An eye for peas

One of these people is Colin Wright. He is head of agriculture for Unilever Ice Cream and Frozen Foods and so he’s a pretty key person in the chain. He’s a nice man though, so he argues that everyone in the process: from agronomist, to farmer, to fieldsman, to agriculture manager, to factory worker, is crucial to the process of ensuring that every single pea is picked and frozen within two and a half hours.

Although Wright is responsible for all things vegetable within the business, peas are the single biggest area with about 74,000t of raw material handled each year. Enough peas to fill 144 Olympic size swimming pools, apparently.

About 20% of this goes for export to other Unilever companies. If you ask him about the recent talk of the business possibly being sold he is quite relaxed: “Birds Eye in the UK is a good business and it will survive profitably in any format," he says.

Next year, Birds Eye celebrates 60 years of producing peas, although Wright is quick to point out that he was not there at the beginning. As such, he believes that his team are custodians of the brand as basically, the quality of the pea is the product. There are no additives or other ingredients added, so if the pea is not right in the first place, there are problems.

“We have a fully integrated process," says Wright, “which involves us maintaining the varieties of seeds as well as being actively involved in sustainable production. We have a significant programme of sustainable production which we started five years ago," he says.

“We work very closely with category people, marketers and our sales guys as it is important that we are all talking together." The challenge of working with a tricky crop, that’s very vulnerable to climatic conditions, is one that affects everyone. “If, for instance, our farmers do not deliver the quality we demand, we do not pay them the same as if the crop had been to our standards," he says. “This means we have absolute freedom to keep our quality high," he says.

“We are totally reliant on working together with our growers, which is why we have such close working relationships, but as in anything, it is not all sweetness and light. I believe that the success of these relationships is that we can resolve any of our difficulties," he says.

Wright believes that as things are commercially very tight for everyone right now - with the price of garden peas falling over the last five years - then everyone in the chain has to understand the situation.

Surely nothing can beat the thrill of the six week harvest with fieldsman calling in the crops left, right and centre?

Wright says that both planting and harvesting are very intensive and he would describe the whole process as dynamic rather than fun. “Harvest is, after all, the culmination of your whole year’s work and it is highly visible if you have failed," he says. “We are highly influenced by the weather and we have to change plans all the time.

“The worst years are when it is wet and dull, as this makes the decisions on when to harvest very difficult to call," he says. “The best one was definitely the very hot summer of 1976 as the six week season was cut to three weeks."

Wright was brought up in Yorkshire, but is based in Suffolk at Lowestoft where he looks after both Birds Eye factories (the other is in Hull). He jokes that he hass been doing missionary work in Suffolk for many years.

Wright has come a long way since he worked on his first pea harvest as a student and wrote his thesis on farmers’ co-operatives. Although his role today is more about the strategic and commercial elements, he still loves the benefit of working outside and “not being confined to barracks."

As he says: “You never quite know what’s going to happen each day in this business." FM

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