Andy Macdonald is the man who made apples glamorous. His marketing nous combined with over 40 years’ experience of buying and selling fresh produce launched a humble top fruit into the realms of lucrative branding. Enter Pink Lady, now worth around £140 million and with 29 per cent household penetration. And if that wasn’t enough, he did it all again with Tenderstem, which has averaged 25 per cent volume growth for the last three years.
It’s patently clear that, in a market where produce brands are few and far between, Macdonald’s strategy works and it works very well.
“You could almost say it’s the tip of the iceberg,” he says, referring to a recent decision taken at the Pink Lady AGM to raise the bar on quality for the already strictly monitored apple. “If you’ve got a premium brand you’ve got to maintain the premium quality. And we understand that. In a way you could say we’re trying to make that gap even wider between ourselves and the next apple.”
Jazz is the closest branded competition, says Macdonald, although he adds that Pink Lady, already the third biggest apple in value, will take on Braeburn next.
“The beauty we have is we are able to take our brand to the consumer, and no other apple does that. They just don’t have a means of getting funds to put into the product.”
And they do indeed get around: the Pink Lady and Tenderstem stands will tour the UK again this year pulling up at family car show CarFest for the first time, and Pink Lady will also sponsor the Race for Life and is the official apple for the London Marathon. This is in addition to a comprehensive consumer media presence and utilising the best crowds in London via advertising on the Tube.
“I think everyone who discovers a fruit now thinks ‘can I do a Pink Lady on it?’ because everyone has seen how successful it has been. The difference with Jazz is they’ve got one marketing agent, Worldwide Fruit, so I don’t know how they fund marketing activity, whereas we have a royalty.”
Of course, the other crucial difference for Jazz is it doesn’t have Macdonald.
Starting out with only one O Level – English Literature – he debuted on the fresh produce stage through a management training course at banana company Fyffes in the 1960s.
He was a director at marketer Saphir Fruit for 10 years during the 1990s, and was one of six who orchestrated a management buyout of Saphir’s parent company Albert Fisher, to found distributor Greencell. After a brief stint at Mack Multiples, he joined his MD from Saphir, Gordon Winterbottom, in start-up company Coregeo.
Winterbottom approached Apple and Pear Australia Limited (APAL), owners of the Pink Lady trademark, to pitch the idea for Coregeo to manage the brand.
“It’s a simple model whereby for every kilo sold we charge a royalty,” Macdonald says. This is broken down into several elements: over 60 per cent goes to marketing, some goes towards contingency to challenge anyone who tries to imitate the brand, some goes to research, and a proportion pays for Coregeo. So if you do have the resources, the million-dollar question is how do you build a brand as successful as Pink Lady?
“The first thing is to know you have something special. Then you’ve got to decide what trademark branding to have and protect it by registering in whatever markets you want to sell your product. And then you’ve got to sell it to a retailer. Select the people you want to make that sale and get them to market the brand and the deal.
“The only difference I would make is where we went wrong – we originally allowed Cripps Pink to be sold at Pink Lady quality. Just make sure you’re not competing with your own product under a varietal name.
“There are many apples that have been branded over the past 10 years – and how many are still there? I think people hype up a product before there’s anything there.”
Despite the resources at Coregeo’s disposal, Macdonald stresses it is possible to start from small beginnings. “My interpretation of PR is getting something for nothing. You get a PR team to get your name out there, and send samples out to foodie magazines and foodie journalists so they know what you’ve got.”
He is justifiably proud of the Tenderstem success story, which was taken over by Coregeo in 2004. Since starting with 500,000kg, Tenderstem has rocketed to over five million, and Macdonald has big plans for its future.
Not one to rest on his laurels, he insists Coregeo is ready for new challenges. He hints that the company is exploring new options for its figurehead brands, although he won’t release specifics at this time.
“We are always looking for new fruit or vegetable products to market as a brand. In theory we could also use the Pink Lady brand in other areas, in kitchen equipment for example. We do get companies approaching us who may have something pink in their own brands, and asking if we can get together with them.
“Yes we can, provided that we don’t lose our own identity. We can’t get involved with companies who are so strong and powerful that they’ll just say you either take our name or you don’t.”
As the man who sold the first ever box of Pink Lady apples in the UK, to premium retailer Marks and Spencer, surely Macdonald must have considered the feasibility of being the first to sell British-grown Pink Lady? He is coy on the topic: “They thought that grapes wouldn’t grow in the UK and they didn’t think Braeburn would either, but they have. So you can never say never and it would be wonderful to get a British label on Pink Lady apples.'
His worst-ever job? De-stemming bananas at Fyffes using a curved blade. “I didn’t enjoy that at all,” he grimaces, “especially if the knife slipped.”
As active in leisure as he is in business, Macdonald does yoga and pilates every week, plays golf – although not as much as he’d like – and captained the rugby vets team until he was 58.
“The great thing about this job is I’ve been buying and selling all my career in the fruit business, and I’m still in touch with the same people,” he says. “I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s in the oil business, and he said ‘I have to go to all these rubbish places for oil, and you go to lovely countries and meet lovely people.’ Many other businesses could do with the type of person you find in the fruit industry.”
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