Snowbird foods has taken a huge step in the sausage manufacturing industry by offering UK customers a guarantee that its fully cooked and frozen sausages are in natural casings sourced from British abattoirs and processed in the UK.

The company is using the casings for its Gourmet and Gourmet Plus ranges of top quality sausages.

The switch to British natural casings follows an earlier move in which the company had upgraded the products by exclusively purchasing pig meat from a single source and from carefully selected breeds of pig which delivered the best meat for making sausages.

Both ranges are multi-award winners, with Gourmet Sausages containing a minimum of 75% meat and Gourmet Plus more than 90%.

“Following our move to procure British pig meat from our choice of breeds we spent time and effort seeking natural casings so we could happily boast we have gone the whole hog,” said Snowbird Joint Managing Director, Philip Paul.

That upgrade to natural British casings was made possible by Yorkshire company Harder Bros. which had acquired, refurbished and re-equipped a BRC approved factory especially to prepare British natural casings for the sausage industry.

Welcoming the move, Philip Sharp, a director of the 75 years old family company, said Harder Bros. had acquired the new premises specifically to process British hog casings.

“We have invested in this factory to create job opportunities for manufacturing in Britain and offer sausage manufacturers the peace of mind that they are buying a produce that has not only been sourced but also processed in the UK,” he said.

Mr Sharp added that the partnership with Snowbird foods, a respected sausage manufacturer and the market leader in its field, had taken a lot of hard work by both companies to help bring manufacturing back to Britain.

Harder Bros. is able to guarantee full traceability from farm to factory because its own staff attend selected abattoirs to purchase the raw material which is then collected by the company’s refrigerated trucks for transport to the new factory where the cleaning process removes 90% of the weight of the intestines. At the same time they are carefully size graded.