0117 325 0027 · info@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk
FCA FRN 724952 · Co. No. 07014570 · Bristol
§ Commercial insurance

Food and drink insurance - UK broker guide

Apex Insurance Brokers · Last reviewed: June 2026

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, FRN 724952. Companies House 07014570. Cover availability and terms depend on insurer underwriting at the time of quotation.

If you make, blend, bake, bottle, pack, import or ship food and drink in the South West, you are sitting on a risk profile that an off-the-shelf commercial policy was never built to handle. A batch of sauce with the wrong allergen on the label, a chiller that loses gas overnight, a contaminated ingredient from a supplier two tiers up the chain, a Shopify listing shipping a recalled product to two thousand customers — these are real claim shapes from the South West food and drink market, and none sits neatly inside a standard combined policy.

This page is for food manufacturers from artisan bakeries in Stokes Croft to the mid-scale ready-meal and chilled-food sites around Bridgwater and Avonmouth; for distributors and wholesalers moving palletised stock through the M4/M5 corridor; for importers clearing third-country product through Avonmouth and Portbury; for online direct-to-consumer brands on Shopify; for dark and cloud kitchens; and for the craft brewers, cider makers and distillers that define so much of the region's drinks identity. The risks differ, but the underwriter questions overlap, and the broker work is the same craft.

Generic SME products fail food and drink buyers at three points: territorial limits, recall trigger language, and stock deterioration inner limits.

What food and drink insurance is

"Food and drink insurance" is not a single product. It is a programme built from a commercial combined base — Material Damage, Business Interruption, Employers' Liability, Public and Products Liability, money, goods in transit — layered with the sector-specific covers that the off-the-shelf market either excludes or sub-limits to the point of uselessness: Product Recall, Deterioration of Stock, Microbiological Contamination, and increasingly Cyber. Drinks producers carry an excise and bonded-warehouse layer; importers carry customs liability and a port-inspection exposure that sits oddly across the standard cover map.

The market splits into three bands. At the small artisan end — turnovers under £500,000, UK sales only, no recall history, no USA or Canada exposure — packaged SME products (Aviva Fast Trade, Hiscox 606, Allianz Commercial Select) can do the job, sometimes well. The wording is what matters: a £25,000 inner limit on recall is not recall cover, it is decoration. Once you are exporting, supplying multiples, contract packing for branded clients, or producing alcohol, you move into the bespoke commercial market. RSA, Allianz, Aviva commercial branch, AXA XL, QBE, Zurich, HDI, NMU and the Lloyd's syndicates that specialise in food (Beazley, Tokio Marine HCC, Hiscox London) all have appetites, but they are not directly accessible and they do not all want the same risks. That is broker work.

A good broker does three things a comparison portal cannot. We know which insurers will write craft distillery stock at full landed value under bond, which want a documented HACCP plan before quoting recall, and which treat USA export as a deal-breaker rather than a load. We prepare the presentation — turnover splits by product line, customer concentration, ingredient supplier list, BRCGS or SALSA audit reports, recall plan, EML — so the risk arrives with the answers already given. And when there is a claim, we run the advocacy that decides whether you recover what you actually spent.

The covers you actually need

Product Liability — the cover everything else hangs off

Product liability responds when your product causes bodily injury or property damage to a third party. £5 million is standard for UK-only operations; £10 million is increasingly what retailers and wholesalers require in supply contracts; £25 million sits comfortably for mid-scale manufacturers supplying multiples. Territorial scope moves premium most: UK and EU is base rate, worldwide excluding USA and Canada is a modest load, USA and Canada are loaded heavily and underwritten separately because of jury awards and class-action exposure. Most insurers offer USA and Canada cover only on a separate sub-limit, and several food panels exclude it outright. If you sell to a Boston gift shop through Shopify, the underwriter needs to know.

The wording detail that catches buyers: products liability needs to be on a worldwide jurisdiction basis if you ship anywhere outside the UK, and the "occurrence" trigger needs to be unambiguous. Claims-made wordings exist in this space and they bite buyers who switch insurer and discover the new policy will not respond to a claim from product made under the old one.

Product Recall — the cover most buyers think they have and do not

Recall is the single most misunderstood cover in food and drink insurance. The packaged-product market typically gives you a £10,000 to £50,000 inner limit under products liability for "recall expenses." That is not recall insurance. Real recall cover responds on a triggered basis — accidental contamination, malicious tampering, or government-mandated recall — and pays first-party costs (notification, retrieval, destruction, replacement, crisis consultancy, PR) plus, on the better wordings, third-party loss of customer revenue and contracts. Limits of £500,000 to £2 million are typical for mid-market manufacturers; £5 million and above for those supplying multiples or co-packing for branded principals.

