Rush Group aims to provide a complete service, from supplying seed, to planning and implementing crop production - working with more than 200 growers across Europe and the UK - right through to marketing the harvested crop.
The team believes in the principles of free - and therefore fair - trade and working towards a future without subsidies and trade barriers, where prices can be brought down through efficient supply chain management.
The London office, based in bustling trade centre Canary Wharf, is the hub for trading activity, backed by smaller offices in Portugal, where the company’s technical director, José Nazaré, has been based for 10 years, and Plymouth, for accounts, as well as an arm in Malaysia, where Rush Asia was set up a year ago.
James Staples, Justyna Wawrzynczyk, Guy Burgoyne and Martin Hodson join Ough and Hogge to make up the London office, with their own specialist areas relating to geographical or sector-based groups. Ken Couceiro, based in a satellite office in Cornwall, manages the Caribbean, Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries.
Rush Group is now looking to expand the onion, wholesale and foodservice parts of its business and, in line with this, is set to make additions to its team. The change of name to Rush Group reflects the evolving product range traded by the business, with vegetables including carrots, parsnips, onions, cauliflower, broccoli and garlic now being dealt with alongside potatoes, which still make up around 97 per cent of the business. “We have moved beyond Rush Potatoes,” says Ough. “The name change reflects our plan to move, in the long term, into other product lines. Within five years, we are planning for our new product lines to have grown to make up 40 per cent of the business.”
The flexibility of the business allows it to accommodate a range of growers and find a market for their products, as well as ensure maximum efficiency in terms of transport and logistics.
“For producers who grow for specific packers there is a difficulty if their product does not meet the precise specifications of that customer. We feel that we offer to them a series of alternatives,” says Hogge. “We are gearing ourselves up to open as wide a range of markets as possible - we are involved in import and export, packing for the wholesale markets and the foodservice industry, and selling to primary and secondary packers right across Europe. We offer growers a huge spread of opportunities and large potential markets.”
Buying and selling fresh produce is a fast-moving occupation made easier with a worldwide grower database. “The right people and the right logistics are two of the most important links in the chain,” Ough insists.
Home-grown produce enjoys one of the fastest routes to market, as it can be harvested early in the morning, arrive at the packhouse before 9am and can be dispatched to customers that same evening.
The team is working hard to show that, contrary to traditional perceptions, traders play a key role in the supply chain. It firmly believes that specialists should remain in their fields and, with this in mind, they are keen to uphold the role of traders in the fresh produce industry. “Over the last 10 or 20 years, the multiples and the industry have viewed traders with suspicion, they have been seen as middlemen between growers and supermarkets,” Ough explains. “But we feel we are necessary, as the conduit between growers and the market. We are firm believers in sticking to what we do well - producers grow product, but they do not have the resources to reach the whole market. We wanted to change the perception of the way fresh produce is marketed. We firmly believe that there are ample growers in this world to produce the food we need, but we just need the right management systems in place to help them to do this,” he adds.
The team uses a global database and a tailor-made trading system to import and export products and achieve the best results. The company has outsourced its packing to Mason Grading Services in Boston, Lincolnshire, which can link into the server on the trading floor in order to make up and dispatch orders immediately - “fresh-packed daily” is its mantra. “When we confirm a sale, it pops up on a screen in Boston and they pull the product from stock, and prepare it to the specifications that the customer requires,” Ough explains.
Rush Group has streamlined the way it operates and how it communicates with both its growers and its packhouse, in order to keep one step ahead of the market. The team has been working with IT specialist Federico Gasparrini to develop its own trading and stock management system over the last five years. This part of the business has seen some of the biggest investment, with more than £100,000 already ploughed into the development of the bespoke trading system.
“The old-fashioned way of doing things was that you would get a salesman going to a farm to look at the potatoes, but this is not something we often do anymore,” Ough says. “We trust our growers to be experts at what they are doing, and they can quality control their own product. Within an hour of a truck coming into the Boston packhouse, we have all the details on our screens, with a quality-control analysis and photos of the product at our fingertips.”
