FAQs

Farm Business Strategy Setting to help develop competitive strategies and measure business performance
Farm Business Clubs to share best practice and develop improvement plans based on benchmarking cost of production information
Market Information to help farmers and food producers identify opportunities for differentiation
Production Excellence to help improve cost, quality and service in processing
Supply Chain Collaboration mapping out chains in red meat, dairy, cereals and fresh produce and recommending ways to reduce waste

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4. How will the Food Chain Centre help farmers?

The Food Chain Centre is part of a national strategy to improve the competitiveness and profitability of farming. It has given farmers free access to important information about changing patterns of food consumption and consumer behaviour to help them identify market opportunities and to plan for the future. This is the first service of its kind providing information that has never been available to farmers before (except of huge cost).

The Centre has identified opportunities for cost savings, described advice of leading experts on business improvement and developed an extensive library of case studies.

One example is benchmarking. This helps farmers confidentially to compare costs with others in a similar position. That way, they can find where their costs are unusually high and therefore where they should look to be more efficient and save money. We have explained the technique, identified a list of service providers and compiled case studies on how farmers benefit.

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5. How will consumers benefit from the Food Chain Centre?

Consumers can only benefit from the Food Chain Centre. Through the Centre’s work, farmers and producers have access to important and insightful information on consumer trends, allowing them to respond very quickly to changing consumer needs. This will impact on the speed of the process of innovation in products and services.

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6. Will the Food Chain Centre be a resource to manage every type of food chain problem?

No - the Food Chain Centre was set up on the recommendation of The Curry Commission on the Future of Farming and Food to help ‘reconnect’ members of the food chain and to help improve the profitability of farming.

Its role is to help improve the efficiency of the chain and also the flow of information.

Other issues such as resolution of trading disputes, setting assurance standards or managing crises are fulfilled by other organisations.

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7. Why has IGD been given the role of facilitating the Food Chain Centre?

IGD is an impartial body working across the whole supply chain and has a reputation as an honest facilitator, which is why it was asked to facilitate the Food Chain Centre. It is a centre of consumer, retail and food chain research and also has many years of experience in promoting business improvement tools.

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8. Isn’t IGD biased towards retailers? Will the Food Chain Centre reflect that bias?

IGD’s members are drawn from every stage of the food chain, including primary producers and farmers, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers. Every IGD member is of equal status and this is reflected in IGD’s strong reputation for impartiality, a key reason why Curry recommended IGD to run the Food Chain Centre. The retailers may be influential within the industry because they are ‘movers and shakers’ in the world, but there is no bias in the way that IGD operates. In-fact the retailers contribute less that 20% of IGD’s total revenue.

The Food Chain Centre will operate on the same strict impartial basis with its direction guided by the Steering Group of representatives from foodservice, small firms, farmers, manufacturers and retailers. Farmers form the largest group on the Centre’s Steering Group because most of its services will be targeted towards farming.

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9. What does IGD know about farming?

Although not a farming specialist organisation, IGD does recruit agricultural experts and has delivered several products for the sector including:

a series of training workshops discussing the impact of consumer trends on farming;
two large-scale international surveys of competitiveness;
guides to local sourcing; and
a guide to best practice in the beef chain.

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10. How long will the Centre operate for?

The Centre was given the go-ahead in March 2002 and formerly started its work following the first Steering Group meeting in June 2002.

There is no formal end point. The Food Chain Centre is part of the national strategy to improve the competitiveness and profitability of farming as set out in the Curry Report. The strategy continues to give direction for farming and food businesses.

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11. How will the information be disseminated?

We are disseminating information through:

the FCC web-site which has recently been upgraded
our Newsletter, ‘Focus’ which is published twice yearly
trade press and other relevant media
conferences (our own in 2005) and by speaking at a wide range of events
circulation lists direct to businesses

We are also working with many other organisations to spread our findings.

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12. Will the Food Chain Centre encourage people to cut corners in the pursuit of lower costs?

Definitely not. The Food Chain Centre is about improvement not compromise. Eliminating waste, not cutting corners.

Whenever there’s a long series of activities, as in the food chain, there are usually expenses incurred that add no value. Examples include: excessive storage of produce, paper based transactions, only part filling delivery lorries, throwing away or downgrading products because they don’t meet the quality specification, administration errors and so on. These are the costs that we’re targeting.

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13. How will the Food Chain Centre contribute to a better environment?

We believe in finding solutions that are sustainable in every sense of the word. However, our main focus is improving financial sustainability, i.e. profitability.

There are many times when financial and environmental sustainability sit hand in hand, for example through efficient distribution. The philosophy enshrined in our mapping and waste reduction projects is ‘fresher, simpler, closer’ and these sit hand in hand with the emphasis on sustainability.

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14. How was the Steering Group selected?

Deirdre Hutton was our first Chairman. She was invited by IGD as a highly respected consumer champion, with considerable experience of chairing stakeholder groups and was a member of the Curry Commission. Deirdre Hutton left when she was appointed Chairman of the Food Standards Agency and replaced by the IGD Chief Executive, Joanne Denney-Finch.

Steering Group members are selected to reflect the various elements of the chain, including both large and small companies. It is weighted towards farming as the prime customer group of the Centre’s activities. Members of the Steering Group leave and new ones are added to reflect the different stages of our work.

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15. How is the Centre funded?

Funding and resources come from a variety of sources. IGD provides management, office facilities and support resources. DTI and Defra are funding the Cereals Industry Forum work and DEFRA grants support our other projects

We currently have 5 grants awarded by Defra under the ADS Scheme.

DEFRA is also supplying a secondee.

Finally, a whole variety of companies are contributing people time and ideas to the Centre.

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16. What has the Centre Achieved?

All our work is published and freely available on our web-site. The highlights include:

the provision of detailed consumer information to farmers now being taken forward by the dunnhumby Academy and our own Market Information service
helping encourage awareness of benchmarking among farmers which has been increasing and establishing 20 Groups in fresh produce to conduct this work
the completion of 16 whole chain projects in red meat, cereals, dairy and fresh produce which identify improvement opportunities equivalent to at least 10% of final value
a programme of production excellence in fresh produce that is helping improve quality and cost
a growing library of around 100 case studies on best practice in farming

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17. How will you know if the Centre is succeeding?

The Food Chain Centre is one part of a national strategy that is being monitored by Defra.

We have developed our own performance measures and targets that are reported to our Steering Group.

There has been an independent evaluation of the RMIF activity and the mapping and waste reduction work we undertook on their behalf. This demonstrated that significant commercial benefits were achieved by the programme.

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18. How do you work with the RMIF, the CIF and the Dairy Industry Forum?

We are co-sponsors of the RMIF. We sit on the Management Board and attend all RMIF Meetings.

With HGCA we are co-founders of the CIF.

We sit on the Dairy Industry Forum – which is a government led body.

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19. What happens when the Centre’s pilot work is completed?

Our initial work programme will not be completed until 2007 so there is still much to do.

Thereafter our challenge is to obtain greater awareness of the methods and results we have achieved, encourage greater uptake and use and continue to develop our work in ways that meet a real business need among farmers.

We are currently working with our partners to identify ways of responding to this challenge.

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20. What evidence is there that farming is any better off?

The Centre is one part of the national strategy. We are a small team and it was never envisaged that we could improve farming overnight or on our own.

Farmers have been engaged in all aspects of our work and the case studies that we have published show how individual participants have benefited from our projects.

So we are confident that our work will lead to commercial benefits if implemented on a sufficiently large scale.

Increasing scale and delivery are challenges that we face and this will need a concerted effort from a wide range of organisations.

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