You won’t find Anthony Pile squeezing in nine holes before rolling into the office.
From 4am to 6am, the 68-year-old Blue Skies founder and chairman is often lying awake in bed thinking – something he doesn’t believe those in British industry do often enough.
As for golf: “I think it’s the most boring thing in the world,” Pile says. “Chasing a funny little white thing around a large estate that might otherwise be a nice lake or a running track. Me? I get my kick in life out of taking on the adversities which yield something very special.”
Thus, as a company, Blue Skies is as special as they come. The business’ origins stem from Pile’s time as MD of Orchard House Foods, which, in the mid-1990s, forayed away from its principle line, juice, into cut fruit.
Pile notes: “Before that moment, there was never a fresh-cut fruit anywhere in the world. So Orchard House and particularly me and two other magnificent people, Mary Bosley, who was then working for Marks & Spencer, and Ray Marriott, a scientist, got together to work out what to do with a spare bit of factory we had. And we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be good to produce something that was actually freshly cut?’ And that was really the beginning of it.”
Pile left Orchard House shortly afterwards to focus on such “fresh from harvest” products, as he prefers to call them, resulting in Blue Skies’ creation. He tells FPJ: “I don’t think there’s a base product introduced to the fresh-cut market that wasn’t first devised by us. The history books will one day tell the tale that we have been at the heart of development and innovation, and we’re leading the way, and are still doing that.
“There are things we are doing now that will soon be adopted by everybody and the pricing and margins will be adjusted so they’re a commodity, as we’ve seen a number of our products become.
“But nobody had put coconut or pomegranate in before we did. Or, believe it or not, mango or pineapple. All these areas started with us first.”
The firm’s key production bases are in several African nations and Brazil. Blue Skies mostly cuts at source, employing thousands of people as a result. For some, such practice would be deemed nothing short of recklessly elaborate. This, after all, is 2015, and technology’s claws are dug deeply into society.
But Pile cannot imagine any other way of doing things. He tells FPJ: “We’re using an awful lot of people, but to my mind, it’s actually rather good, keeping down the capitalised items like big machines that cut up pineapple in a pretty ordinary way. Why not do it in a more attentive way, with a regard for quality, and using an individual that can spot, say, a hair?
“In that environment, though, you have low productivity, in economists’ terms. Yet I think it’s rather good, and works through into helping the African.”
He adds: “Should we really have this NIMBYish approach so often heard, where everything should come from immediately around your region? Is it really something we’re all excited about? Of course, it’s nice to look after Farmer Giles from the village next door, but we need to broaden our minds.
“We have a responsibility in Britain not just to think about our businesses, but about our world. The amount of time it takes to go between Newcastle and Cornwall, you can get to West Africa, where people, 80 to 90 per cent of them, don’t have access to electricity, or running water, or quality medicine.”
Underpinning everything Blue Skies does is its Joint Effort Enterprise model, which Pile claims gives employees “an identity with which they feel pride”.
“This culture is very important to us,” he adds. “I often feel that in British industry, we don’t talk enough about culture. We don’t talk about the way in which we glue people together.”
Pile believes his military background has enabled him to achieve this at Blue Skies, with the armed forces often rendering class barriers redundant. As well as a lack of focus on culture in British industry, Pile also slams it for not thinking enough about long-term planning: “It’s terribly important,” he says. “I don’t even think three years is long enough. I’m thinking of what we’re going to be achieving in 10 years’ time. And unless you do that, you don’t get there.”
Pile doesn’t see any room for growth in the UK market – M&As aren’t really his “style”, and he claims consumers in the UK spend just seven per cent of their disposable income on food, far lower than the vast majority of countries. “Thus, what I’m going to perhaps do instead is do something in the US or China, or somewhere else where they desperately need to have the quality that our consumers enjoy here in the UK,” he says.
Very much the forward-thinking globalisation drum-banger, Pile also cannot understand why “fear” surrounds labeling a fruit or veg product with its country of origin. He says: “Recent label legislation from the EU has said that nobody has to say that a product has come from Whereverland. But I think it is of interest, and I think it’s a little bit arrogant of us sometimes to say consumers aren’t interested in where the thing comes from.
“Perhaps the product comes from some horribly war-torn part of one of the –stans. And you can’t help but feel then that the people there are benefitting.”
Nobody can accuse Pile of not helping those who hail from some of the world’s less well-off exotics-producing nations. And it’s a message he is keen for others in this industry and others to take on board. “We are providing consumers in Europe with a standard which we believe is as good as or better than that available elsewhere, and at the same time making a huge difference to the way people live,” Pile says.
“We employ 3,000 people in Ghana, and also operate in South Africa, Brazil, and Egypt, where we provide an income for people who wouldn’t otherwise have it. We give them a leg up into the middle class.
“And this will not only play its part in helping to restore or enable some sort of level playing field between the way we live here and the way they live there, but will also perhaps do something to halt the massive flow of people across the Mediterranean in boats by smugglers. Isn’t that only fair, to help people free themselves from desperate levels of poverty, or worse?”
Never let it be said that this industry doesn’t have the power to change the world for the better.
Blue Skies started life in 1997 in a small room in Pile’s house, before progressing to the living room, and finally the Northamptonshire base it calls its UK home today.
- Blue Skies uses the hold sections of commercial aircraft to transport products such as fresh-cut melon, mango, pineapple, pomegranate and coconut to the UK.
Factfile
- Blue Skies Holdings’ most recent turnover was £60 million.
- The business is “well on track” to double this figure within the next decade.
- Pile spent 13 years in the army after leaving school.
- He then did what is now known as an MBA at the London Business School.
- A number of jobs followed, culminating in Pile being sacked twice, and made redundant on two other occasions.
- He was “determined to catch up with those who had not been in the army”, though, and set himself the goal of being a managing director by the age of 40.
- Which he did. Before getting fired.
- He then took on the job as MD at Fresh Fruit Juice Manufacturing Limited. His first move was to change the company name to Orchard House Foods (OHF). Pile left OHF in late 1996.
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