Camgrain has today (3 July) formally opened its new 90,000-tonne grain storage and processing site at Wilbraham, southeast of Cambridge.

The “Advanced Processing Centre” cost £16m to build and will process all of Camgrain’s Group 1 bread-making wheat from the coming harvest, including the 65,000t of wheat needed to supply all of Sainsbury’s in-store bakeries.

Speaking at the opening, Camgrain chairman John Latham also announced that the farmer-owned company had just received planning permission to expand the site by another 210,000 tonnes and on the same day had received the go-ahead to develop a similar-sized facility in Northamptonshire.

Once completed, these new facilities, plus an existing 150,000 tonnes of storage at Linton in Cambridgeshire, would take Camgrain’s total grain storage and processing capacity to over 500,000 tonnes.

“Camgrain represents a huge step forward for the industry,” shadow agriculture and rural affairs minister and local MP James Paice said. “The mid-term review of the CAP six years ago effectively signalled the end of direct market support and there’s no doubt many farmers were very apprehensive about the new world they’d been thrown into. The relationship Camgrain has with the whole food chain demonstrates how we can go on from this and work together to produce exactly what the market and consumers want.”

“The next major CAP reform is in 2013 and we may well see the single farm payment disappear altogether by 2020, so increasingly, farmers’ income will depend on the marketplace.”

Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King said the provenance of the supermarket’s products was crucial going forward and customers were increasingly looking for British produce, despite the recession. “The tougher times get, the more people get concerned about the quality of their food and where it comes from.”

He said the supermarket had completed its conversion to using 100% British flour in its in-store bakeries and was introducing a new range of branding to highlight the fact to consumers.

In-store bakery bread buyer Sarah Callanan said two-thirds of customers buying bakery products regarded buying British as being important to them in a recent survey, so the supermarket planned to move to using 100% British wheat for all of its own-label sliced bread by this September. And by April next year she said it would use only British wheat in all of its ‘bake-off’ bread.