Sustainable Growth

Well Pict European Ltd Chairman, Martin Seymour

Sustainable growth has been the headline since Well Pict European Ltd inception in 1998. In our tenth anniversary year we can look back at achievements and we look ahead to new challenges. Ten years ago we looked at our industry and we tried to analyse the risks from a growers perspective rather than the view we had previously been taking which was that of purely a marketing desk. It was clear that there were large problems ahead in the form of:

• Shortage of manual labour
• Rising cost of labour
• Low yielding soft fruit varieties
• Increased burden on employers regarding H&S
• Increased demand for assurance schemes
• Unattractive industry for university graduates
• Cost effective crop protection
• Inability of UK growers to grow soft fruit 52 weeks a year
• Increasing cost to transport our products

We made a pro-active decision to address these (and other issues as they have become important in our industry) with a view to ensuring that growers could produce crops profitably ensuring the future of the industry.

• Fruitful Ltd was a created to source labour for farms, putting an emphasis on the inductions given to workers before they even leave their home country, putting in place innovative solutions such as allowing workers to pay for their travel costs once they had started working in the UK or providing speed training to workers to increase productivity and thus reduce average cost per kilo in the face of annual increases to minimum wage. The company now supplies 4000+ workers in the UK, Iberia and South Africa.
• New varieties are the holy grail of the industry, a high yielding, great tasting, easy to pick variety is what we all need, many have claimed to have found the solution but most have fallen by the way side or have resulted in higher costs to the growers, a great tasting berry that only yields an unsustainable amount of fruit is not sustainable for our growers. We have invested in trialing on our OWN farms, not asking our growers to take the risk, we continue to work with Plant Sciences, Planasa and Reading University and we continue to seek the varieties that work for growers and consumers alike.
• Our direct involvement and ownership of production has given us the an informative insight into what growers need to be efficient and productive, the result has been the development of Crop Pro Tech, which has successfully brought down the costs in crop protection as well as bringing innovative solutions in other areas of soft fruit production for example the You Are What You Eat platform and harvesting.
• As UK growers ourselves we have taken the decision to invest in production that complements the UK season, but that maintains the strong emphasis on quality expected from UK fruit that is not always replicated in some overseas production.
• Flexibility is vital in our industry with regards to transport, when we could not get the service that we required we started our own transport company, Fresh Logistics, designing a logistics solution to meet the needs of the grower and the retailer and not the needs of the transport company to make a profit. The ethos has been extremely successful and it is recognised as the UKs leading soft fruit hauler, and as a bonus it makes a small profit.

The largest threat to our industry that I see is irresponsible marketing by marketing desks that do not put an equal importance on the sustainability of the supply chain for the grower as well as the needs and wants of the retailer. We are entering into a new phase of cooperation and a willingness to work within the industry to the benefits of both growers and retailers, seeking ways of securing sustainable growth for the whole industry.