Ming Foods chooses Optimum Finance as vital ingredient for growth
Ming Foods , a food production business that has made around two billion Chinese pancakes in the last 10 years , is looking to expand its range of products and grow its business thanks to a £ 350,000 Invoice Finance cashflow management facility from Bristol-based Optimum Finance .
The business is also using the facility as a way of paying its own suppliers early , giving them greater flexibility in their purchasing decisions . The company buys north of 26 tons of wheat flower each week , as well as a large quantity of rape seed oil , both of which have been hit hard by the war in Ukraine .
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Ming Foods can trace its history back to 1984 , when a husbandand-wife team started making crispy duck pancakes in their home . Fast forward 20 years , and entrepreneur Sam Duong joined the business to help transform it from a cottage industry into a major industry player , diversifying its product range and taking on a new 4,000sq ft manufacturing facility . In 2012 , it acquired a new 30,000sq ft facility in Swanley as part of a significant investment in growth .
Through Optimum , he started to use Invoice Discounting , a method of cashflow funding that uses receivables ( invoices ) as the principal asset against which money can be raised . Optimum
Finance pays Ming Foods an agreed percentage of the invoice value as soon as it is submitted , driving access to liquidity at the point of invoice as opposed to needing to wait . All of the invoices ‘ sold ’ to Optimum have the protection of credit insurance , in case the buyer should default .
“ Optimum Finance advances 85 % of the invoice value ,” Sam explains , “ with access of up to £ 350,000 at any one time , and this is a tremendous benefit in managing our cashflow . It ’ s also , crucially , a facility that grows as we grow , so our growth is not hampered by access to capital , which is probably the biggest barrier to an SME business like ours that is looking to scale .”