HJ Heinz finance director, Garry Price

Price describes what was wrong with the business when he came here. “We got a little lazy; I think we got complacent. The products we had were number one in most of the things we do and I guess we took a too-relaxed view.” Then, he says, fresh competition came in from Premier Foods in red sauce, brown sauce and beans. Heinz, however, had been suffering from “a lack of innovation, there was a lack of true, really talented marketeers that understood consumers and understood what the consumers wanted. And I don’t think there was the right drive and the right level of accountability. A lot of people flew below the radar screen and were getting through each day and going home.”

In virtually all areas, including marketing, supply chain, HR and sales, new people were brought into the UK organisation from Gillette, Coca-Cola, Mars and from some far-flung bits of the Heinz empire. “I don’t think we’ve used this model before,” Price says. “We’ve taken people from other areas around the world, put them in another place and said, ‘Go fix this; make something out of it. Let’s look at this, forget about what’s happened. In reality, we’re not stuffed with some precedent or ‘You have to do it this way’; let’s look at it completely new, fresh view, and pooling all of our experiences together.’ And it’s been incredibly successful.”

Price rattles off a list of performance statistics to prove his case: 3.6 points up in ketchup, four points up in salad cream, six points in soup, seven points in bean meals, frozen ready meals up six points. “Our business is growing: 88% of our portfolio is in growth.” Core to this is a significantly higher proportion of sales coming from new products ­ everything from ‘Farmer’s Market’ soups to little, microwavable tubs of baked beans. In fact, 120 new products were launched last year alone. So forget about there ever having been just 57 varieties.

Sense of urgency
To achieve these sorts of figures, finance wasn’t exempt from the turmoil made necessary to throw off the complacency that had set in. About half the finance staff were replaced in the space of 18 months. “Some at our request and some at theirs,” he says. “One of our values is ‘sense of urgency’ and everyone has to have accountability. Some people weren’t up for that because they just weren’t.” The new structure requires everyone to deliver against objectives: “We have 90-day objectives and four-year goals. We do reviews semi-annually and annually with career planning as part of that, so we’ve really taken it up a notch from an HR perspective as part of a high performing organisation.”

Finding the right people wasn’t easy, and Price says he is frustrated by headhunters, most of whom don’t do the proper due diligence on candidates. It took eight months to find a financial controller, for example ­ “but we weren’t going to make a mistake”. Price wanted to get people who understand consumers and the pressures on retailers.

And he’s changing the culture of finance, getting away from its traditional role as “reporters of the news after the fact. Everyone’s waiting: ‘How did we do this month?’ We’re trying to become more ‘business partners’ than just a lot of accountants around the place,” he says. “We’re trying to take away the monthly build-up. ‘We’re closing the books next Wednesday.’ ‘Okay,’ ­ and there’s this big build up. It shouldn’t be like that; it’s [just] another day. So we’re trying to do things weekly now. ‘Let’s tap into our yield reporting, our labour reporting, our overhead recovery and our gross profit. What did we earn last week? What did we ship? What were the sales? What was the gross profit?

“I want my finance guys to understand what’s behind the numbers,” he says. “Sometimes they struggle. A lot of the finance people have a tough time putting words on a piece of paper with numbers. And what you find is, ‘Hey, give me the summary of those numbers,’ and what they do is they read the numbers. They’ll say, ‘We’re up 2.6% driven by higher volumes’ and it’s like, ‘Look, guys, tell me what’s behind that,’ ­ which stretches them a little bit. And then, ‘Okay, well, we’re down in Sainsbury’s.’ ‘Why? What do we do about it?’ ‘Oh, shall I go check?’ ‘Why don’t you?’”