The system, which was introduced this year, relies on the fact that growers are best placed to monitor their own product, Hogge continues. It is set to be rolled out to more producers who have a well-established relationship with Rush Group. “We have a network of growers that we are working with, and they are the experts,” Hogge says. “These growers upload all the information about their crops onto our system, which reduces the environmental impact of carrying out multiple visits to farms. This is also more efficient and cuts costs.”
The concept will be extended so that growers will be able to upload their product information straight onto the Rush Group website, so that customers can see quality control details and photos, but the move is still in its early stages.
The development of the trading system and website is just one of the ways in which Rush Group will continue to push forward, with a step into the UK production sector and headway made in the Far East helping to grow the business. Chris Lioe, managing director of Rush Asia, is working with Clarence Koay and Lai Leng Phang to manage a number of supermarket and processing accounts in the Malaysian operation and they see the opportunities in this region as meteoric, while back home, the formation of Triple Fresh will see Rush Group move into a new area.
The team believes that with the fresh produce trade set to yield more opportunities than ever and concerns over food supply thrust into the spotlight, they have a lot to look forward to.
UK TRIO LINK UP FOR TRIPLE FRESH
The latest development for Rush Group has seen it move into the production scene by linking up with Park Farm Produce Ltd and Growise Ltd to set up joint subsidiary Triple Fresh Ltd.
The joint shareholders established the East Anglia-based potato-growing venture this year, in order to make the most of opportunities they believe will boost the production sector.
David Ough and Murray Hogge, from Rush Group, Stuart Liddell, managing director of Growise, and Tim Cordy, who heads up Park Farm Produce, came together two years ago to get the ball rolling.
The venture has started off with a 20-hectare site on the east coast, but there are plans to expand both the area and location progressively, following this trial season.
The team is passionate about providing the best possible service to their customers. The flexibility of the venture and the ability of those on board should stand the team in good stead.
“Tim came up with the idea two years ago, but it took the rest of us a little time to be convinced,” Ough explains. “Over the last couple of years, the four of us began to see that, although the agricultural sector had been in decline for the last 10 years or so, we were seeing the bottom of the dip - we believe we are at the beginning of a long-term upside.
“We all recognise the fact that food is needed everywhere - food inflation is in double-digit figures. The right thing for us to do was to get back into food production. We want to offer our customers continuity and quality, but we know we can’t do this in a year - in the future, a significant part of what we offer will be grown by Triple Fresh.”
A limited range of potatoes will come on stream this season - with new potatoes and maincrop varieties available in equal share - all targeted at a broad customer base, including retailers, wholesalers and foodservice, rather than being tied down to specific contracts.
“The idea is that we want to try this and see if it works, but we don’t have any five-year plans,” says Ough. “The four of us have an enormous amount of experience in the fresh produce trade - we have never worked in anything else - and we are well placed to make a go of this.”
Liddell, pictured, will oversee production, while Rush Group and Park Farm Produce will handle the marketing side of the new business. The subsidiary will start off as a potato-growing operation, exclusively in East Anglia at the outset, but the aim is to grow the acreage and the locations involved, Cordy says.
“Our experience is not just with growing the crop, it is about planning and about creating a wide range of options, and that is the expertise we bring to the project - whatever the resulting crop, we will find a market for it,” Hogge adds.
The four of them are confident that this is the right time to get involved in a new growing venture and they predict the production sector will be able to make the most of its potential in the coming years. The perception of the agricultural industry may not have changed much over the last 30 years, but the team is convinced that it is on the verge of coming into its own.
“The general public wants to look at it as a cosy little operation in the country, run by someone with a dog - it is time we became an industry to be reckoned with,” says Ough. “Now there are investments in operations globally, and we are going to see a major turnaround - we want to be a part of that.”
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