Doug Robertson Florette Agrial Fresh Produce

Doug Robertson

Agrial might be a famous name in the French and wider European fresh produce market, but up until now it has been relatively anonymous in Britain. The parent of the Florette brand has been happy to take a back seat in terms of public recognition in this country, but thanks to a new structure and acquisition drive it is set to become one of the most influential players in the market.

Agrial Fresh Produce, as it is now known in the UK, comprises four sites and business units – Florette at Lichfield, MyFresh Wigan (which it bought last August from the William Jackson Food Group), Salads to Go in Skelmersdale and Axgro Foods in Scunthorpe.

Explaining the new structure, managing director Doug Robertson says the move was primarily about “simplicity”, offering more flexibility and mobility for staff to move within the business as well as having unified HR policies, a single set of accounts and audits, and other logical synergies. For the parent company, it’s about more than that though: “Agrial updated its long-term strategy, and one of the things to come out of that was a new logo and message – ‘Cultivate our roots, Open up to the world’,” Robertson explains. “It’s about being proud to be a French co-operative but also opening up to the world and becoming a more international business, hence the interest in the UK.”

Certainly there are plans to become a serious heavy hitter in this market. Florette UK & Ireland’s £45.9m turnover in 2016 wasn’t enough to secure it a place in the latest FPJ Big 50, but the now-expanded group’s £130m would have earned it 26th place. And that’s just the start of Agrial’s ambition: “I think if you look at the work that Agrial have done around the key elements of their strategy up to 2025, they asked us as part of that process to look at our activities in terms of the broad direction of the business,” Robertson says. “And it’s fair to say we proposed an ambitious plan for 2025 – probably present in more segments in the market than we currently are and with a turnover that would get us past the £200m mark.”

That will be achieved thanks to a much wider depth of focus than was ever the case purely with Florette, which supplied predominantly branded products into supermarkets. Now, with Wigan supplying the own-label and foodservice markets and Axgro’s beetroot offering and established export markets, there’s a clear platform from which to branch out further. “Brand is still a very important part of our business,” Robertson clarifies. “We do, however, want to operate in a number of different segments of the market, and that was the attraction of the Wigan acquisition. So it’s not a message that brand is not important to us, it’s a message that we want a much more balanced business and we will continue to develop the Florette brand.”

As a unified group, Agrial Fresh Produce has a pretty impressive customer base of some of the biggest operators in the business, from the big-four supermarkets to the discounters and foodservice chains ranging from Pizza Hut and Nando’s to Subway, KFC and Greggs. That gives the company a 20 per cent share of the UK leafy prepared salad market in foodservice, in addition to its already sizeable clout in supermarket retail.

That sense of a wider portfolio of activities extends to the production side too. Florette already has a partnership growing operation called Angflor which supplies homegrown babyleaf and lamb’s lettuce, and Robertson teases that could be just the start of plans to increase control of its own supply chain in terms of domestic production. “Angflor is the first step in getting closer to agriculture in the UK,” he says. “There’s clearly a journey to be had. If you look at the models we have elsewhere in Europe, there is typically an integrated approach – production sites and a local growing operation. Clearly UK growing is an important part of the business and we want to be as close to that as we can.”

One wonders whether that wider focus could also extend to fruit. Barring a brief flirtation with the sector a few years ago fruit has not figured in the company’s UK activities, but might that all change in future? Robertson won’t go as far as to say fruit is something the company is actively looking at, but he does point out tantalisingly that fruit is a big deal for Agrial’s European colleagues and the UK business now sits within the group’s vegetable and fruit division. “We are active in a number of different areas outside of what we do in the UK and I guess part of our challenge and opportunity is to look at those categories where we’ve already got that knowledge and expertise within the group and see what is the most appropriate in the UK market,” he says.

Expanding on the theme, Robertson sees being part of the larger Agrial group as being a distinct advantage when it comes to realising the company’s objectives, particularly in terms of accessing more growing areas than it could hope to on its own – a factor which helped considerably during last winter’s salad supply crisis – and in seeing what works in other markets that could be replicated in the UK.

Agrial remains open to the possibility of further acquisitions in future, though Robertson stresses the profile needs to be “good businesses with good facilities, with potential for the future and with good people”. He adds: “It is an exciting time, both from acquiring other activities and developing those as we’d like to find synergies and take what are fundamentally good businesses and move them forward further.”

With innovation also having been a major focus over the last 18 months, and a large haul of new lines set to hit the market this summer, you can sense this is very much a business grabbing the opportunities of the market by the scruff of the neck.

Sunny Side Up

Florette will be continuing its Always Made With Sunshine message this year following positive consumer feedback, with analysis showing shoppers made the connection with a tastier, fresher product. The brand has also revamped its bags with a large ‘Washed & Ready to Eat’ flash and the message that the company is farmer-owned.

“We will be making more of that across all of our social and digital activity, telling a deeper story about who our farmers are,” explains marketing director John Armstrong (pictured below). “That’s a flag we want to wave a bit more.”

NPD for this year includes a range of new bowl combinations and fresh meal solutions combining salads with other foods such as pasta, ham, cheese or other ingredients.

Florette will also be doing more to flag up which products work best for certain occasions, for example highlighting that a particular mix of leaves works well in sandwiches. Its product mix will be backed by a TV ad spend 20 per cent higher than in 2017, while 20 per cent of its media spend will go on social and digital, with a particular focus on NPD, as well as reinforcing the agricultural and sunshine message.