it has grown into the UK’s second-largest food business
A West Midlands businessman once known for cutting meat in a butcher’s shop is now a billionaire.
Ranjit Singh Boparan and his wife Baljinder have seen their fortune rise to £1.017 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2025. That’s up more than a third from £750 million in 2024.
Ranjit, nicknamed the ‘Chicken King’, is now the sixth richest person in the West Midlands and the 153rd richest in the UK.
He was born in Bilston and started working in a local butcher’s.
In 1993, he founded 2 Sisters Food Group in West Bromwich. The business began by cutting and packing frozen meat and had a turnover of just £6 million.
Three decades later, it has grown into the UK’s second-largest food business, worth £3.2 billion in turnover. It is second only to Associated British Foods, at £3.3 billion.
The group employs more than 23,000 people across sites in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Poland.
In 2011, Ranjit bought Northern Foods, a FTSE 100 company which was then Marks and Spencer’s biggest food supplier. He also acquired Bernard Matthews, a major turkey producer, in 2016.
2 Sisters Food Group now supplies many of the UK’s leading supermarkets, including Tesco, Asda, Aldi, Lidl, Morrisons, Co-op and Waitrose. Fast food giant KFC is also among its clients.
His wider business empire includes Boparan Restaurant Group, which owns Gourmet Burger Kitchen, the UK franchise of Slim Chickens, Giraffe, Ed’s Diner, Carluccio’s, Fishworks, Cinnamon Collection and Wondertree.
Since 2017, the Boparan family’s wealth has nearly doubled from the £544 million recorded in that year’s Rich List. They once lived in Roman Lane in Little Aston.
The group formerly owned the Goodfella’s pizza and Fox’s Biscuits brands, which have since been sold.
However, the family’s rise has not been without controversy.
In 2006, Ranjit’s then 19-year-old son, Antonio Boparan, was convicted of dangerous driving after a crash in Sutton Coldfield.
He was found to have caused a collision between his Range Rover Sport and the Edwards family’s Jeep Cherokee on Streetly Lane.
The crash left one-year-old Cerys Edwards with life-changing injuries. Cerys required full-time care until her death in 2015.
Antonio Boparan was sentenced to 21 months in jail. In 2019, he admitted causing death by dangerous driving and received a further 18-month sentence.
Cerys’s father, Gareth Edwards, said at the time the sentence was an “insult”.
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