A huge bulk-buy discount company specialising in products that are past their best-before date is to open its second store in Kent.

Bargain Warehouse has taken over a unit on the Beaver Industrial Estate in Ashford near B&Q and Gallagher Retail Park.

The discount distributor, which describes itself as “Kent’s biggest, gone-past best-before date shop”, will open at 9am on Saturday.

The company already has a unit on Park Farm Industrial Estate in Folkestone, but store manager Mike Harman says the new site in Ashford will be slightly bigger.

“We have been looking at opening another store in Ashford for a while because there is a big population,” explained Mr Harman.

“We have quite a few customers from Ashford come to Folkestone so we thought why not open one there?

“We have refurbed the whole unit and spent a lot of money clearing it out.

“It was a place that used to make vapes before but they left the unit in a terrible state.

“We have had to replace the roof panels and repaint the whole place inside and out to make it like our shop in Folkestone.

“We looked at a unit further back from where we are now but when the landlord said this unit would be coming up in six months so we were happy to wait.”

Mr Harman explained the aim of his store is to stop perfectly good food from going to waste.

“We sell short-dated products and those that have gone past their best-before date,” he said.

“They are perfectly safe to eat and drink but they may have lost taste, texture or colour.

“But with the packaging these companies use, they can go months, even years beyond their dates.

“We do cleaning products too which surprisingly have best-before dates.

“So much waste goes into landfill each year yet it is perfectly good food.

“We are stopping all of that happening and we are a fraction of the price of supermarkets.

“The date is not the same but the quality is there.“

Mr Harman says he hopes to open more stores across the county in the future.