[ SHOWGSD-L ] Tripe for dogs in Europe
- From: Peter Cacioppo <PeterCacioppo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: GSD Show List <Showgsd-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 13:42:30 -0700
This probably works well for the readers:
When I saw this article in todayâ??s Financial Times I thought of Ed Hill, my
neighbor here in California, and how he has talked about tripe for dogs over
the years. Enjoy, Peter Cacioppo, Moraga, CA
Graham Baker thrusts a gloved hand into a vat of glistening entrails to pick
out what looks like a wet rubber bath mat.
What has drawn the attention of the chairman of Butcherâ??s Pet Care, the
UKâ??s largest independent dog-food maker, is a piece of tripe â?? the stomach
lining of a cow. Tripe was the raw material for the first â?? and still most
popular â?? product made by the company: Butcherâ??s Tripe Mix. Butcherâ??s is
the UKâ??s largest buyer of tripe â?? â??not a great claim to fame I admitâ??.
Mr Baker, 60, is taking a turn round his new factory at the company
headquarters near Crick in the Midlands. When fully operational this £35m
investment will be able to produce 1m cans of pet food a day.
Sales last year were £74m, and the company hopes to hit £100m in the next 18
months, thanks to its premium â??natural nutritionâ?? brand boasting an
all-meat recipe that is gluten free and uses no artificial colourings,
flavourings or preservatives.
The factory was financed with cash from the business, and loans from banks
including a £5m interest-free loan that Butcherâ??s won as a prize in a
bankâ??s entrepreneur competition.
Mr Baker smiles as he recalls the origins of Butcherâ??s, which today has 230
employees. It was started 25 years ago in a corner of the family-owned abattoir
to solve the problem of what to do with the waste byproduct: â??I noticed there
were all these people coming to the back of the [abattoir] asking for tripe for
their dogs.â??
The Butcherâ??s brand operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Baker Group, the
family-owned slaughterhouse company, which had Europeâ??s largest beef
processing plant, with a turnover of £150m. The company supplied meat to the
restaurant trade in Europe, as well as leading food processors and supermarkets
in the UK.
The Butcherâ??s transformation into a leading British consumer brand for pet
owners is a lesson that even a small, family-owned business can take on
multinationals â?? and not just in its home market.
Its success is even more remarkable considering the effect that BSE had on the
rest of the family business. In 1996 the neurodegenerative disease in cattle
was officially linked to the human disease variant CJD.
The EU banned all beef exports from the UK, London ordered the cull of all
cattle aged more than 30 months and Baker Group faced an existential crisis.
â??By the time I came to work the following Monday we had no raw material. We
had no customers. We had 1,200 people with nothing to do and we had meat being
returned to us from all around the world.â??
The business struggled on but by the time the ban on UK exports was lifted
after 10 years, the meat factory had closed. Butcherâ??s, which had switÂched
to using more non-banned meat such as chicken, was the only part of the
original group remaining at Crick.
Today Butcherâ??s has a fifth of the UK dog-food market, and claims to be
bigger in the UK than Nestléâ??s Winalot brand and only slightly smaller than
Pedigree Chum, the market leader from Mars.
How Mr Baker ended up owning the pet-food business outright was not planned and
was in part the result of family tragedy.
Following the BSE crisis the banks had forced Baker Group to sell and lease
back the meat factory site. At the same time Mr Baker and his three brothers
decided to split the ownership of the group, which comprised the meat business,
a transport operation, various farms and the pet-food company. Then, during the
period when the talks were taking place, one of the brothers died. â??Now we
had to talk to his executors, who could never make a decision,â?? Mr Baker says.
The death also led to a sale of land they owned separately. This â?? along with
remortgaging his house â?? gave Mr Baker enough cash to buy out his brothersâ??
interest in Butcherâ??s, although part of the deal included taking on the
pension deficit of the old abattoir business.
â??Would the break-up of the group have happened without BSE? We still would
have got to that point when we had to decide how to pass it on to the next
generation. The business weâ??ve got was never going to go to a load of
different cousinsâ??.â??.â??.â??It would never work. It needed strong
leadership.â??
Mr Baker was the youngest. â??But we all had different family situations. Some
of us had children in the business. I had remarried and had a second family. So
I was driven. I needed a good income.â??
He also had a more formal business education, having taken a two-year college
course on meat technology â?? the others had joined the family business at 15.
In fact, he had been sent away to boarding school against his will because his
mother thought there would not be scope in the family business to provide him a
living.
The technical knowhow he gained at college stood him in good stead to develop
ButÂcherâ??s and will do so again now as the new factory works through
teething pains. Mr Baker intends to use the extra capacity to build the
Butcherâ??s brand in Poland and other eastern European markets.
The size of the market â??is not really about the population of dogsâ??, says
Mr Baker. â??If you take Poland, for example, there are about the same number
of dogs as there are in the UK, but the market for industrially prepared pet
foods is probably about 20 per cent of what it is here. Theyâ??re still feeding
their pets from waste product from small rural slaughterhouses.â?? In Poland,
Butcherâ??s has a 2 per cent market share but awareness of the brand has
increased from 4 per cent a year ago to 20 per cent today.
The UK market, according to the Pet Food Manufacturersâ?? Association, is
holding up well during the recession. But Mr Baker says the economic downturn
has nevertheless affected margins. Rising material costs and financing for the
new factory mean profits before tax last year at just over £4m were down
slightly on the two previous years, although substantially higher than five
years ago.
Tin-plate costs have increased as hard-pressed households buy more canned
products, while the price of tripe, still one of the main raw materials in
Butcherâ??s, is rising steadily. â??Far more now goes for human consumption, to
eastern Europe and to China,â?? he explains.
But tripe is still what sets the brand apart. And, as Mr Baker puts it, â??dogs
love itâ??.
END.
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