Premium is driven by turnover, USA/Canada export percentage, product category (ready-to-eat chilled and infant formula attract the heaviest loads; dry ambient ingredients the lightest), recall history, BRCGS certification level, and whether your recall plan is documented and tested. Appetite shifts year to year and we re-test the market at each renewal.

Product Guarantee and Efficacy — the financial-loss covers

Distinct from product liability, product guarantee responds when your product fails to perform as warranted and causes the buyer pure financial loss. Efficacy is its close cousin for nutritional, functional and health claims — a probiotic that does not contain the stated CFUs, a protein powder failing to deliver labelled grammage. Less commonly purchased but increasingly relevant for the functional drinks, supplement and better-for-you brands around Bristol and Bath.

Material Damage and Business Interruption — the chiller question

Standard fire, lightning, explosion, storm, flood, theft and accidental damage sit at the base of every food and drink programme. The detail that defines a food risk is refrigeration. A chiller losing gas overnight, a freezer failing on a Bank Holiday weekend, a power outage on a site without backup generation — these turn into six-figure stock losses fast. Material Damage limits need to reflect actual stock at risk including raw materials, WIP and finished goods at peak season. BI indemnity periods of 24 months are standard; 36 months where bespoke plant, regulatory re-approval or specialist ingredients would delay restart.

Refrigeration breakdown is the BI driver we see most often. The wording needs to cover deterioration of stock following breakdown of refrigeration plant, including consequential loss of gross profit. Many SME policies cap stock deterioration at £25,000 or £50,000; for any serious chilled or frozen operation, that is not a number.

Deterioration of Stock and Microbiological Contamination

Deterioration of Stock responds when temperature-controlled product spoils because refrigeration failed. Microbiological Contamination responds when product is unmerchantable because of bacterial, viral or fungal contamination — listeria in a chilled sandwich line, salmonella in a confectionery batch. These are sometimes bundled into the recall wording, sometimes sold as separate extensions; the broker work is making sure the trigger language joins up and there are no exclusion gaps.

Employers' Liability, Public Liability, Cyber and the rest

Employers' Liability at the statutory £10 million is non-negotiable. Public Liability at £5 million minimum, £10 million where contracts require. Goods in Transit for own-vehicle delivery and third-party hauliers. Money, Glass, Engineering Inspection (statutory for pressure vessels in breweries and distilleries and for refrigeration plant under PSSR), and Directors' & Officers' once there are external investors or a board structure.

Cyber is now a hard-market cover for food, particularly for contract packers and co-manufacturers holding customer recipes, artwork and EDI integrations. The exposure is twofold: ransomware shutting down a production line, and contractual liability following a breach of a customer's recipe IP. Beazley, CFC, Tokio Marine HCC and Coalition are the markets we present food cyber to; they all want MFA on remote access, segregated OT networks, tested backups and an incident response plan before they bind.

Sector-specific risks we see most

Allergen mislabelling

The Food Information Regulations 2014 and the Prepacked for Direct Sale rules introduced by Natasha's Law in October 2021 transformed allergen liability. Any product prepacked on the premises for direct sale to consumers requires a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised. A typical claim: a small bakery supplying cafés through a wholesaler ships a batch labelled gluten-free that, after a flour-mill changeover, contained wheat traces. One coeliac customer is hospitalised; the wholesaler recalls across two hundred outlets; retrieval, destruction, replacement and PR spend hits £180,000 before the product liability bodily injury claim is pleaded. Without standalone recall cover at a proper limit, that spend is uninsured.

The Natasha's Law exposure sits hardest on sandwich and chilled-food manufacturers supplying foodservice, on dark kitchens preparing meals for delivery platforms, and on artisan producers selling prepacked product through farm shops and delis. Labelling errors, ingredient substitution by suppliers and cross-contamination drive the claims.

Supplier failure and ingredient contamination

Contamination claims most often originate not in the manufacturer's own process but in an ingredient supplier two or three tiers up the chain. The defence is supplier due diligence, ingredient specifications, batch traceability and a recall plan that executes in hours rather than days. The insurance defence is recall cover that responds to contamination originating in raw materials, not just contamination introduced in your own factory.

Refrigeration breakdown and the BI gap

A typical chiller failure claim: compressor fails Friday night, discovered Monday morning, £40,000 of finished goods spoiled, £60,000 of raw materials compromised, three days of lost production. On a standard SME combined with a £25,000 stock deterioration inner limit, the recovery is £25,000 and the buyer carries the rest. On a properly broked programme with full stock value and a fit BI indemnity period, the recovery is six-figure and the business is whole.

