Life is sweet for executive who clearly gives a fig

THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:Michael Carey chairman, Jacob Fruitfield Group

IT’S A Monday afternoon in the Residence private members’ club overlooking St Stephen’s Green. The sun is beaming in the window to the front lounge when a polished waiter delivers us two cups of coffee.

“So where are the Club Milks, Michael,” says I to the executive chairman and majority shareholder of the Jacob Fruitfield Food Group. “Times are bad . . . there’s a recession on for God’s sake,” he chuckles.

It’s all light-hearted banter with a man who doesn’t take himself too seriously. In fact, Jacob Fruitfield, the Tallaght-based company that makes a range of biscuits, mints, jams and ketchup, is doing quite nicely in these recessionary times.

Its 2009 financial accounts won’t be available for another six months or so, but Carey reveals that turnover last year was flat at €90 million. This was quite a result in the context of the collapse in the Irish economy and consumer spending.

“We’ve been discounting our brands by an average 15 per cent,” Carey explains. “Pricing is a core part of what the consumer wants, and it is working.”

Jacob Fruitfield also made a bottom-line profit in 2009, after years when the costs of restructuring the food business dragged it into the red. “The exceptionals are gone. The company is profitable, yes,” Carey adds.

Jacob Fruitfield has 12 of the top 20 biscuit brands in Ireland, including Fig Rolls, Kimberley, Mikado and Coconut Creams. “Thankfully, our brands are doing really well,” he says. “Our share in biscuits is up, our share in sauces is up. The Chef brands have responded really well to advertising.”

Carey, himself, is also doing well. A week ago he picked up a gong from the UCD Smurfit School as its 2010 Alumnus of the Year to add to a trophy cabinet that already includes an Ernst Young entrepreneur category award.

His old mucker Aidan Heavey of Tullow Oil was similarly honoured by the UCD Quinn School.

These awards are as much recognition for their successes in business as their burgeoning roles in social entrepreneurship. In Carey’s case, that ranges from an involvement with the Simon Community to being a director of Traidlinks in Africa, and chairman of the Soul of Haiti foundation, which grew out of a trip by a large group of Irish entrepreneurs to the impoverished state in 2007.

“We have a number of projects going on there, which started in January and have substantially geared up now.”

Carey visited Haiti recently, after the devastating earthquake. “It’s literally a disaster zone. Many buildings are lying as they fell, literally in rubble. They’ve a lot of difficulty to get through and it will take a long, long time for them to get back on to their feet.”

So how will Soul of Haiti help?

“We have half a dozen serious projects running,” Carey explains. “One of them is under the heading of Haiti is ‘Back in Business’. We’ve been identifying export opportunities for existing Haitian businesses that are still operating or getting back on their feet.”

One is a a coffee company based in the capital, Port au Prince. “We’ve linked that business with Java Republic,” he says. “Java has agreed to purchase quite a substantial portion of Haitian coffee, and they’ll launch it as part of their coffee offering.”

Carey also plans to import “some high-quality Haitian rum. We’re hoping to bring in a few container-loads.”

Another project is called ‘Brand Haiti’. Carey has assembled a number of Irish business leaders with expertise in branding who will help Haiti to build a “nation brand”, as has happened in South Africa and elsewhere. “That will be a great project . . . it has a lot of potential.”

Soul of Haiti is also trying to encourage Irish investors to locate businesses there. “We already have Taxback.com, and there are guys looking at setting up hotels and bars.”

The foundation has a full-time employee operating on the ground in Haiti – Irishman Conor Murphy, who previously worked for Ernst Young. Thankfully, Murphy survived the earthquake. “He slept on a tennis court on the first night.”

With the Simon Community, Carey recently helped negotiate a deal with Irish cash-and-carry group BWG to supply a range of food products to the homeless charity’s Dublin hostels. It will be worth about €250,000 to Simon.

“The intention is to roll that out to Cork and hopefully to Galway and to get more food companies involved,” he explains.

Carey spends about two days a week working in Jacob Fruitfield, and the balance on various charity projects. Fortunately, he has a strong management team at Jacob Fruitfield – led by former Aer Lingus executive Seamus Kearney – to mind the shop.

