Kingswinford-based health food chain Grape Tree opens its 100th store

The double landmark means that the Kingswinford company has become one of the UK’s fastest growing retailers by opening a new outlet every two weeks.

Stores now stretch from Loch Lomond to the south coast with more than a dozen in the Midlands including Solihull and Sutton Coldfield.

There is also a flourishing on-line shopping service.

In line with its rapid growth, the company's headquarters and distribution centre on the Pensnett Trading Estate, where the company also packs its own branded products, has doubled in size.

Founder Nick Shutts said “Opening a new store every fortnight for the last five years has been a flat out process for the entire team.

“But we have been driven by demand from shoppers . We have actually been receiving appeals from people to open shops in their areas.”

The formation of the company, which employs almost 400 people, coincided with a major switch to healthier eating patterns in Britain. A third of the nation is now reported to be vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian and numbers are predicted to keep growing.

Grape Tree sells over 600 choices of natural, unprocessed foods which appeal to this market as well as the growing free-from sector.

They include dozens of dried fruit products, over eighty ways of buying nuts, a wide range of super foods, whole grains and seeds as well as baking necessities.

“It’s been hard work but also extremely rewarding to now be reaching so many people with foods that can have such positive effects on health and to be supplying those foods at affordable prices” said Nick “Plus we have had the satisfaction of helping to bring life back to some of our long suffering High Streets and town centres.”

“We have no intention of slowing down. In fact we are now talking to private equity companies with a view to facilitating a more aggressive approach to future expansion.”

For Nick this is the second time he has been involved in the development of a national chain of food stores.

In the 1990s he and business partner Nigel Morris launched Julian Graves which grew to a 350 store, £75 million business. It was sold in 2003 to Icelandic investor Baugur and was then purchased by NBTY Europe-which owns Holland and Barrett- and disappeared from the High Street in 2012.

At that point Nick Shutts reassembled many of his former management team, including Nigel Morris, and launched Grape Tree.