Woodward Foodservice chief executive Andrew Ramsden has promised that his aggressive restructuring will turn the company round after it posted a pre-tax loss of £32.8m for the year to March 2007.

Ramsden said the changes he had implemented since joining the company last April would reduce losses to less than £10m for the year to March this year and deliver a return to profit by March 2009.

Since April, Woodward has shut four depots and reduced the number of head office employees from 250 to 100. In all it has cut 750 jobs. In so doing, Ramsden said it had removed £40m of costs from the business.

He admitted Woodward had struggled to integrate DBC Foodservice, which it acquired in 2006, while the costs of servicing some low margin national accounts, including the Pizza Express restaurant chain, had soared.

The company had walked away from these accounts after honouring the contracts, he said, and Woodward and DBC were now being run as separate businesses.

Woodward hit the headlines early last year amid stories of cashflow and availability problems, which eventually led to former chief executive Ed Hyslop leaving the business.

Ramsden admitted that service levels to customers, including the MoD with which it has a £150m contract, had fallen below an acceptable level.

Current service levels were running at 99.5%, but at its worst the company's overall service level was in the mid-to-low eighties.

Ramsden said the company now had regular meeting with the MoD to ensure supply lines to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were maintained at all times.

Woodward's troubles can be traced back to 2006, when it developed a strategy to become a third national operator to rival foodservice giants 3663 and Brakes. That year it bought DBC in September and took on the MoD contract in October.

The group, controlled by Icelandic investment group Baugur, will continue to run Woodward and DBC as separate entities, but would not rule out trying to combine them again as recovery continued, Ramsden said.