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Food & beverage
Overview
The food industry started 2013 with unwelcome headlines as Irish food inspectors announced they had found traces of horsemeat in frozen beefburgers stocked by UK supermarkets including Tesco, Iceland and Lidl.
Nor was this an isolated scandal.
Salmonella in eggs in 1988, BSE in the 90’s, the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 in which ten million animals were slaughtered1 – these and other crises are perhaps indicative of an industry under extreme pressure to provide large amounts of food at the lowest possible cost.
Such pressure can only be exacerbated in a recessionary environment which limits consumer spending at the very time when rising commodity and energy costs and adverse weather patterns are conspiring to create “massive”2 food price inflation.
Along with price, food safety must now be at the front of consumers’ minds.
Indeed, as Deloitte indicate, it was already a noticeable priority before 2013 as manufacturers responded to previous scandals with actions including requesting that suppliers become audited through accredited certification programs as well as improving their recall processes by establishing electronic communication with retailers3.
Establishing the safety of food is fundamental if the industry is to capitalise on more positive trends such as the continuing consumer preference for products with health and wellness connotations – a trend which stimulates line extensions and brand innovation as well as driving deals such as Starbuck’s acquisition of juice maker Evolution Fresh at the end of 20114.
Deal-making itself looks set to intensify as a feature within this sector.
Warren Buffet’s and Jorge Paulo Lemann’s $28 billion takeover of Heinz in February 2013 follows the latter’s creation of the world’s biggest, most efficient brewer, AB InBev, through mergers and acquisitions with Belgium’s Interbrew and America’s Anheuser-Busch5.
The Heinz deal may have been one of the biggest in the history of the food industry – but Buffet’s declaration that “I’m ready for another elephant”6 suggests it may not be the last of its kind in 2013.
To discover more about the ways in which we can help our customers, please click the links below:
We offer food and beverage companies the opportunity to remove complexity across a full range of business processes – including payroll, learning and development, recruitment, HR administration. We can also offer offshoring services delivering advantages including speed to market, back office transformation, on-demand business, improved customer service and cost optimisation. The result is more flexibility and greater efficiency in the face of formidable challenges.
We offer extensive technology capabilities across a variety of industry sectors. In food and beverage specifically, our solutions include application development for an airline catering organisation. On the wider stage, our infrastructure team supports customers’ growth with cost effective, scalable and rapidly-deployed solutions. We also design, build and run the software that supports a range of business processing solutions. We embed our intellectual property (IP) to create a solution faster and more cost-effectively than our customers can themselves. We can also provide customers with Total IT Outsourcing (ITO) solutions – a single point of supply for an end-to-end managed service.
Customers include: Singapore Airline Terminals Service (SATS), Britannia
We are experts in supporting procurement professionals with services including sourcing, spend management, procure to pay (P2P), system management and software solutions. In this industry, we already provide sourcing and category management for one of the UK’s biggest multinational food manufacturers.
Customers include: United Biscuits
