Inside Maelor Foods
A Story Behind the Process
What begins on a family farm becomes a much bigger story about people, responsibility and the journey of food before it reaches our tables. This film takes the audience inside Maelor Foods, following that journey from the farmers who raise the birds through one of the UK’s modern poultry processing facilities and onwards towards retail. Rather than simply documenting machinery and production, we wanted to reveal the human relationships, decisions and standards behind an operation capable of processing at enormous scale.
The Film
Who We Made It For
Maelor Foods is a family-run poultry processing business based in Wrexham, working with farmers and major retail customers including Lidl. Their facility brings together agriculture, animal welfare, food safety, technology, logistics and a large team of people responsible for keeping one continuous operation moving. What became clear very quickly was that their story was not simply about how much they could produce, but about the culture and relationships that had allowed the business to grow.
How It Began
The original brief came with a very real deadline. A senior visitor from Lidl was due to visit the wider business, and Maelor wanted a film that could properly show the scale and capability of its Wrexham operation without requiring the visitor to make the additional journey to the site. What initially sounded like a film about a factory quickly became something more valuable. We saw an opportunity to create a piece that could serve that immediate presentation while also becoming a lasting film about the company itself.
Behind the Lens
We spent two days inside Maelor, using the first to capture interviews and the facility before production began, then returned before 4 am to follow the live operation from first arrivals through processing, grading, packing, and dispatch.
Because the production line could not simply stop for filmmaking, we worked closely with the Maelor team to understand every stage beforehand and built the story around voices from across the business, including leadership, operations, agriculture, welfare, employees and farming.
Where parts of the wider farm journey could not practically be captured during the shoot, we incorporated carefully considered additional visuals, while keeping the real people and their experiences at the centre of the film.
The Finished Film
The film achieved the immediate goal, but the response inside Maelor became just as important. Ricky Mehta told us that their visitors were “completely captivated, not wanting it to end,” while employees became emotional seeing their work, people and company represented on screen. His description of it ultimately said more than any viewing figure could: “More than anything, it’s a legacy video that means so much to all of us.” What started as a film for one important meeting became something the people behind Maelor could genuinely feel proud of.