Shelf Life to Share Price – Princes Eyes a £700m London Listing

Princes is one of those names you meet on the supermarket shelves long before it makes an appearance in the financial news. Tinned tuna, corned beef, even those tins of peaches stacked quietly in the cupboard – the kind of staple you reach for on a Tuesday night when inspiration runs dry. Not, in other words, the stuff of headlines in the Square Mile. But behind those tins lies a corporate story stretching from 19th-century Liverpool to modern Milan – and now, potentially, to a fresh £700 million listing in London.

From Merseyside to Mitsubishi

The business began life in 1880 in Liverpool as Simpson & Roberts, an early player in tinned seafood. Over the following century it became a British fixture, eventually catching the eye of Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation, which bought Princes in 1989. Under Mitsubishi, the group expanded and modernised into one of the UK’s largest food and drink suppliers, the sort of company whose products most of us have bought without ever really thinking about who makes them.