15 Finsbury Food Group Annual Report & Accounts 2019
Chief Executive's Report
Strength in Collaboration
We are seeing encouraging results from our people strategy throughout the Group. The positive momentum is illustrated by a number of internal promotions into senior roles over the last year. These promotions demonstrate the benefits of this programme, as well as our commitment to growing our people with the business. Employee engagement and communication has been significantly improved with the introduction of Workplace, a collaboration platform, across the Group in the first half. The use of this platform has enabled colleagues to collaborate more effectively across teams, projects, sites and accelerate functional best practice transfer as well as create instant communication opportunities and increase transparency.
I would like to thank all of our employees for the way in which they have embraced and engaged with all the initiatives that we have introduced over the last few years. They have responded brilliantly, and we’re very grateful for that. We believe that by working together, we become stronger as a Group.
Broadening our Group through Acquisition
In September 2018 we acquired a specialist Free From bakery, Ultrapharm. As with all acquisitions, we completed a comprehensive multi-function assessment, utilising expert resource from across the Group as well as the existing management team, against Group standards and best practice before creating a prioritised integration action plan. Additional expert resources from across the Group have complemented management to implement the year one plan which is now largely complete as expected.
In addition, we have invested in new capacity, with a new bakery in Poland, alongside additional resources and skills to deliver a stronger platform for anticipated future growth.
Whilst we remain committed to future acquisition-led growth as part of our strategy, as always, we are focused on driving organic growth and efficiency within the current Group structure. With any further acquisitions we would be looking to introduce new product, customer or channel diversification, or accelerate market consolidation in our main product areas.
Outlook
We are confident that the strong second half performance will continue into the year ahead, as the core business continues to perform well with strong quarter one growth to date, outperforming Finsbury’s respective markets.
We have made a number of significant investments across the Group that have stood us in good stead throughout what has been a more difficult period. With the Group now in its strongest position in recent years and having completed a period of intense investments including the IT platform roll out and the new Free From bakery in Poland, we are expecting to significantly reduce our capital spend going forward as we focus on driving further efficiencies from the new systems and processes and utilise our additional capacity.
Whilst the wider macroeconomic and political environment remains challenging in the UK, our drive for innovation, outperformance of foodservice and our entry in the Free From market provides a strong footing to continue to drive organic growth. Our Group-wide drive for efficiency and productivity coupled with the skill of our people provides Finsbury with a backbone to achieve further growth.
By maintaining a longer-term strategic approach, given an uncertain consumer and inflationary cost environment outlook, we are confident that we will continue to build a strong, lean, scale competitor and consolidator.
John Duffy Chief Executive Officer 13 September 2019
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