Recall trigger language and the "voluntary" gap

The exclusion that catches the most food buyers: many wordings respond only to government-mandated recall under the FSA's Food Alert system. If you withdraw a product voluntarily on the precautionary advice of your own technical team, the wording does not respond. Better wordings include voluntary recall on a triggered basis — usually requiring the involvement of a recall consultant and a documented decision trail — and that is the wording we push for.

USA and Canada exposure on the Shopify channel

Direct-to-consumer brands selling through Shopify, Amazon or their own ecommerce often do not realise that a small percentage of overseas orders fundamentally changes their products liability rating. A South West craft drinks brand we placed last renewal had a USA hobby-export channel: £40,000 of turnover against £1.8 million UK base, but the territorial extension required a separate Lloyd's market because two standard food panels declined. The broker work was getting the right market to take it without restructuring the export operation.

Cyber on co-packers and contract manufacturers

Contract packers and co-manufacturers sit on a cyber risk profile the broader food sector does not. They hold confidential recipe and packaging artwork for branded principals; they integrate over EDI with multiples; they run OT networks on production lines that, if breached, halt the factory. We have seen ransomware claims in the South West food sector run to seven figures including BI, forensic, notification and customer-contract loss. Cyber underwriters are pricing food and beverage manufacturing as a higher-hazard segment than office-based businesses, and rightly so.

Bristol & South West considerations

The South West has one of the densest food and drink production clusters in the UK. Bristol's food economy runs from the artisan producers around St Werburgh's, Bedminster and Wapping Wharf — Pieminister, Sandows Cold Brew, Wild Beer Co, Bristol Beer Factory — through to the larger chilled and ambient manufacturers across the city's industrial fringes. Severn & Wye Smokery on the Severn estuary represents the specialist smoked-fish exposure: high stock values, refrigeration dependency, USA export. Bath's artisan food scene, Cheltenham's gin and craft distillery cluster, and Cotswolds Distillery near Stourton sit alongside the wider Cotswolds drinks economy and the legacy of Bath Ales.

Somerset is cider country: Thatchers at Sandford, Sheppy's at Bradford-on-Tone, Burrow Hill at Kingsbury Episcopi — orchard-to-bottle operations carrying significant raw materials values at harvest and finished-goods stock under bond. Bridgwater is the centre of larger-scale food manufacturing with Yeo Valley headquartered at Blagdon. Yeovil and the wider South Somerset dairy and meat processing economy, Wyke Farms at Bruton, sit on serious EML profiles and the dairy refrigeration dependency that defines BI exposure. Cardiff brings the Brains Brewery legacy, Crafty Devil and the wider Welsh food and drink economy. Avonmouth is the region's bulk food storage and cold-store hub, sitting on the Severn flood plain — and the flood exposure across Avonmouth, Bridgwater, parts of Cardiff Bay and the Severn corridor matters for any site with high-value stock at ground level.

The South West underwriter community knows this geography. Presenting an Avonmouth cold-store risk without flood mitigation evidence — barriers, raised stock, pump capacity, drainage — is a fast route to a decline. We prepare these submissions with the local knowledge a London comparison engine cannot bring.

How to get it right at renewal

Start sixty to ninety days out. Food and drink risks take longer to market than standard SME combined because the questions are deeper and the markets fewer. We use that window to build the underwriter pack properly.

Loss runs from the current and prior two insurers. Open versus closed claim status matters — an open £80,000 product liability claim is priced differently to a closed one. We work with the current insurer to get reserves reviewed and closed where facts support it.

A documented HACCP plan. BRCGS Global Standard for Food Safety certification at the current grade and the last audit report; SALSA certification where you sit below BRCGS scale. FSA registration and local authority food hygiene rating. For drinks producers, HMRC bonded warehouse approval and excise registration. For importers, IPAFFS registration for products of animal origin and Customs Declaration Service evidence.

Premises photographs and EML calculation. Refrigeration redundancy: backup compressors, alarmed monitoring, generator backup, response times. Sprinkler grade. Intruder alarm grade and signalling — Grade 2 monitored, dual-path or above. CCTV with off-site recording.

A documented and tested recall plan. Underwriters want evidence you have practised the recall, not just written it. Customer concentration analysis — what percentage of turnover sits with your top three customers — because a single multiples delisting following a recall is the third-party loss that drives the larger claim values.

For importers we coordinate the food and drink programme with importer-exporter cover, because the customs liability exposure on third-country imports and IPR-relieved goods sits on a different wording and needs to dovetail without gaps.

We market through three to five targeted insurers, not a scattergun: food underwriters talk to each other and a risk that has been around the market loses appetite. We present a single clean submission, negotiate, and come back with a comparison sheet that lets you decide properly. Six weeks out we want decision; three weeks out we want documentation issued.

