Made in the Midlands Awards 2025

Insider Media

Midlands manufacturers showcased their world-class innovation and adaptability at the 15th annual Made in the Midlands Awards. Winners and shortlisted businesses highlighted the vitality of the region’s makers at a time of major global challenges. Deputy editor Ian Griffin spoke to some of the judges and the winners on what was a huge celebration of Midlands manufacturing. The winners of the 11 categories now go through to Insider’s national Made in the UK Awards on 19 June in Liverpool.

Transcript

00:00Hello, I'm Ian Griffin, Deputy Editor of Midlands Business Insider and I'm here at the 15th annual

00:14Insider Made in the Midlands Awards. We've got 11 awards to give out this evening. It's just sat

00:20out. There's around 400 people here. It's going to be a great night. I'm Rachel Eade, Chair of the

00:27UK Metals Council. I've now been judging on the Made in the Midlands Insider Awards for 15 years.

00:34I do it because I love it to find out about all the companies in the region that are growing,

00:40expanding, innovating and to see their stories of success and particularly celebrating young people,

00:47apprentices and the skills that they're learning as our future leaders in industry. Chris Corkin,

00:53Region Director for Make UK, the Manufacturers Association. I'm really pleased to be a judge

00:59yet again, having been so for the last few years at the Insider's Made in the Midlands

01:04Manufacturing Awards. A really, really great way to celebrate all the amazing things that our

01:09manufacturing businesses and indeed apprentices are working on in the region. Some excellent

01:14successes across transition to net zero, developing new products and the standard of entry as ever at

01:21the Insider's Made in the Midlands Manufacturing Awards is excellent. Josh Wesson, Managing Director

01:27of Geary's Bakeries. We have won the Food and Drink Award at Made in the Midlands Awards. We are

01:34incredibly proud to have won this award. We are an artisanal bakery based in Leicester, producing Jason's

01:42Sourdough and Sourdough. We've been on an incredible growth journey, gone from like nothing in 2020 when

01:51we launched during COVID to supplying a million loaves a week into the retail industry, trying to

02:00bring proper bread to more people. That's our mission. That's what we want to do. Hopefully,

02:06later this year, we're going to become the third biggest bread brand in the UK behind Warburton's

02:11and Hovis. Hi, I'm Tom, a founder of Beer Buyer and we've won the Manufacturing Startup Award,

02:17so really pleased to have won this. We're an early stage startup born and bred in the Midlands with

02:21our R&D facility in Leicestershire. It was actually born at Loughborough University, a spin-out, and now we

02:28have secured pre-seed investment, Innovate UK backing. We've built a 10,000 square foot R&D facility and we're now

02:35looking to build the UK's largest insect farm and what that means is we're basically taking waste,

02:39waste organics, the insects consume the waste, we then process those insects into animal feed and

02:43fertilizer. So it's a clean circular economy approach. So I'm Sophie Hallett-Jones, I'm the

02:49Managing Director of Acura Engineering. We're a precision machinist in Willenhall and we are the

02:54proud winners of the Automotive Aerospace and Rail Award for Made in the Midlands. It's a fantastic time to

03:01be an aerospace manufacturer at the moment, particularly in the Midlands. We have a long

03:05history of manufacturing aerospace components here in this region of the UK and with the change

03:13in the global economy, the tariffs, that's going to become more important. We have an opportunity

03:19here to do something really exciting and really dominate the global aerospace market. Acura is very

03:27keen to be a part of that. We're investing heavily. We've put four million into our new facility and

03:33that is allowing us to move into markets that we've not done before. So really exciting time for us.

03:40Hi, I'm James from Digital Planning. We've won the Digital Technology Award tonight and we're

03:45absolutely thrilled. I'm Mark from Digital Planning. We started our business in 2021 off the back of

03:55Covid, we needed to reinvent ourselves and we started with a £2,000 loan from my dad and we've grown that

04:00into a £1.6 million turnover business. Currently we're focusing on AI implementation, particularly within

04:07manufacturing, where we're trying to optimise real-time resource allocation. The right person, the right place,

04:16at the right time and we've seen optimisations of two to two and a half thousand times faster, making business

04:25owners able to make those decisions in real time about what they should be doing with their resources.

04:30And we're really happy to have won this evening and very grateful.

Category

Transcript

Recommended