Tell me about how it all began. Did you always want to work in fresh produce?
Chris Mack: I was never really destined to enter the fresh produce business, or never thought I was. I was down to become a graduate trainee at Shell but the day I was supposed to turn up there for my induction I was taken ill with appendicitis.
I ended up going to Wye College, the agricultural college of the University of London, because that seemed like a good place to be. I left there and went to work for a topfruit grower in Essex. It was probably only a small step away from there into Bristol Wholesale Market, which was my first job in the business.
Fresca is now a £450 million business. How did you evolve the business to get to where you are today?
CM: In fairness, when I came to head up the business it was already pretty strong. We had a really strong team of people; we had a business that was big in the wholesale markets and also a significant supplier to a range of multiple retailers, which in those days was quite unusual; and we had a joint venture with Spain’s largest citrus exporter. So I was given a pretty strong set of cards to start playing with.
We continue to have a focus on people and the joint ventures have progressed. It’s been a pretty powerful and successful formula and frankly all I’ve done is try to keep things on the straight and narrow.
What is it about the joint venture formula that you like so much? Why does that formula work for you?
CM: Well, we have three significant joint ventures. One is the citrus business, which like all marriages it’s had its highs and its lows but the fact is that it grew up in an environment that was relatively low pressure. Manor Fresh is another. And the last one, which is probably the most dynamic, is Thanet Earth.
We certainly wouldn’t have entered into that market or that activity on our own so we partnered up with a number of leading Dutch growers. Similarly they wouldn’t have come and invested in the UK on their own. So I look at that and think we’ve actually managed to get two plus two to equal not four, but possibly five. Looking forward, I see more collaboration like this achieving things that businesses are not likely to be able to do on their own.
Do you think a project like Thanet Earth would get off the ground nowadays given the level of investment required in such a volatile industry?
CM: The fact is that Thanet and the south east of England has a high unemployment rate and the jobs people wanted were lower skilled, so moving workers away from cauliflower fields to picking tomatoes was very attractive. This meant we had a very supportive local authority.
I think to replicate it would be pretty difficult. To launch a really viable glasshouse project now requires scale and that means you’ve got to find a site that’s fairly unusual, so I think that’s the limiting factor.
Can we look forward to an announcement about a seventh glasshouse?
CM: When the sixth glasshouse is finished we’ll end up with three growing speciality tomatoes, two growing cucumbers and one growing peppers. We’ve always looked at the seventh plot and said we’ll use it for something wacky. But I don’t mean wacky baccy!
How are you managing Sainsbury’s recent supplier review?
CM: Sainsbury’s came out very publicly last year and announced they were going to adopt a direct-to-grower model so it was fairly obvious that from that moment the world would be a different place. As Sainsbury’s largest produce supplier it was probably inevitable that we would be more seriously affected than others. Ironically I would say that, although we lost a big chunk of Sainsbury’s business, we also won business with them. We’re probably still their largest third-party produce supplier.
What do you think needs to happen for the industry to grow more sustainably?
CM: I’m getting on a bit now so I have lived through quite a lot of change, but I would say our marketplace is changing at a pace that I’ve never experienced before. We all allude to the pressure in the marketplace now – primarily among the major retailers – and that has a knock-on effect, which affects the entire industry.
I think there are huge benefits still to be got at through having a totally transparent supply chain and through this you can build a degree of collaboration with your customers. You can’t really achieve this without complete trust with your customers in both directions and this is really difficult to achieve in the current environment. But the winners will be those who find a way through that and look at the real cost of the supply chain from end to end, while managing their business in a much more efficient way.
What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning and go to work?
CM: It’s a bit of a fear of failure. I head up a business which is knocking on for 150 years old. I am the fourth generation, there are 1,000-odd employees, and a lot of those people have spent their working life in the business. So what’s the most important thing to me? It’s actually the long-term sustainable success of the business. At the end of the day, that is what I should be judged on.
Is there another Mack coming through to continue the legacy?
CM: I don’t think so. I was lucky when I came into the business. I came at a time when it was still okay for a member of the family to come into the business and be encouraged and promoted, but the world is a different place now. It would be very difficult for a member of the family to be parachuted in and run the business.
I sit here today and 39 per cent of the equity of the business is in the hands of the two employee trusts. For me, the best evolution for the business is to finish up as a meaningfully employee-owned business, so one of the things we’ll be working on is moving that percentage up. I think that’s one of the important factors in our ongoing success. —
