Ranjit Boparan: a new hero for net zero

Ranjit Boparan stares intently at the screen. To the naked eye he’s looking at CCTV images of small chickens in a big barn. But look closer and there are little circles focused on each of the chicks.  Numbers pop up as the chicks move about. Using AI, the screen gives the stock keeper greater visibility over each bird’s weight, movement and behaviour, as well as conditions inside and outside the shed.

And for the 2 Sisters owner and so-called ‘Chicken King’ the changes such technology is affording are transformational.

“Data, data, data. What can we get from data? That’s what I’m always asking. That’s what the last 10 years has been about and what the next 10 will be about. How can we use technology, digitisation and robotics to stretch boundaries and create a supply chain that doesn’t exist today and makes us fit for the future?”

This relentless focus on data-driven efficiency has enabled 2 Sisters to keep delivering chickens that still cost £4 in our supermarkets. “About the same from what it was 20 years ago. And less than a Costa Coffee.”

But it’s delivering so much more: higher welfare and huge reductions in Scope 3 CO2 emissions. It’s creating (and saving) jobs. It’s generating £5.5bn in sales and £202m in profits. It’s powering expansion into new categories and further forays into Europe. And in a rare interview Boparan outlines the journey so far and his vision for the future.

Difficult turnarounds

A bootstrap entrepreneur, Boparan has built his business the hard way, through a series of “difficult turnarounds”. And he still bears “the scars” from major supply chain crises, food safety scandals and the countless close scrapes that turnarounds entail.

“With every business we’ve bought they’ve gone wrong for different reasons. Lazy corporate PLCs, second and third-generation family-owned businesses who haven’t got a grip, or private equity only interested in short-term returns.

“Most have been difficult. And when a business is in intensive care, losing a lot of money, you’ve got to make quick decisions, there’s a lot of heavy lifting, and it takes two to three years. Especially when you buy two or three [failing] businesses consecutively, or you don’t have the right team, it can be scary.

“Like every entrepreneur the fear of failure is the first thing I think of every day when I wake up. It drives behaviour. That’s how we’ve built our organisation. It’s a mindset. Were there times when it was getting very tight? Of course, but if you believe what you are doing is the right thing, and you’ve got the right team, you will get through. And there’s not a scar on my back that I haven’t learned from.”

Fingers in lots of pies

While the fear is constant, like so many entrepreneurs, Boparan has not been afraid to diversify outside poultry. He has fingers in lots of pies, almost literally in the case of Holland’s Pies, but also investing and turning businesses around in fish, bakery, ready meals, pizzas, sandwiches, biscuits and restaurants.

With the entrepreneur’s eye for the unexpected, for example, he snapped up Roberts Bakery in a £21.6m pre-pack last October. The result? “We’ve saved 600 jobs.” And across all his previous acquisitions, Boparan estimates “we’ve saved 12,000 jobs from businesses that would otherwise have disappeared”.

But he also believes he can disrupt the bakery market.

“The industry’s plan was to shut the plant, so all those jobs would have gone. But it would have been worse than that because consumers would have paid the price as competition was removed from the market. Now we’re going to disrupt the bakery market, give customers more options and give consumers more affordable food.”

Often the motivation for his acquisitions outside the core poultry business are seen as the dabblings of a serial entrepreneur. But “it depends what you mean by core. Food production is our core. Because most raw materials are the same, manufacturing practices are the same, it’s the same logistics, procurement, packaging. And mostly customers are the same.”

“So what’s non-core for us? Let’s take restaurants as an example. During the pandemic we bought Carluccio’s, we bought Gourmet Burger Kitchen. And people said ‘you’re going into all these different restaurants!’ And I said: ‘No we’re not. It’s a property play. We had a super brand called Slim Chickens, and the hardest thing is finding good locations. It would have cost a fortune. So we’ve converted half the Carluccio’s and half the GBKs. And the Slim brand has gone from 10 stores to 100.”

As to the rest, he adds, “when the time is right, if the opportunity is there”, it may yet be developed, he says. “But if it isn’t or it doesn’t excel, it will be sold.”

As well as selling or closing businesses that don’t work out, Boparan has restructured the business into two legal entities. 2 Sisters Food Group sits within Boparan Holdings (BHL) alongside its ready meals business, while Boparan Private Office is a more diverse portfolio of businesses, including the restaurants, agriculture and property, bakery, biscuits, pies, and the European poultry and turkey business (Storteboom Food Group Europe).

“We have a portfolio. Each business has to stand on its own two feet. Each one has its own capital, and each has to make a return on its capital, a bit like what private equity businesses do, but it’s a long-term hold.”

Good to great

The restructure has helped get the overall business back in the black, and as the latest results show, momentum is building. But Boparan is also adapting his approach. “We’ve bought bad businesses and made them good. What we’re [mostly] focused on now is making good businesses great.”

The hugely ambitious £1.8bn Next Gen investment plan kicked off in 2023. And the recent acquisition of German poultry supplier Heidemark is a typical investment case: “It’s a good business that wants to be great,” he says. Boparan’s European operations, which account for €2bn in sales, are due to receive £600m of the total.

But the biggest gains are in the UK, where over 10 years he plans to achieve a 40% capacity increase in poultry supply through inward investment – while also delivering higher welfare and net zero emissions.

“We’ve bought bad businesses and made them good. What we’re focused on now is making good businesses great”

Of course chicken is surfing a wave. Healthy and cheap, it’s the protein of choice and demand has never been higher. And 2SFG supplies lots of it. It counts all the major mults, as well as KFC and Nando’s, among its customers, meeting their needs across standard, higher welfare, free-range and organic production. But the market isn’t easy.

