Hotel plan for former HP Sauce factory site
A luxury 10-storey hotel could be created on the site of Birmingham's former HP Sauce factory, it emerged today.
Black Country-based East End Foods is behind the plan for a four-star hotel, and bosses revealed they were in talks with leading operators, Hilton and Sheraton. The hotel would be built alongside a planned new food plant, training kitchen and conference centre.
It also wants to build a cash and carry. Don and Tony Deep Wouhra, who run East End Foods in Kenrick Way, West Bromwich, bought the site for an undisclosed sum in March this year.
The new plant is expected to create around 200 jobs in wholesale food operation alone.
Company director Don Wouhra said planners at Birmingham City Council were looking at the application, but the firm was confident that work could begin within eight to 10 weeks.
"We have been working closely with Birmingham City Council on this," he said.
"The site is extremely large, too big for our operations alone, and there are now plans for a four-star hotel and a cash and carry, as well as the conference centre we originally had planned.
"We have already had talks with The Hilton and The Sheraton about the hotel plans and things are progressing well.
"We are still in the planning process, with final designs being put together by the architects, but it could be as soon as eight to ten weeks before construction starts."
East End Foods is based in East End House, Kenrick Way, West Bromwich and is now the largest importer of Indian food products and ingredients to the UK.
It cleans, packs and processes the goods before distributing to independent stores and to supermarket chains such as Waitrose, Asda and Tesco.
It already has two cash and carry warehouses, one in Smethwick and one in Birmingham.
The company has been running for more than 35 years and has an annual turnover of more than £100million.
HP Sauce production was moved from Birmingham to the Netherlands in 2007, a move which saw 125 people lose their jobs. The tower and factory on the six-acre site had been a fixture on the Aston skyline for more than 100 years before being demolished in 2007.
