European Export Opportunities for Food Producers

Updated: 11th August 2008

European Export Opportunities for Food Producers

By Martin Lightbody, Strategic Development Director of Finsbury Food Group

Many economic advisers are warning that the UK economy is about to enter its bleakest period of growth since the recession days of the early 1990s. In addition, the coming slowdown looks set to be a fundamental adjustment rather than a brief pause for breath. Growth will be weak in both 2008 and 2009 and interest rates could fall as low as 4%.

So how is this change in the economic environment going to affect European export opportunities? We ask Martin Lightbody, Strategic Development Director of Finsbury Food Group, one of the UK’s leading premium cake businesses, what he thinks the future has in store for the exportation of food products to Europe.

The UK currently exports around 55% of all goods and services to the European Union. At Finsbury Foods our cakes tend to focus on a special celebration such as a birthday, graduation, bridal shower, wedding, or anniversary. At first we sold our products exclusively in the UK, but as demand grew we decide to branch out firstly in Europe and then globally. We now export our celebration cakes to countries across the world, including France, Scandinavia and China.

Our European customers are serviced from a Head Office and Depot in Rennes. An advantage for Finsbury Foods, when exporting our products, is that we have licences to use, such as Disney and other world famous characters such as Spiderman on our cakes. Having such globally recognisable images on our products makes it much easier for the consumer to identify with what we are trying to sell.  

Although we think on a global scale, we act on a local level and have been flexible enough to offer a solution in each of the markets we have entered. France is a good example of this. The French didn’t have an evolved celebration cake market and following a series of focus groups we discovered that French children have very similar attitudes towards celebration cakes as British children. The key learnings we discovered in the focus groups allowed us to tailor our offer in France, both in terms of flavour profile and the character licenses we used.

Through experience we have found exporting products to Europe isn’t actually that much different from working within the UK; you need to offer the consumer a great looking cake at a price that represents value for money. However many factors need to be taken into consideration when entering a new market to ensure you develop the correct product offering, be it in the UK or abroad. You can’t sell something to the local market that it doesn’t want.

This was proven when Finsbury Foods looked into exporting to Germany. Again we used focus groups to research the current attitudes to celebration cakes. The groups showed that Germans we not responsive to celebration cakes and we decided against entering the market.

Current Economic Environment

We are lucky; the current economic conditions have yet to have any real affect on Finsbury Foods production and distribution. I also think it’s probably too early to tell exactly when if at all we will be affected. However, with a total of 180 million sales across 7 productions sites, we have a flexible business model that I feel can cope with the changing economic environment.

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