AN £11m investment by a North Yorkshire ice cream factory has helped it land its first overseas order.

Richmond Ice Cream has invested £7m in an automated cone line that produces 2.5 million cones a week.

As part of the investment at Leeming Bar, Richmond has also increased its capacity to produce tub ice cream by 25 million tubs a year.

A £500,000 filler that can fill either one or two-litre ice cream pots at the rate of 140 pots a minute has also been installed.

The company has landed its first export order from a Scandanavian company, which does not want to be named.

As well as the exports, private label cones for Richmond's main UK customers, which include Nestl ice creams and Ribena frozen lollies, will soon be rolling off the line.

The manufacturer is also hoping to expand the cone market with new products.

David Atkinson, Leeming Bar factory manager, said: "The cone line has a potential capacity of 200 million cones a year and will help us make a big impact on the £48m UK cone market. It also increases our ability to produce other products."

Richmond Ice Cream is the UK's largest volume manufacturer of ice cream products, and the operating subsidiary of Richmond Foods plc, which announced a record turnover of more than £127m for the year ending September 2003, with pre-tax profits rising by 28 per cent.

It is in the final stages of a three-year, £27m capital investment programme. The company has a workforce of more than 950 at five sites - Leeming Bar, in North Yorkshire, Crossgates, in Leeds, Bude, in Cornwall, Ivybridge, Devon, and Wigan, Lancashire.

Richmond makes Nestl brands such as Fab, Rowntrees Fruit Pastil Lolly, Smarties and Mivvi, with Yorkie and Toffee Crisp ice creams introduced this year. The new equipment in the Leeming Bar factory can produce different flavours for customers who want mixed flavours in the same ice-cream carton.

The company can now produce ice cream cones with a longer shelf-life using its new technology, which involves dipping cones in chocolate before freezing them.

No one from the company was available to speak to The Northern Echo about the job implications of the new technology.