Master of organics

Before I joined this business I'd been running my own interim management consultancy on and off for around eight years. I'd just finished an assignment at a quiche plant in Shropshire and was brought in here on a three-month contract. Then it was extended to six months, and finally they asked me to come here full-time.

That was in 2002. I started as operations director here at RB Organics in Yaxley, near Peterborough, which is where I'm still based. Then last year I was offered the job of business unit director looking after Isleham Fresh Produce (IFP) in Soham, too. That's about 38 miles away across the Fens, so I spend quite a lot of time driving.

IFP packs root vegetables like carrots and parsnips, mainly for the multiples. It produces about 32,000t a year, which means washing-in about 50,000t.

RB Organics does a similar range, but nearly all organic. It packs in just about every format you might want: sacks, bags, tie-wraps, form-fill-seal, flow-wrap punnets, multi-component packs -- anything other than nets, really.

It also packs some conventional produce on behalf of IFP, mainly the difficult, short run, multi-component products like stew packs and casserole packs. Those are still filled by hand. It's almost a 'positive selection' job -- you're mixing and matching different vegetables to make up a pack -- and the volumes mean it's not worth investing in automation.

This site will do around 12,000t of finished product. We sell 90% of it to retail -- we're in nearly all the major multiples -- and the rest goes to foodservice or in bulk to other packers.

And we've just put in a high-care organic unit here, which we think might be the first of its kind in the UK. That's producing added-value, prepared organic vegetables for other packers to use in ready-to-eat products.

For a lot of larger companies working with conventional crops, organics are a pain in the neck. But we've got the set-up, we've got the growers in place, and we've got the contacts. If a client wants organic red peppers, for example, we can get them because we've got the contacts worldwide.

We're owned by Produce World, which also has its headquarters in Yaxley. It's an umbrella company and its major shareholders are the Burgess family, who were originally farmers and packers. My boss is William Burgess, the chief executive. His brother Andrew works for me here as technical and agronomy director -- he's one of the leading people in organic agronomy in the UK -- and the other brother runs Rustler, which is Produce World's onion business.

The group is growing rapidly. They've got a company called Solanum, which is a potato packer at Sutton Bridge. Then there's Frupac, which, not surprisingly, packs fruit. There's a very new business called Prep Direct, based near Thetford in Norfolk: it produces added-value, size-altered products. And there's Briess, which is our import business and has offices in London. If we run short of anything, Briess can usually get it.

Each of those is an autonomous unit, with each business director responsible for his own profits. The bit I look after will turn over about £22m this year.

I came here originally to set up RB Organics as a standalone business and put a bit more professionalism into the management. The senior managers had been trying to run it from Isleham, and it wasn't working too well. The business was also growing rapidly, so it needed someone on site to get people working as a team.

My 'strapline' is that "I don't manage people by telling them what they can't do". And I try desperately to push that down the line. Give them the freedom to do the job and they own it then, don't they?

William Burgess is only in mid-30s, and has brought in senior people with a few years behind them and a bit of fat on their backs. The non-executive chairman is Paul Wilkinson, who used to run RHM. Paul and I were both Unilever management trainees, although he must have been five or six years ahead of me and was on the commercial side, whereas I was in engineering.

This is a very entrepreneurial business. They are prepared to take a risk. You won't get hung out to dry just because something didn't work.

I've worked for companies where every now and then a little piece of paper would come out from under the boss's door telling you what to do. I call that 'fish and chip shop management' because for one school summer holiday I worked in a chip shop where the owner made every decision and told you how to do absolutely everything. Then when he went on holiday he had to close down the business for a fortnight.

When I arrived at RB they weren't really planning and forecasting effectively, so it tended to be one crisis after another. I joined five weeks before Christmas, and you'd think it had never happened before. It was like: "It's going to be on the 25th this year? Oh my God!" It was the same when I did some work for a company that made pancake mixes. Can you guess when 90% of pancake mixes are sold? It would be no use saying: "It's the 18th of February; so we'd better starting building up stocks". It was a bit late by then.

I'm a mechanical engineer by training. I started with Birds Eye Foods as a student apprentice and then at 19, I was offered a place on the Unilever management training scheme. I went and got a degree at Newcastle, and did placements all over the UK.

I had a year in Hull, went to London Business School to do a sort of mini-MBA, then went back to Birds Eye -- and six months later I left. I've always felt a bit bad about that, but I needed to get out of frozen food, and most of my jobs had been in maintenance, not on projects, which was what I wanted to do.

So I went to Terry's of York as a project engineer, and while I was there I achieved my main target, which was to become a chartered engineer by the time I was 30.

Since then I've worked in every branch of the food industry with the exception of dairy, either full-time or on interim assignments.

Nowadays my job is partly accountant, partly people manager and partly project manager. There's not a huge amount of technological input.

Produce comes to us more or less straight out of the field, we wash it and grade it by size, and then, depending on the product, we might put it through a semi-automatic trimmer. Other than the multi-component packs, most of the packing is automated through multihead weighers.

It's going to get a whole lot more automated now because we're just about to start colour-sorting on an optical grader. We'll still do final grading by hand but the bulk will be taken out by machine.

In the past, the optical graders used for carrots or potatoes tended to 'singulate' out -- they'd put every potato or onion into a single cup and look at it -- which meant you had a very long, slow machine.

Ours is more like the machines you see in crisp factories. You just orientate the vegetables on a belt, and it's got cameras that look at the leading edge, the rear edge, the top and bottom. Then it uses air knives to blow out any defects. It can't see the bit that touches the belt, but it will pick up all the visible gross defects, and it's much, much faster. Also, it's programmable, so you can just switch from one spec to another.

I also have a full-time profit optimisation guy who works across both sites. looking at where we can take out cost.

The organic market has seen double digit growth over the last few years but it seems to be plateauing. That's one reason why we invested in the high-care processing area. If only 4-5% of people are buying organic today, then 95% of the population are not. If, by looking at convenience and presentation, we can coax another 2-3% to buy organic we'll have nearly doubled the market.

Personal

Name: Dennis Bean

Age: 54

Career highlights: Unilever apprentice engineer and graduate trainee. Qualified as chartered engineer while working for Terry's of York. Spent eight years in interim management before joining RB Organics in 2002.

Domestics: Married with two children, daughter aged 20 and son aged 18. Wife is technical manager for a speciality oils and fats producer near Norwich.

Outside work: A former semi-pro guitarist (his band once supported The Jeff Beck Group -- with Rod Stewart on vocals -- at Norwich's Norwood Rooms) he still plays everything from Hendrix to acoustic ragtime. Also collects antique timepieces, describing old chronometers as "the ultimate" in mechanical engineering, and is a Norwich City FC season ticket holder.

===Factory facts ===

Location: RB Organics

Main products: Organic root vegetables in all pack formats, conventional veg in multi-component packs, and added-value organic salad components.

Throughput: 12,000t of finished product from 20,000t of raw material.

Employees: 49 permanent, plus up to 70 temps during winter season.

Factory size: 7,500m2.