How Apex helps

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is an independent commercial broker based in Bristol, regulated by the FCA under FRN 724952. We work across the South West food and drink economy from artisan producers in our own city through to the mid-scale manufacturers, distributors, importers and drinks producers across Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Bridgwater, Yeovil and the wider M4/M5 catchment.

We are broad market on this sector. We place through the specialist food panels at the major UK commercial branches, through the Lloyd's syndicates that write recall and contamination, and through the cyber markets that have appetite for food and beverage manufacturing. We prepare the renewal submission properly, run the presentation with the underwriter rather than behind a comparison engine, and when a claim happens we run the advocacy that decides whether you recover what you actually spent. If you are within fifty miles of Bristol and you make, pack, distribute or import food and drink, speak to us. A single conversation tells us whether your programme is fit or whether the renewal needs proper work.

FAQs

Do I legally need product liability insurance for my food business?

Product liability is not statutory in the way Employers' Liability is, but every viable food and drink business carries it. Most retailers, wholesalers, distributors and foodservice customers require evidence of cover, typically £5 million or £10 million, as a condition of supply.

How much does food and drink insurance cost in the UK?

Premiums vary widely with turnover, product category, territorial scope, recall history and certification level. A small UK-only artisan producer might sit at £1,500 to £3,000 a year for a basic combined; a mid-scale chilled-food manufacturer with USA export and standalone recall will commonly sit in the £25,000 to £75,000 range across the programme.

What is product recall insurance and do I need it?

Recall pays the first-party costs of retrieving, destroying and replacing contaminated, tampered or government-recalled product, plus third-party loss of customer revenue and contracts. If you supply foodservice, wholesale or retail customers, the answer is almost always yes — recall exposure dwarfs bodily injury exposure for most operators.

Does my standard combined policy include recall?

Most SME combined policies include a small inner limit (£10,000 to £50,000) under products liability. That is not standalone recall and rarely covers a real event. We treat that inner limit as a token.

What does Natasha's Law mean for my insurance?

Natasha's Law requires Prepacked for Direct Sale food to carry a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised. The insurance impact is on product liability bodily injury exposure where mislabelling causes an allergic reaction, and on recall exposure where mislabelled product has to be withdrawn. Your wordings need to respond to both.

Can I add USA export to my UK food policy?

Sometimes. Several standard UK panels exclude USA and Canada outright; others extend on a separate sub-limit with a premium load. We have placed USA-exposed risks through specialist Lloyd's markets where the standard panels declined. The conversation needs to happen before you start exporting, not after.

How does insurance work for a craft brewery or distillery?

Drinks producers sit on a combined risk profile — food manufacturing plus bonded warehouse, excise, stock value, plant breakdown and engineering inspection. Stock under bond at full landed value (including duty suspended) needs to be properly insured; HMRC requires evidence of cover.

Do you cover dark kitchens and Deliveroo Editions sites?

Yes. Dark and cloud kitchens operate as food manufacturers for insurance purposes, not as hospitality, and need product liability, recall, stock deterioration and refrigeration cover sized for production volume.

What about cyber cover for food manufacturers?

Cyber matters for food and drink, particularly for contract packers and co-manufacturers holding customer recipe IP. We place food cyber through Beazley, CFC, Tokio Marine HCC and Coalition; underwriters want MFA, segregated OT networks, tested backups and incident response evidence before they quote.

Do you place food and drink cover outside Bristol?

Yes. We place across our fifty-mile catchment and beyond — Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Newport, Swindon, Yeovil, Taunton, Bridgwater and the wider M4/M5 corridor.

How long does a quote take?

For a standard combined we can usually have terms within two weeks. For a complex programme involving standalone recall, USA export, bonded warehouse or cyber, we work to a sixty-to-ninety day renewal timeline.

Can I have one policy covering manufacturing, importing and distribution?

Often yes, on a single combined wording with sections for each activity. Where one activity dominates the structure is straightforward; where activities are evenly weighted we sometimes split the programme across two specialist insurers to get the best of both appetites.

Other sectors we cover

Coverage area

We place food and drink cover from the Apex office in Bristol across a fifty-mile catchment that takes in the major food and drink clusters of the South West and South Wales. Our Bristol commercial insurance work covers the city's artisan producers, the larger chilled and ambient manufacturers, and the Avonmouth cold-store cluster. We work with operators across Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cardiff, Yeovil and Taunton — and the wider commercial insurance Bristol and South West catchment from Wells to Stroud and Swindon.

SEO metadata

Our service promise. We acknowledge every quote request the same working day. For straightforward risks, indicative terms typically follow within five working days. Complex risks — higher-risk buildings, cladding, mid-term proposals requiring fresh underwriting — may take longer; we’ll send you a progress note by the end of the fifth working day in those cases.
★ 4.0 on Trustpilot (verified)|Listed on the ARB PI broker list|FCA FRN 724952