Richard Quinn CEO of Farmcare

Richard Quinn

It’s been quite a year for Farmcare Trading and the business’ CEO Richard Quinn.

The Manchester-based company was born in its current guise in August 2014 after The Co-operative sold it to charitable foundation the Wellcome Trust for around £250 million.

It’s been a case of all hands on deck ever since.

Farmcare, previously known as Co-operative Farms, primarily produces potatoes, arable crops and top fruit on more than 50,000 acres in England and Scotland, and it also owns seven farm estates and two packhouses, and manages another eight farms.

Quinn says: “I describe us as having been a department in The Co-op. We’re now an entity in our own right, have a shareholder to answer to, and we have a board. And there’s a number of roles we’ve created to go with the fact that we’re now an externally-facing business, rather than an internal one to help us with our strategy and plan.

“The opportunity we have here is significant. We have a blank sheet of paper and it allows us to say, ‘what does Farmcare want to be when it grows up?’

“In any business, you rarely get the chance to press reset, and question everything. What you usually do is look at what you’ve got, use it, adjust it, and tweak it, rather than look at it completely with a fresh set of eyes, and say, ‘what does it mean for the next 10 years?’”

Quinn talks a few times of the sheer relief of being able to put a long-term plan in place, something Farmcare couldn’t do previously as “a lot of the drivers were ‘how do we fulfil the requirements of The Co-op at this particular time?’”

He adds: “The main difference between us and other fresh produce suppliers is we’re a corporate entity with some degree of scale, and we can think about the next 10 or 15 years with a degree of confidence in that we’re able to think that way, and thinking about how we can influence markets, and what those markets might be doing.

“That’s not saying what other scale producers in the market are doing isn’t right – it’s just that we can think in a slightly different way. We’ll be right in some cases, and wrong in others, but it’s different ways of thinking that allow us to invest in the long-term, and not just for tomorrow.”

Nevertheless, there are short-term challenges, mostly around implementing new back office infrastructure. Quinn adds: “If you press reset, you create a new normal, and I hope it’s not the new normal, as I don’t want to tell my wife that it is given the long hours we are needing to put in. But there are certainly a good 12 to 18 months of hard work ahead of us to be able to get set up and focused on the future.”

Farmcare is on the hunt for new customers, and Quinn emphasises that anyone coming on board with his firm in this way would have to buy into the business’ modus operandi, and sign up for the long-term.

He states that Farmcare isn’t closing the door to working with anybody in the industry, and is flexible enough to correspond with retailers’ new way of working: “The ability we have because of the scale and scope of the business means we can respond differently and offer retailers the chance to say ‘I want to be close with my supply chain’, without involving 50 different parties,” Quinn says.

“We’re in a market and climate where people are interested in cost, and it’s now about how do retailers and food businesses achieve their goals in an efficient way.”

Farmcare recently highlighted its ambition when it announced Phil Britton’s appointment as senior potato agronomist and technical manager.

The business hopes that Britton, who joins from potato firm Manor Fresh, will use his expertise and potato farming strategies to “exert considerable influence over the quality and variety of potatoes stocked on supermarket shelves across the country, as far ahead as the next decade.”

Farmcare is also on the hunt for a finance director and an operations director, new roles the firm has created as it maps out its road to even greater success: “We want to be an attractive place for people to come and work for,” Quinn says. “If I’m trying to be a leading grower and don’t attract people who want to achieve that, then we’re never going to achieve that.”

The business’ most recent turnover was £61 million, and Quinn tells FPJ that Farmcare hopes to increase this in about six years’ time to £111m. He also hopes to up the number of employees at the company from around 250 to 330 in this period.

Any profit made is invested back into the Wellcome Trust, which then reinvests it in medical research: “I never thought I’d be a charity worker, but that’s what Farmcare’s investment job is to do,” Quinn says.

Like any potato supplier, Farmcare is having to deal with the repercussions of falling demand and an oversupply in the market.

Quinn says the answer to both problems is to work to ensure that the product is as high quality as can be: “We can’t make consumers turn to other more convenient solutions such as a Tilda pack of microwave rice, so they need to expect quality from the product every time, and therefore, our job is not to disappoint,” he notes.

“Also, consumers don’t want a huge choice. What they want to know is ‘does this product perform if I do this with it?’ So simpler and clearer ranging will help: nobody wants to stand in front of a 10-metre potato fixture picking from 70 different products.”

Collaborating more effectively is another significant challenge for the industry, in Quinn’s view. He notes: “In other countries, there’s far more knowledge and information sharing transparently, to help improve quality generally and focus across the industry.

“Yes, we’re all competitors, but we need to work out how we help retailers try and win by producing good-quality products, and through sharing things that aren’t competitively driven.”

Quinn is out of his chair in a flash after our interview. There’s not a second to waste in the Farmcare project.

The business might be taking a long-term view, but hitting reset creates a enormous short-term to-do list as well.

Reheated late-night dinners will remain a reality for one member of the Quinn family for a while yet.

Farmcare Facts

- Primarily produces potatoes
- Grows top fruit at sites in Hereford and Kent
- Top fruit is packed by Wye Fruit, which markets it through Richard Hochfeld
- Also grows blackcurrants, peas and cherries
- Around 20 per cent of Farmcare’s produce went to The Co-op pre-split
- That accounted for three per cent of what The Co-op sold, and was all potatoes