For a business that prides itself on ensuring British products are available around the world, while looking well into the medium term, a guess-what-Brexit and a global pandemic have not played well.
It makes the recognition as being at the “gold standard of food exporters” all the more sweet for Sean Ramsden MBE and his enlarged team.
From Grimsby’s Adam Smith Street, a 100-strong team is now led, and while recent calls to the capital have been full of joy, the intervening period between his 2020 New Year's Honours naming and recent investiture from Prince Charles, has been a challenge he’s keen to move on from.
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Reflecting on the company accolade, while proud of his personal recognition, he said: “It is a massive achievement for us and I am really proud of the whole team that we have got. It is an incredibly competitive market, 10 years ago we had a lot less and weaker competition than we do now, so still to be ahead is great.
Pinning down what makes it work so well, and stay at such a level, he said: “The direction of the company comes from always looking ahead. A lot of companies run themselves year by year, we are looking five years from now, which gives us that long term consistency.”
We’re five years on from the Brexit vote, but the business could only really respond once the deal was finally delivered as 2020 ebbed away, while Covid-19 didn’t feature in any such horizon scanning such was its rapid emergence.
Like many of his contemporaries, one such event would have been more than enough to contend with.
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“It has been extremely tough for us. More than 40 per cent of our trade was into the EU, and because of the way it was negotiated, we did whatever preparation we could do, but we didn’t know what it was until Christmas Eve,” he said on Brexit.
“That threw up enormous challenges and had a significant impact on revenues for the first few months of the year.
“It pulled in tremendous resources and we had to create a model that allowed us to get products into Europe, which meant setting up a subsidiary in Belgium. That is the importer, taking the risk, handling the paperwork and duties.”
While registered across the North Sea, operationally, Ramsden International is firmly fixed in North East Lincolnshire.
“It was like completely reinventing the business, and there are still teething issues,” Mr Ramsden said. “It is still hard to get fish, meat and dairy products into Europe, but the trajectory is a positive one and we have seen significant improvement from the middle of this year to where we are now. We have seen a significant improvement and increases in revenue as a result of that.
“In one way the increased complexity of Brexit works for us, we create value for customers by managing the complexity. We have had to do all this previously with non-EU markets, so Brexit may bring us some advantage, but in the short term it has been very painful.”
All this played out with coronavirus too.
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“Lockdown was a mixture, in markets where we were dealing with main go-to shopping stores, volumes were much higher, but in tourist-led areas, the Med, Caribbean and Thailand, those markets dropped off a cliff. I think it probably balanced out, demand was reasonably stable - the issue last year was product availability.
“Panic-buying started, the impact was taking £3 billion of product out of the food supply chain, and it took the producers and distribution market a lot of time to recover from that.”
This year saw the Suez Canal incident, twinned with the HGV crisis, also leading to a container shortage, impacting on product movement.
“We are an agile enough company and we are able to respond to these challenges, but it is tough,” Mr Ramsden said.
“Ultimately most of these issues are the result of lockdown. You couldn’t just switch off a large part of the economy for a year to 18 months, then switch it back on again and everything start as normal - but we’re on a general trajectory of improvement.”
It estimated £7 million in lost sales, with the house curfews and travel bans coming almost on Easter - seeing £290,000 of orders cancelled when already shipped.
Entering the period with revenues of £46.9 million, he believes the current financial year wll dip below £40 million, but is eyeing a return with interest - with a £50 million figure mooted as it pushes on with the 24,000 products for 650 customers across 133 countries, backed by a bank of linguists.
“2022 will be a year of recovery and growth,” he said. “We have been battered for two years, it has been tough on so many different fronts. We won’t be profitable this year, we made a reasonable profit last year, but we live to fight another day.”
Building on historic family links with Nisa - his father Dudley co-founded it - the Scunthorpe delivered wholesale giant is the provider of 90 per cent of the exported goods.
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Now owned by The Co-op, a new five year supply agreement has just been agreed, including exclusive distribution of The Co-op own brand goods.
“That has some exciting potential,” Mr Ramsden enthused. “There are certain markets with certain customers that it will work very well in. We are very excited about the opportunity that agreement gives us.”
The company has a neighbouring reprocessing operation to label goods correctly for the geographies they are heading to.
Once it was required for 5 per cent of exports, that figure is now 40 per cent.
“That is partly Brexit and partly the growing need for compliance around the world,” he said of the expansion. “Increasingly we are dealing with large supermarket chains, who will deal with nothing less.”
Relabelling sees ingredients, preparation and storage information translated - “complex, fiddly work, but we’re quite good at it,” Mr Ramsden said.
The company is also 'quite good' at winning awards - with more than 100 in the past 20-odd years, with several personal accolades collected by the CEO prior to the MBE.
“It shows consistency," Mr Ramsden said. "It is all about the people, we have the best people we could possibly hope for, an amazing team and we’re fortunate to have them. It is not always easy finding talent in this region, but we have assembled a wonderful team.”
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