AN ice cream manufacturer says it has saved £1.5m by using in-house skills to build its automatic mixing plant.

The mixer, installed at Richmond Ice Cream, of Leeming Bar, near Bedale, North Yorkshire, can process up to 75,000 litres of ice cream an hour.

Sam Wrist, leading manufacturing manager at the plant, said: "This new, fully-automated facility will speed up production, improve product quality and guarantee recipe consitency in both preparation and processing.

"Also, by using in-house skills, we now have a totally bespoke mix plant at a cost of £1.5m. If we had followed the usual path of hiring outside firms, the total cost would have been in excess of £3m."

The machine has four, 28-tonne silos for cream, glucose and butter, while sugar storage capacity has increased from 60 to 108 tonnes.

Project manager Ryad Apasa said: "The other key advantage of this self-design approach is that we know the location of every piece of equipment down to the smallest wire.

"Therefore, if anything goes wrong, we can sort it out ourselves."