A FAMILY-run Valleys food company is celebrating half a century in business.

Blaenavon-based Vin Sullivan Foods has been supplying hotels, restaurants and caterers across the UK with food since 1960.

Among the 6,000 different products the company supplies from small businesses across the UK are Welsh farmhouse cheeses, Scottish smoked salmon, live Menai mussels, Hampshire trout, Devon clotted cream and Spanish saffron.

In 1969 the company imported its first cooked meats from Poland, in 1975 it brought its first maize-fed chickens from France, in 1989 its first ostrich arrived from South Africa, in 1990 it bought crocodile from Australia and in 2002 it began importing bison from Canada.

Foods are distributed to destinations including the Carribean, Scotland and the Isles of Scilly.

Managing director John Sullivan recently unearthed company invoices to the Angel Hotel in Abergavenny dating back 50 years.

He said: “The produce ordered by the company five decades ago was far simpler than today’s and included apples, potatoes, marrows, parsley and brown trout, reflecting the more seasonal and less exotic tastes of the time.”

The founder of the company, Vincent Sullivan, from Abergavenny, died in 1964.