Helping food industry acquire taste for international success

Exporting cheese to France, beer and salami to Germany, and pasta to Italy has become the success story of the State's food industry which is promoted abroad by An Bord Bia.

Michael Duffy, the board's chief executive, describes the ultimate coals-to-Newcastle scenario as the sale of Irish ham to Parma in Italy. Such are the idiosyncracies of the speciality food sector, whose companies are an example of small enterprises building on the national reputation of having a clean, green environment.

Although contributing only a small proportion of the £5 billion (€6.35 billion) made by the industry last year, the 93 companies listed with the food board range from Aran Salmon, based on Inis Mor, to Wild Irish Fruits, a Limerick-based supplier of dessert products and preserves.

In between are some surprising businesses, producing foods such as venison, sheep's cheese, fermented salami and waffles.

The mouth-watering aspect of the job has not been lost on Mr Duffy, who has moved a long way from his first post with Courtaulds, the textiles and chemicals group, as an expert in the rheological properties of molten polymers, which, he explains, are "plastics and how they flow, and how they behave at different temperatures and pressures".

Far from being a research physicist now, he is fascinated by the "breadth" of the food industry. "Everybody relates to it. Everybody has an opinion about it. Everybody has an interest in it. And it is an important industry from the economic point of view." He has just returned from Paris and is not above a little promotional blarney himself, having assured the French that St Patrick was from Britanny, a claim the Welsh might take issue with.

Into his fifth year promoting the industry, Mr Duffy is looking at an increasingly competitive environment as retailers internationalise in a common euro market of 290 million consumers.

"You have the major supermarkets operating in a defined marketplace, with a currency that provides price transparency, and they have the information technology capability to put it all together."

He has a budget of about £20 million, one-third of which is provided by the industry through a levy and contributions to food exhibitions. His organisation provides advice to companies seeking to break new ground on the continent. Often their foreign market expertise may be confined to Britain where up to 80 per cent of food companies' exports go.

"The first thing they will learn is retailers will operate quite differently. For example, they may not have centralised distribution. The local supermarket manager may have far more autonomy."

The approach is more time intensive but the prize is high volumes of goods carried if a major supermarket such as the French giant, Carrefour, is won over.

Within the industry, market trends have been ascribed to each passing decade. The 1970s focus was on price, the 1980s on quality, the 1990s on convenience. For the next decade, the issue is reckoned to be the "time famine" of modern living. "The deficit is in time now rather than in cash," Mr Duffy says.

The mainstays of the business continue to be the meat and dairy industries. In the beef sector, 90 per cent of the produce is exported, and over 50 per cent of the pig and sheepmeat output. Export earnings of beef amounted to over £1 billion in 1998, pigmeat £204 million and sheepmeat £143 million. Dairy and ingredients account for the largest sector, amounting to £1.66 billion.

Beef is still reeling from the BSE fallout of March 1993, when European exports immediately dropped by one-third, and the challenge will be to develop new markets following the phasing out of EU subsidies and recovery of European markets. "They [European countries] are the industry's high-value markets," he says.

Lamb, as a foreign produce, sells in France at a lower cost than French lamb and his priority here is to "narrow the differential" by promoting the product's quality. One of An Bord Bia's aims is to diversify the international markets outside of Europe and to avoid over-reliance on the high-volume Russian and Egyptian markets. Mr Duffy says much of the new focus will be on the Middle East and Asia. He is optimistic about the new quality standards applicable to food and says that genetically-modified products need a lot more research. An Bord Bia has launched a promotional campaign for "quality-assured bacon", which is based on the international ISO 9000 standard, while beef traceability "is there and it is going to be there in the future". He recognises that consumers are looking beyond the product now to environmental concerns and cruelty to animals - "stall-and-tether" issues.

"From an Irish industry point of view, we need to be aware of the trend that the consumer is looking for information. We need to be absolutely assured that the integrity of our products stand up," he says.

In May, Dublin will host the 12th World Meat Congress, an event which "is a great opportunity for us to put on a show that reflects the kind of meat industry that we have".

Mr Duffy is a graduate in physics from UCD, having begun his career with Courtaulds in Britain and finding himself in a management position by the age of 24. After transferring to a plant the company was establishing in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, he moved to the IDA. "The choice for me at the time was either to stay in the technical area or develop into a business area," he says.

He did stints in the IDA with the rescue-and-restructure, pharmaceuticals and electronics divisions before becoming the head of Forbairt's food and agribusiness sector. In December 1994, he was appointed to his present position as head of the newly-formed national food board. The job also means meeting people who are impassioned by food. "The chefs are really committed to it," he says, "they really want to show Irish food for what it is worth."

His favourite food is beef and he has developed a taste for Rioja wines from visiting a sister in Santander. But, while enjoying food, he says he has learnt to say "no", "which is the hard part".

He has a tendency to be too available to people, he believes, which means they "can transfer the monkey onto your back". But he places value in performance and cites the three Ps of politics, posturing and positioning as his dislikes. A naturally calm person, he takes refuge in the gym three times a week, and enjoys taking walks from Dun Laoghaire harbour to Sandycove or to Killiney. His wife, Jennifer, is a remedial teacher and they have five children. In his working life, he says he learnt the value of people and the role they play in an organisation's success. At a course he did in INSEAD business school, Paris, he remembers the emphasis on organisational development. By way of example of what management was not, a lecturer quoted a definition that "management is the dynamic synthesis of contending dialectics".

"You can describe management as that but the best definition I got was in my first job, in Courtaulds. My first boss said, `management is about getting things done through people'."