Martin Agnew and Geoff Agnew have each been awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours list for services to business and to the community, putting the Henderson Group’s leadership in the spotlight. The 63-year-old Martin is one of the fourth-generation custodians of the family business, which has grown from a Belfast butter stall in the 1890s into one of Northern Ireland’s biggest retail and wholesale firms.

The honours matter because the Henderson Group is not a small local name. It has a turnover of more than £1.3bn, employs more than 6,000 staff and contributes £167 million in wages to the local economy each year. Martin and Geoff, who are currently co-chairs, are the great-grandsons of founder John Henderson, while their father, John Agnew, joined the business in 1957 and still remains involved at board level.

The recognition also landed alongside a wider list of Northern Ireland business figures. Joe O’Neill, the chief executive of Belfast Harbour, received a CBE, while Mukesh Sharma and Dr Helen Kirkpatrick saw their honours upgraded from MBE to OBE. John Harkin, the founder of Alchemy Technology Services, received an OBE, and Trevor Annon and Maurice Henry Geddis were each awarded MBEs.

That spread of honours underlines how the list reached across sectors, but it also creates a subtle imbalance inside the Henderson story. Martin and Geoff received MBEs, while others from Northern Ireland were pushed a step higher: O’Neill with a CBE and Sharma and Kirkpatrick with OBEs for services to economic development, entrepreneurship and innovation. In practical terms, the Agnews’ award is a public nod to stewardship and scale rather than the kind of personal profile that often follows a CBE.

For Henderson Group, the accolade lands at a moment when the business is already tied to long-term local weight. It remains a family company with roots in late 19th-century Belfast, but its footprint now reaches far beyond the butter stall that started it all. The unanswered question is not whether the Agnews have been recognised; it is how this latest honour will shape the public face of a company that has spent generations trying to look both local and large at the same time.