Boss takes all 800 of his employees on a cruise to thank them for hitting targets

Entire workforce is off to the Caribbean

Winter sun is in store for Bertch Cabinet workers (Rex)

The boss of a US cabinet-making company is treating his employees to a reward for meeting their targets for the year - by taking all 800 of them on a week-long cruise.

Gary Bertch, who co-founded Bertch Cabinet in Iowa with his wife Becky, will take more than 800 of his workers to the Caribbean next month, having promised them the cruise as an incentive and challenging them to meet new goals.

Their company hauled itself back into profit last year after a tough time following the 2008 recession, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported.

Mr Bertch said: "We were anticipating we’d have better sales again this year.

"We just tried to get all of our people pumped up a little more to achieve the various goals, both customer-oriented goals and financial goals.

"There’s been a very slow recovery in the industry. The financial goal was the big one. We hit the other goals, not by much, but we hit them. We’re looking forward to the following year."

Bertch Cabinet employees were first treated to a mass winter holiday in 1989, 12 years after the company was founded. It once employed 1,000 people, but that dipped to about 600 in 2011 before recovering in recent years.

This year their cruise will take them around the Caribbean including a stop at the popular scuba-diving destination of Cozumel island, off the coast of Mexico.