The Food Chain Centre

The Food Chain Centre (FCC) was established in 2002 following a recommendation in “Farming & Food - a sustainable future” (the Curry Report). It is facilitated by IGD (the international food and grocery think-tank) and its role is to improve the efficiency of the UK food supply chain.

The approach has been to test a number of business improvement methods which have been used successfully in other industries by adapting and applying them to the UK food and farm businesses. These methods fall into five “Pathways to Profitability”:

1. Farm Business Strategy – FCC is encouraging farm businesses to have a clear competitive strategy by using a series of coached questions covering a review of their current position, developing future plans and ways of measuring the progress.

2. Farm Business Improvement Groups – FCC champions benchmarking and the formation of Business Clubs as a way for farmers to compare their performance against their peers, share best practice and ultimately improve their bottom line.

3. Differentiation – FCC has proved that using good market research data helps producers make better business decisions. For instance, distinguishing themselves from their competition through better marketing of their products.

4. Manufacturing Excellence – FCC has piloted ‘Masterclass’ and ‘PROBE’ techniques with food processing and manufacturing companies to improve production efficiency and reduce cost and add value.

5. Food Chain Collaboration – FCC has introduced the ‘Value Chain Analysis’ method to the UK food supply chain as a way to reduce whole chain inefficiencies and increase understanding and collaboration between partners in the chain.

This work has been conducted across all the major agricultural sectors and different routes to market. Some results from this work include:

A ‘Farm Scorecard’ and associated workbook which is a step-by-step guide to producing a business strategy.
A three fold increase in the number of farmers participating in Business clubs.
The establishment of 20 fresh produce business clubs using the ‘Hortbench’ tool.
The dunnhumby Academy of Consumer Research at Kent Business School, which gives farmers access to supermarket loyalty card data for 1 million shoppers.
A free Consumer Library on the FCC website, which shows population, demographic and consumption trends from several different sources.
Significant cost savings within the supply chains and organisations that have participated in the Masterclass and Value Chain Analysis pilots.
To date, over 75 published case studies showing the benefits of these best practice techniques throughout the food supply chain.

Contact FCC: www.foodchaincentre.com or 01923 857141.