Carey was probably always destined to sell biscuits, given that his father ran a sweet shop in Cabra. “From the age of 10, I was standing behind the counter and eating my way through the stock,” he says. That would have been the first experience of earning.

“As we grew up, my Dad would ask us to look after the shop on a Sunday afternoon and let us run the shop. That was probably my first exposure to trying to make a profit.”

Carey claims to be the “black sheep” of the family. His brother is a heart surgeon in Manchester – “I supply him with his customers” – and a sister has a PhD in biotechnology. Carey went to UCD where he completed his BComm, leaning more towards branding than accountancy.

Ironically, he subsequently applied for a junior marketing role with Jacobs, but was knocked back. That led him to return to UCD to do a masters in the Quinn school. He would subsequently return to Jacobs, first as marketing director, before buying the company in 2004.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have the rejection letter, which would have been good to have on the wall.”

Carey has held a number of senior roles in both Ireland and the UK. He is a former marketing director of CC, and was managing director of Fox’s biscuits and the Evian and Volvic water businesses in the UK.

In 2001, he was headhunted by cereal maker Kellogg’s as managing director of its UK and Irish division. By his own admission, he was a square peg in a round hole. “They found me out after about seven or eight months and they eventually fired me,” he says candidly. “I just didn’t fit in at all at Kellogg’s. They tend to recruit people who grow up within the Kellogg’s organisation. They have a very strong culture. It didn’t work from either side. It wasn’t a match.

“So they fired me and paid me a good chunk of money not to work for them.”

For Carey, it gave him the funds to buy the Fruitfield business in 2002 and then Jacobs two years later. “The cheque was the equity investment in Jacob Fruitfield,” he says.

As a young buck, Carey set himself the target of being a marketing director by the age of 30 (he was 29 when he got that role with CC); a managing director by the age of 35 (Evian and Volvic at 34); and a company owner by 40.

“The deal on Fruitfield was completed on the 15th of July 2002 and I was 40 on the 27th of July, so it was very close,” he says.

“Looking back it seems a bit daft, but planning your career as if you were a product being sold is a relatively sensible thing to do,” he advises.

Since snaffling the Fruitfield and Jacobs businesses, Carey has completed a major restructuring of both, closing their manufacturing facilities in Tallaght and moving production abroad. So is it fair to continue to refer to Club Milk, Fig Rolls and Chef sauces as Irish?

He bristles ever so slightly at this suggestion. “More than half the products that we acquired were not made in Ireland when we acquired them. Some of those brands were, for decades, being sourced from the UK or farther afield.

“I think the Irishness of the brands is about the heritage and the uniqueness of the products. A brand like Kimberley and Mikado is uniquely Irish. It’s 99 per cent sold here, it’s made on a production line that we own. It’s using our recipe, it’s using our expertise. The intellectual property in that brand is done entirely from Ireland.

“It’s 100 per cent owned in Ireland. All the profits are retained in Ireland, all the taxes are paid in Ireland. Maybe this is the modern part of ‘Irish made’,” he argues.

Carey is also adamant that the restructuring was necessary for the brands to have a secure future. He highlights how the company will spend about €4 million this year marketing its products.

“In our case the fundamental problem was that we had a huge facility that was massively under-utilised. If we hadn’t done what we did, financially we’d be under huge pressure.”

Not surprisingly, Carey has a sweet tooth, so what’s his favourite biscuit?

“Fig rolls,” he says, getting a plug in for one of his best-sellers. “There’s a high fruit content, they’re probably one of the healthiest biscuits on the market – and I say that without grinning.”

And his favourite non-Jacob Fruitfield? He smiles devilishly, pauses, and then says: “Most of them taste like cardboard. There are some awful products out there.

“Snack is a relatively acceptable product – but it wouldn’t be as good as Club Milk.”

On the record

Name: Michael Carey

Age: 47

Family: Married to Alison, they have two children

Lives: Rathgar

Hobbies: Golf and cycling

Something you might expect: "I grew up in a sweet shop in Cabra, where I developed a sweet tooth."

Something that might surprise: "I've no idea how they get the figs into the Fig Rolls."