A frozen meals retailer watched record sales edge close to £50 million as dinner hosts snapped up its convenient four-portion meals, party food and puddings.

COOK Trading also managed its highest ever pre-tax profit, up slightly to £2.45 million from £2.41 million, in the year to the end of March 2015, according to its latest accounts filed at Companies House.

Operating profit was £4.2 million, up from £2.6 million, as its kitchen at Eurolink in Sittingbourne, which employs 300 people, made more than £1 million of extra food above budget, all at the planned cost price.

The company sells its meals in more than 90 of its own stores and from concessions in other retailers.

It increased annual sales to just below £50 million before £10.7 million of trade and customer discounts left turnover at £39.2 million, up from £35.8 million, an increase of 15% on the year.

Like-for-like sales in stores grew 2.7%, which the firm described as “decent enough but not quite where we wanted to be”.

Its concessions business, supplying farm shops and independents, continues to thrive, with like-for-like growth ahead of its COOK shops.

Trade of its four portion meals, party food and puddings remains robust but its one and two-portion meals market “remains challenging”.

Company founder and director Edward Perry said: “We had a superb Christmas trading period but outside of that sales were slightly below our expectations. “There’s no doubt the grocery market generally was tough but in hindsight we made a big mistake [in our stores] by delisting too many lines, expecting our customers to switch to other, similar products. They didn’t. Lesson learned.”

The company employed 634 people in the year, up from 505, awarding 70 internal promotions and dedicating 10,458 working hours to training and development. The firm’s wage bill grew from £6.9 million to £9.3 million and it paid its first ever dividend to shareholders of £400,000.

It also joined the B Corp movement – a group of for-profit companies aiming to meet rigorous ethical standards.

It earned the business the 44th spot in the Sunday Times’ annual list of the Best Companies to Work For in the UK, a ranking which Mr Perry said was the most important figure of the year.

Mr Perry said: “I guess the headline as I look back at last year would be: COOK keeps rocking. This was true in the straightforward business sense (record sales and profit).

“But more importantly, it was true with regards to the bigger purpose of COOK: to use our business as a force for good in society.

“Doing what we do is hard. If it wasn’t, everyone else would be doing it too.

“Having a founding statement that promises to cook using the same ingredients and techniques you would at home becomes challenging as we get bigger.

“Delivering a homemade look and taste at scale, using natural ingredients and people rather than machines, is a very tall order.

“Things can and will go wrong and we therefore remain in a state of healthy paranoia about the quality and consistency of our food.”