HJ Heinz finance director, Garry Price

Garry Price is full of beans. There’s no other way to describe him. We meet him on an auspicious day: it’s exactly 23 years since he started his career as a trainee with HJ Heinz in Canada and yet, even after almost a quarter of a century with the same company, he still talks ten-to-the-dozen, pinging from people to products to performance like a pinball, peppering his speech with imagined conversations with other people to illustrate his point and bubbling with an enthusiasm you couldn’t put in a bottle if you tried and which contains absolutely no artificial ingredients. It’s a wonder we got him to stay still long enough for the photoshoot.

He has a passion that has taken his CV ­ and his family ­ from Canada to Pittsburgh, back to Canada, then Holland, France and now Hayes, Middlesex, where he is CFO of Heinz’s UK and Ireland division. “I was supposed to come to Europe for two years,” Price says. “It’s been six. We’re loving it. The whole family absolutely loves it. It’s a fantastic experience.”

As far as we’re concerned, families are usually off-limits in the Financial Director interview, but the family factor can’t be ignored when you’ve taken two daughters to three schools in three countries in about as many years. He admits it can be hard on children, but as far as he’s seen, “the benefits outweigh the cost,” he says.

The oldest daughter has been admitted to top US university Cornell, “and I think a big chunk of that was her international exposure and her cultural understanding. She’s been in 32 countries in her life now and she’s lived in five and it’s not bad for an 18-year-old, I think.”

Life’s a beach
Price recalls the excitement when he told his family that he was in the running for a job in Australia ­ “I made a mistake in telling them; you don’t do that. They were really pumped up.” ­ and their disappointment when he turned it down for a posting in Holland. “‘What happened to the beaches?’ ‘The beaches in the Netherlands are fantastic on the North Sea!’” (You see what we mean about the imaginary conversations.) “I’ve been extremely lucky because each time we move [the family is] positive about it. We’ve had no problems. Well, we’ve had the typical problems,” Price admits, “but nothing that would force us to go home. So it’s been a super ride.”

Back to business and, over and above all the international travel, there’s another reason why Price is just fizzing: in the two years he has been in the UK he’s played a pivotal role in getting significant growth back into the British and Irish business which had been flat for around five years. Britain and Ireland are important to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, branded food group, he says. “If this company isn’t growing it’s very hard for the rest of the company to hit its growth targets because everyone has to [grow] by a factor of 10.”

(Apparently, many people in Britain think Heinz is a British company, though not without good reason, perhaps. “Outside of New Zealand, the sales [of Heinz products] per capita is larger in the UK than anywhere else. So, substantially above the Americans.”)