It usually begins with a desire to change and a gap in capability. Here’s a few examples where we’ve bridged the gap for a number food companies
Fresh Food Quality
Fresh food production, logistics and retailing is possibly the area where our network has the broadest and deepest experience. There’s little our experts haven’t seen before, with experience drawn from technical, supply chain, commercial and NPD. We’ve helped retailers improve field to fork time; manufacturers develop more efficient, food safe operations and developed packaging technology for growers to help improve their returns. We also work internationally sharing UK best practise.
Private Label
Many of our experts have spent most of their careers within UK retail and manufacturing. With 50% private label participation for UK supermarket sales, they are no strangers to the complexity and opportunity of this sector. We have some of the best NPD and Technical leaders in the world in our ranks, all passionate about differentiation and great product.
Logistics Optimisation
Whether for reasons of cost management or sustainability supply chain has become a critical priority for all food businesses. Our network not only has many highly experienced logisticians, but also uses state of the art machine learning tools to minimise logistics impact on both the cost base and the planet. Recent routing projects have seen upwards of 25% savings using these tools.
Partnerships & Acquisition
The sheer breadth of skill set and experience within the FEN allows us to put together small specialist teams to deal with larger commercial arrangements. We have provided partner assessment and guidance services for a number of operations. The networks knowledge of people and businesses within the food sector has been frequently used for targeting and due diligence on key corporate acquisitions.
Talent
Our network can provide a very flexible range of support for our clients. Whether you’re looking for senior advisors, consultants, interim experts or full time executives, we have all the functional areas represented.
Health-checks
With such a broad team of functional experts, the network is well placed to provide an independent view on business operations, particularly cross functional effectiveness. A business health check is often a good place to start, but can also be highly insightful as a good place to finish - by the completion of the majority of our projects our experts develop a powerful and useful perspective of an organisation.
Supplier Strategy
Most of our network have experience on one side of the fence or the other. This allows us a better perspective to support customer selling strategies, supplier selection strategies and for developing joint business plans. We have provided guidance to both retailers and manufacturers on recent projects, along with 3PL assessment based negotiation tools.
Specialists
We have a number of experts who can provide more specialist support for clients. This extends from expert witness assignments for legal disputes, through executive leadership coaching and team development, to food waste initiatives.