IGD convention 2014
Ronald Kers
Taking the theme of leadership through disruption literally, Müller UK & Ireland Group chief executive, Ronald Kers, revealed how the firm had purposely disrupted the dairy industry to help it become a leader in the sector.
Kers: “We disrupted the yogurt industry about 20 years’ ago when we created Müller Corners and have had some very successful years – that has kind of flatlined.
“For the last three years, we’ve tried to disrupt the dairy industry as a whole by growing from the number six dairy in the country to the number two. That’s been done through three acquisitions and one Greenfield operation. We’ve moved in the last few years from a £400M business to about £1.6bn turnover.
“We saw four signs in the industry [for disruption]. We saw the UK has a dairy trade deficit of £2bn, we saw a dairy industry in the UK that was significantly under-invested and had no real leadership.
“We also saw that quotas were coming up, which means that there is more milk and therefore more international competition coming up in 2015. Lastly, we saw a change in the retailer landscape. Those are factors that will cause some sort of disruption in the market, so you either lead it or are taken back on it – we made sure we were actually the ones leading it.”