BELL’S Fishmongers is creating up to nine jobs when it expands its Carlisle site.

The fish and game supplier has landed a contract to process Scottish rainbow trout for export to Europe, and has plans to increase throughput of game.

This expansion, at its site on the Kingstown Industrial Estate, has been made possible thanks to an £18,000 grant from the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), enabling Bell’s to invest £58,000 in equipment to handle the increased workload.

The trout order came through Selcoth Fisheries, a trout farm near Moffat in Dumfries and Galloway.

Tony Bell, managing director of Bell’s, said: “The fish come in to us as whole fish. We gut, gill, fillet and box them, and they are supplied frozen for the customer.

“The product goes to Selcoth’s customer in Germany, who supplies them to supermarkets in Austria and Sweden.

“We have had a relationship with Selcoth for a number of years so when they got this order they asked us to take it on.”

He added: “We’ve had to invest to make the job viable. When we started it was too labour intensive to get the price right for the customer.

“We did it all by hand at first but now we have a machine that guts and gills the fish.

“Where it was taking six men four hours to do one tonne – around 3,000 fish – now two men can do that in an hour and a half.”

Bell’s is sending out 10 tonnes of trout fillets every eight weeks.

The contract has seen it recruit six additional employees, taking the workforce to 32. It expects to recruit two or three more with growth in the game side of the business.

The LEP grant has also helped pay for conveyors and cutting tables to boost throughput of game such as pheasant, partridge, duck and rabbit.

Mr Bell said: “This will allow us to increase volume. A third of our game goes for export, mainly to France and Germany.

“In November, December and January we are processing between 12,000 and 15,000 birds every week.”

The business was founded in 1967 by Mr Bell’s father Jim Bell, initially with a travelling shop selling fresh fish, fruit and vegetables.

Bell’s opened a shop in Denton Holme in 1979 and, two years later, moved to Carlisle Market, becoming purely a fishmonger, then to the firm’s present site in Westmoor Road, Kingstown, in 2000.

It diversified into game with a government grant awarded in the wake of the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, and now has customers all over the country and abroad.

Locally, Bell’s sells directly to the public – its shop is open Tuesdays to Fridays, and Saturday mornings – and it still has a mobile shop visiting Dalston, Brampton, Aspatria and Annan every week. The firm also supplies firms such as Cranstons and Pioneer Foods, many Cumbrian hotels and restaurants, and some further afield.

Celebrity chef Michel Roux Jr sources game from Bell’s for Le Gavroche, his two Michelin-starred restaurant in London.

Bell’s LEP grant comes from the Government’s Regional Growth Fund (RGF). This supports projects that bring in private investment to create jobs and boost growth.

However, the minimum grant is £1m, which must be at least match-funded by private investment, so ruling out many smaller firms.

Cumbria LEP received £4m from the RGF, later topped up to £8.5m, which it can distribute in much smaller amounts to SMEs.

Other companies to have benefited from this funding include Calder Foods, John Chapman and Liberty Work and Leisure in Carlisle, Bells of Lazonby, and AST Signs, Cranstons, Trade Copiers and Traybakes in Penrith.