Tulip boss outlines bright future ahead
I’ve been here for two and a half years, having previously worked for Milk Link and Dairy Crest. The first thing I did when I got here was to move my office. This is a big site and the old office was far away from the production areas. Now I’m right on top of them, I can see what is going on, and people can drop in and speak to me.
Before I came into the food industry I was in the Army for 12 years. When I came out I had an old VW camper van and left my parents’ house in Lincolnshire and headed down to Bude. I had no plans. That weekend I bought the Cornish Guardian and saw a job for a shift engineer at Dairy Crest. It all started from there.
I consider myself very lucky because I love this job. The site has two core functions: cooked meats and cooked bacon. The cooked meats operation has three separate facilities: cured manufacturing, uncured and a meat slicing factory. On top of that we’ve got an independent cooked bacon facility.
We run the site on two separate profit and loss accounts. So, although you’ve got them sitting together and both being run by the same leadership team, they are two very individual parts of Danish Crown (Tulip’s parent company).
We’ve also got the distribution centre for Cornwall here, which looks after the gammon site in Bugle and raw bacon slicing facility in Redruth. Their products come here to be stored, picked and then distributed across the UK.
Local population (Return to top)
Around 60% of the staff here are from the local population with the rest largely from eastern Europe. It’s great that many of them have now settled in the area because we’ve now got a stable workforce and our labour turnover has gone from around 20% to 8%, which from an industry perspective is very good. We’ve got a lot of husband and wife teams working here. I guess it’s a sign of the times that at shift changeovers dad clocks off and takes the kids from mum in the car park, who then comes in to do her shift.
We employ around 2,000 people in Cornwall so we are important to the local economy. The food industry as a whole is important to this region. Without our three sites, some of these towns would be quite financially depressed. This isn’t an especially wealthy area and it is dependent on tourism with 7M people visiting a year. However, these are for short-term stays and we need to make sure the county is buoyant all year round.
That’s why nobody here fails to understand that this site is open and profitable. You’ll always have wins and losses in business, but the key is to keep moving forward.
Therefore we’ve been working on our Foodservice Solutions plan for the last two years, which looks at how you can get retail-quality food into foodservice.
Enormous range of foods (Return to top)
We provide an enormous range of foods so firms can order a variety from one source: whether they supply cafés, pubs, restaurants, hotels, fast food outlets or convenience stores.
We work closely at all levels with businesses of all sizes, from wholesalers to international catering operations. We help our clients stay ahead of trends by developing new menu items.
We have really strived to transform the whole process of innovation and how we work with customers in the last couple of years.
That now sits really well alongside our retail work. It’s important that the same high standards are applied in whatever we do.
I'm really proud of our production standards and the skills that the workforce possesses.
Operations (Return to top)
To give you a brief overview of how we operate, we will bring in the raw materials, and in terms of the meat, this will have been slaughtered and prepared elsewhere in the group.
For cured meats, we give each bin a unique code and inspect every single muscle by eye. We then make to a recipe at around five tonnes a batch. Depending on the nature, it will be injected, tumbled and we will possibly add a second stage emulsion too. It's then potted and cooked – we boil all of our hams.
For uncured meats, the operation is smaller but more complex, because of the number of species. The main difference is that they are steam cooked and cooled with water chillers.
Both then go into the fridge, and we can hold three or four days’ worth of stock in there, before it hits the service corridor where it can be honey roasted, smoked, scored and coated. Then it hits the slicing lines before it is packaged.
For cooked bacon, again, we don’t do any of the butchery or slaughter. We receive a cured, smoked and frozen primal of either a belly or a back. We will press it, drop it into a slicer, and individually slice each rasher. It then goes through one of three cooking procedures – a contact grill, an impingement oven or a microwave – before we pack it off. There is a bit of retail in there, but our main customer is McDonald’s. The thing to remember with bacon, however, is that there is very little yield in there. You are looking in some cases at five tonnes going in with only one tonne coming out.
It is fair to say that the business, and this site especially, has been transformed in recent years.
In 2011, this site was in a bit of rut. We did standard and value cooked meats, predominantly for Tesco, and that was it. If you asked someone what they did here, that’s the answer you would have got. Now, slowly, because it is a big ship to turn, we are becoming a cooked meats facility that is – as strange as it sounds – more concerned with food.
So we are exploring new pork ingredients, we are investing in creating a continental range, and looking at what the celebrity chefs are doing and how we can tap into the trends such as using pork cheek and other fifth quarter products.
Presentation and packaging (Return to top)
We’re also doing a lot of work around presentation and packaging because at the moment the cooked meat section is a wall of plastic and pink. If you’re a customer, how do you choose? They spend around three seconds at the fixture and move on so we are looking at a whole range of solutions from envelopes, paper parchment packaging and tubes and cylinders to make some significant improvements.
In the past we have been as guilty as anybody of waiting for the customer to come to us and say: ‘this is what we want to put on our shelves’. I’d like to think we are a long way past that now and that we are the ones coming up with the new ideas and pushing things forward.
It’s a massive change in culture that has come from the top and swept through.
The beauty is that everyone buys it and we are opening people’s minds to what we can do. There’s also great scope for expansion. There is another six acres we could use if we wanted to. The world is our oyster, we just need to keep moving forward, trying new ideas and maintaining best-in-class standards.
Listen to our exclusive podcast to find out how Smith has tried to instill the “passion and mentality of a start-up” into the site as part of its transformation.
Factory facts (Return to top)
Location: Newtons Margate Industrial Estate, Bodmin, PL31 1HF
Staff: 750
Products: Cooked meats and cooked bacon
Customers: Major retailers and foodservice operators
Turnover: £89M for cooked meats and £35M for cooked bacon
Personal
Name: Steve Smith
Age: 37
Title: Site director
Domestics: Married with four sons
Outside work: I volunteer with the Army Cadets
