THE nation's growing affection for one of America's favourite snack foods could lead to a bumper jobs boom at a County Durham plant.

Union Snack, the UK's only pretzel manufacturer, saw turnover jump 30 per cent to £5.4m - amounting to an extra 2.5m bags - following growing demand for its product.

Over the last year, Union Snack has strengthened its customer base with pretzels being sold from supermarket chains including Sainsbury's, Tesco, Safeway, Asda, Somerfield, Marks a nd Spencer, Waitrose and Morrisons.

The company also supplies 40 million packs a year as inflight snacks for British Airways, Virgin, Aer Lingus, and KLM.

Export to Japan played a large part in the company's success, a deal which came after the managing director of a distributor there tasted Penn State pretzels on a British Airways flight.

More than 500,000 bags of pretzels have winged their way to Tokyo in the past 12 months, where the Japanese distributor supplies supermarkets throughout Japan.

Other names on the customer portfolio include Boots, Cooperative Retail, KP, and Holland & Barrett.

Union Snackhas created extra staff capacity at its plant in Tanfield Lea, County Durham and plans to take on more workers in the near future.

John Pike, managing director of Union said: "The business was founded in 1996 and over the past seven years has grown constantly.

"We now employ 58 people and to increase our turnover by 30 per cent in one year is a reflection of the growing popularity of pretzels as an alternative snack to crisps."