“We have a national food security issue,” he warns. “In 2015 we were 76% self-sufficient in poultry and today in 2026 we are only 65%. If the government doesn’t allow planning permission in this industry we’ll drop to just 50% by 2035.”

To address this shortage, the latest investment tranche is a new £155m site in Scotland. As if to prove his point on the capacity decline, all the other eight poultry businesses north of the border have closed in the past 15 years. So it’s a watershed moment. And Boparan is full of praise for the Scottish government.

“It’s embraced the importance of developing an end-to-end supply chain. They are completely joined up.”

In contrast “the UK government aren’t playing ball. We’re investing capital in the UK, feeding the nation, and setting some of the highest welfare standards in the world. But the planning system is delaying investment. It doesn’t work at a national level, it isn’t aligned with local planning or the Environment Agency.

“We’ve explained the situation to [Defra secretary of state] Emma Reynolds recently and to be fair she got it in a way that others in the past haven’t. And the new National Planning Policy Framework will take years.”

Higher welfare

Of course some of the decline in self-sufficiency is self-imposed. As well as investment in Flox AI monitoring, improved litter management and disposal and enhanced ventilation, 2 Sisters has voluntarily reduced stocking densities from 38kg/sq m to a maximum of 30kg/sq m across all its 489 farms (the 42 remaining standard welfare farms will be converted by 2027). 

“It’s the right thing to do. We could place 500,000 birds on this farm,” he points out. “We’ve got planning and the permits. But we’ve said our maximum will be 398,000. We’ve shown our customers the outcomes on welfare. They get it.”

But he also defends the rowback earlier this year by the QSR sector from their Better Chicken Commitment to slower-growing chicken breeds. “It’s really simple,” he says. “If we had planning permission it’s possible. What they’re trying to do is exactly what we’re trying to do, which is to keep chicken affordable while raising welfare standards.

“Remember: they’re still going to 30 kilos. That agreement wasn’t in place when the restaurant chains signed up, OK? So using slower-growing breeds you would now need twice as much space.”

But the most important element of the Next Gen plan is Boparan’s simultaneous investment in net zero, with an ambition to eliminate all carbon emissions across its poultry business by 2035 – a full 15 years ahead of the government’s mandatory target.

“People say you can’t do carbon net zero and welfare, but I say they can work hand in glove.”

The logic for net zero is obvious: “With poultry, I’m their Scope 3 [emissions],” says Boparan. “So if we can eliminate CO2 from our supply chain it makes a big difference to our customers.”

It’s an approach endorsed by Compassion in World Farming. But it doesn’t come cheap. 2 Sisters is investing at every stage in its end-to-end supply chain, with £500m allocated to the farming side (including feed milling, breeding and rearing) and £600m across its  processing and manufacturing sites.

The first area of focus has been clean energy. Already 19% of 2SFG energy comes from clean and on-farm generated sources and Boparan believes this can double in the next 18 months, mainly from solar.

But the biggest impact will come from soy, which accounts for 44% of supply chain emissions. From July onwards 2SFG will be introducing verified deforestation-free mass-balance soy into its supply chain. This move alone will eliminate 2% of all CO2 emissions at M&S, he claims. 

The real game-changer, however, will be the rollout of ExtruPro.Using UK-grown crops such as rapeseed and field beans, 2SFG has been developing the patented feed for a number of years and it’s already displaced 23% of 2SFG’s soya, saving 113,000 tonnes of carbon a year. The next step, Boparan explains, is to build a new plant in Scotland which will displace a further 75 tonnes of soya – meaning that by the end of next year all poultry reared in Scotland will be soy-free and net zero.

“And if we can do it there we can do it everywhere, which is important because it means we can be self-sufficient as well as more sustainable.”

The path to net zero will not be easy, however.

“We have to make the economics work, OK? We can’t just impose the cost on customers and consumers. Soya-free is more expensive. We’ve halved the cost in the last five years. But it’s 5%-10% more expensive. People won’t pay for it. So my challenge is to find a way to make it even more cost-effective.

“We’ve done it in a lab, we’ve done it in a mill, now we need to do a trial with 1.5 million birds a week in Scotland, OK? And we will tweak it, tweak it, tweak it, until we have the absolute best model to roll out nationally.”

In theory this should offer 2SFG a competitive advantage over its Brazilian and US rivals in the UK. But once it’s perfected, he plans to share the formula. Because, once again, he says, it’s “just the right thing to do”. Whether they choose to adopt the feed is “questionable”, he adds. “They might take a different view.”

Eco-warrior?

Some may question the turnaround tycoon’s eco-warrior credentials. But he’s a serious businessman and a deep thinker, who’s determined to figure out how to solve a number of problems on behalf of his business, his customers and, yes, the greater good.

“Some problems you can’t control, like market forces and geopolitics. Worrying about those is a waste of time. But we’re living in a world using too much carbon, and we’ve asked ourselves: ‘are we doing this to be the first, or because it’s the right thing to do, and, honestly, Adam, we think it’s the right thing to do.”

Boparan’s plan is hugely ambitious, detailed, onerous, and vastly expensive. The path ahead is also paved with potholes and pitfalls. But no one should doubt his commitment to seeing it through.

“It’s what we do. And we won’t stop. We won’t stand still while I’m driving this organisation. People who stand still become dinosaurs, and then they get extinct. You asked me: ‘what’s your biggest fear?’ I fear failure, and failure is standing still, not challenging the status quo, whether it’s environmental, on welfare, recruitment, automation or data.”