Years of inflation in Chinese wages and freight costs have chased several US manufacturers back home from China. Now a British food producer is delivering arguably the ultimate blow to the one-time factory of the world – it is transplanting noodle-making from Guangzhou to Leeds.

The phenomenon of “re-shoring” is gaining traction globally as the cost of doing business in China, including transport, catches up on developing markets. The differential is shrunk yet further in Britain by the renewed weakness of sterling.

Symington’s, the maker of Ragu pasta sauce and Golden Wonder’s pot noodles, says it is bringing noodle manufacturing on to British soil, cancelling its Chinese contracts and creating about 50 jobs in the process, in the latest sign that offshoring – popular in recent decades as a means of exploiting lower labour and land costs – is falling out of favour in the UK as it has in the US.