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.”)

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?’”

To help make this happen, Price has his finance people literally sitting with the operational people: “We’re located throughout the business, so [for example] our factory finance people have dual reporting: they report into the factory managers, but also into our supply chain finance director who works for me. We have people in sales areas. We have a sales finance manager [who sits] with each major customer team.

Part of our drive of becoming a business partner is to have a seat at every table so every decision that’s made in this corporation, I want finance to have a part of it. I want finance to be a valued member of that group at that table. So we’re going to launch a new product, finance has a say in it. We’re going to launch a marketing campaign, finance has a say in it, because we can add value to it.”

We ask what value finance can add to such a marketing-orientated business given that, as we dare to suggest, finance managers obviously aren’t expected to actually create new products. “You’d be surprised!” he exclaims, proceeding to tell us about a range of baked beans that have slurried vegetables mixed up in them. “We do these ‘Dragon’s Den’ every once in a while and people from the organisation get together in teams and come up with new products. And this was an idea from one of the women who works in HR. The whole purpose of this is you give your kids the vegetables, but they don’t know it. Fantastic idea!”

Taste for new ideas
So if HR can dream up new ideas, surely finance can think up new types of beans. The real role of finance, of course, is to do the modelling, the costings, test whether the projections meet the necessary hurdle rates and then, after launch, to do the one, three, six and 12-month reviews. Part of that exercise involves making sure the product has been costed properly: real-life factory costs can be different from experience in the pilot plant. Not all launches survive this process. “New products are hit and miss,” Price says.

One interesting aspect of new products, though, is that the cannibalisation effect can be a lot less than one might expect. The little snackpot tub of beans, for example, “is creating new uses for beans” (and we bet you never thought you’d read a sentence like that). “It’s convenience, it’s a come-home from school, the children can pop one of those in the microwave, it’s 200 grams, it’s a snack before dinner.”

If you cut Price he’d probably bleed ketchup, as he admits, though the same seems to be increasingly true of his colleagues. Schemes such as “Adopt-a-store”, “Consumer closeness sessions” and working shifts in the factories help even the most senior executives understand the whole of the Heinz operation ­ to say nothing of the new products that immediately land in the staff canteen (“We eat the soup”). Price has a store in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, that he is supposed to visit once a month “and actually do a survey of the product on shelf,” he says. “What is the price point? Are we getting three facings on the shelf or two? What’s on promotion? What are the competitors doing?” There are around 225 senior execs with a store each, “which is also providing market intelligence back into the company.”

On the consumer closeness sessions, Price spent an afternoon with a young mother in Ruislip, west London, listening to her talk about her shopping habits and even going to the store with her, finding out “what’s important when she’s walking through the aisles, what upsets her, what intrigues her, what is she looking for? Is she looking for health and wellness? Is she looking for reduced sugar and salt? Is she looking for organic? Is she looking for colour and flavour and new experiences and all those kind of things?”

And as you might expect in a business where manufacturing quality is so crucial, a shift on the beans canning line helps round off the education for this highly operational FD. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Price tells us (without being asked) that Heinz’s beans production is 336 million units a year. That’s 14 cans a second. So now you know: you can take the finance director out of beancounting, but you can’t take the beancounting out of the finance director.