The Jersey potato sector is responding to rationalisation in its customer base, internal and overseas competition and rising costs with the formation this season of the Jersey Royal Potato Marketing Company. The new integrated growing and marketing company will supply 100 per cent of the multiple and wholesale outlets this season.
Six growers have joined together to form the new corporate farming company, and so have all the companies’ marketing organisations: Top Produce, JPMO, and Farm Fresh Produce. Woodside Farms has also sold its export early potato interests to the Jersey Royal Company. Between them they represent more than three-quarters of the island’s total sales.
With all Jersey’s multiple and wholesale sales under its umbrella it accounts for more than 2,500 acres of potato cultivation, and employs 230 staff, making it one of the largest businesses in the island.
The new company has a capitalisation of £8.5 million and all shareholders are minority ones.
Its managing director is Tom Binet formerly of Top Produce. He said that in view of the massive problems and hardship facing Jersey growers, and the intensification and consolidation of competition within the UK marketplace, sales from Jersey were reducing and customer support was eroding. To reverse the trend, the first thing was to eliminate internal competition, and he hoped the formation of the new company was a step in the right direction.
"Because we have been able to take advantage of economies of scale, there is less machinery, and the crop is being produced less intensively as well as more efficiently," said Binet.
"The island has had lots of highly efficient farmers, running highly inefficient farms... "There is far too much cost in having 30 to 50 separate farms with a land-base scattered throughout Jersey, all competing with each other...Corporate restructuring brings cost efficiencies to bear."
The company plans to increase and diversify further, and to continue to make better use of its capital equipment and investment.
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