, act small and protect your reputation.”
But the key to the group’s success, argues Boparan, is what he describes as the “brilliant basics”. “Brilliant basics are boring. But boring is good. Keep doing it every day. Every hour.
“Everybody wants to do someone else’s job. But they don’t want to do their own. Do your brilliant basics. Once you’ve done your brilliant basics you can do other things.”
So at 59, how much longer will he keep doing his brilliant and boring basics? “The day I get out of bed in the morning and I don’t want to go to work. I will stop. I enjoy what I do. It is a bit like you’re blessed. It’s a bit like a professional athlete who can continue doing what they do and get paid for it.”
