Meet the Alumni: Sam Franklin – AMFresh

What is your current role? And what is your day-to-day like?

My current role at AMFresh is UK technical director for the group.

There isn’t really a set day-to-day, there’s a month-to-month. It’s just really managing the quality, integrity, compliance plus the business all the way from end-to-end, but it is different every day.

With focus in South America on weather one day, to quality procedures on the line and implementation of quality assurance to having retailer talks the next day, it’s just completely different. There is no real structure.

What challenges does that pose?

I think you’ve got to have a good team underneath you that can manage the day-to-day, but in the role I’m in my job is really just to set the direction and then make sure everyone’s going in the right direction and you’re providing them with the best skillset, ability to deliver that day-to-day.

My job is to take the exact vision and direction of the business to a technical strategy and deliver it.

What skills did you learn through MDS that help with that?

It’s fairly varied. The biggest thing you have to learn is you have to learn how to talk to people at every level of the business, and I think you get quite a stark introduction to that on MDS because I think, although you normally come in at a relatively low level, you normally sit as a manager, and therefore you deal with everyone at the same time.

You can be dealing with temporary labour on the line, who might not speak particularly good English, right up to executives and everything in the middle.

I think that’s a really important skill that people tend to lose sight of in the modern communication environment, how to talk to people of various levels 121.

How has MDS changed since then?

Massively, I mean when I was on it, MDS was very small groups. I think there was 10 members in our group, and I think that was it. Then when I walked in to do the presentation earlier this year (at the MDS Annual Conference) I can’t believe how many people were on it, to be honest. I thought it was massive – I think that’s the thing that really, I guess, surprised me.

You don’t really get visibility of that, you don’t really get the true sense of how big or broad it’s become.

I mean the concept is the same, but I think the scale and breadth of what they’re delivering now is far in excess of what the scheme was like when I was on it. Then it was very much produce-centric and now there’s all manner of different companies on it from all sorts of areas of the industry.

Why did you join MDS?

I got into it because I didn’t know what I wanted to do basically, so I left university. I went travelling for a year and a half.

I’d already booked on to MDS before I went travelling and then delayed it and then came back and didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

We had a family farm at home but decided it wasn’t really big enough for me to go into so I decided to go and work. I kind of wanted to work in the industry or something to do with farming, and MDS was a really good fit at the time so I went there and then wasn’t expecting to ever work for a retailer or live in London, then ended up loving both of those for eight years.

Eventually I just got a bit fed up with living in London, so I ended up coming back out into the supplier base. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and I think MDS gave me that sort of direction of doing multiple different jobs in multiple different companies, and I think even if you come out of MDS still not knowing what you want to do, you do have an idea of what you don’t want to do.

I think that’s what MDS enables you to do is just see lots of different things in a short space of time and enable you to narrow that to an area of which you want to or like to work in, and that’s as good as you could probably hope for.

It’s narrowing down to ‘that’s what I want to do next’ and then just sort of go down that route. But I knew very quickly that I didn’t want to work in commercial, it just wasn’t for me, I wanted the variability that Technical delivered.

How did you go from your secondments to AMFresh?

I enjoyed working in retail, so I did 4 years at Sainsbury’s and 8 years at M&S, and then switched sides, working in retail is definitely good to experience. I think what it does give you is the broad view of everything, you’re not really an expert in any one area but you get to see a huge range of different companies.

I think that when I made my decision to leave M&S, I was looking at the 30 companies and I knew only 2 I’d actually want to work for – the first one I actually approached was this one, it was called MM UK at the time. I said ‘look, I’m looking to leave’ and we basically created a role and that was it, I’m in it 13 years later – well 13 years in January.

I think the reality is every day is different because the one thing I realised quite early is I don’t like monotony and therefore the constant change is just something new every day. No day is ever the same.

Where were your placements?

My first one was iceberg lettuce, harvest manager running a rig for a company that doesn’t exist anymore, a company called Mary Mac Salads. My second I managed a group of growers, again for a company that doesn’t exist anymore called Bomfords. They were basically a bean grower that used to direct pack their own products and supply direct, I managed quality for them. My third one was slightly different – it was process development for chicken ready meals. That was the first time they’d been involved with MDS.

And then I did Sainsbury’s as my final placement, I think it’s good to see the full end to end supply chain – the whole thing together. It’s quite interesting to see a different aspect to it, with a different set of challenges.

Has the supplier base consolidated too far in some areas?

I think in some of those areas' retailers are starting to look again now, whether it’s because of heat or drought or whatever, and go ‘actually have we consolidated too far?’ when all of our particular products are only sourced from this one area in one country, and do we actually now need to broaden the outlook of it.

So we’ll see. My thoughts are that especially with climate change impacting the areas that are producing that’s going to be a big topic with the resilience around the supply chain.

If you look at some of the ways some product areas and supply chains are set up they could be more resilient than they are, and I think everyone is looking at that where some of the consolidation has happened and thinking about sourcing from multiple countries or multiple options, rather than just handing it over to one specific area.

But it’s hard to know what that will look like – definitively.

What other challenges for the industry are there?

I think one of the biggest challenges that we face at the moment, and it’s not just produce, but a total food industry is actually good quality young talent coming into the industry because it’s not particularly sexy –we’ll be working in cold environments, without natural sunlight, shift work etc. So, I think having people wanting to come into the industry when there are other, probably easier routes in other sectors is one of the challenges.

I think that’s why MDS works well – it does an element of filtering down within its process, but it gives a really good two years and an appreciation for different companies, different cultures and appreciation for what is required to succeed. It makes you very well-rounded.

I think there’s also the obvious ones, you’d say sustainability, global climate challenges, that big picture of socio-economic factors, and we have to roll with the punches with some of that, but I think people is where we can almost have more direct control over, and I think MDS is one of the key areas we can see fill in some of that void.

It definitely feels like MDS is doing a good job.

What kind of exciting things can you see coming up in the next 1-5 years? Either at AMFresh or the wider industry.

I think the produce industry overall has matured quite a lot, and I think there’s been a lot of consolidation in the last 10 years, and that has driven a level of maturity and growth within businesses.

And I think for AMFresh over the next few years, there’s a big opportunity in a number of different areas to be honest. How we build on the platform, and we continue to cement that growth with our key strategic customers, but I think the pipeline of new varieties coming forward within the breeding programmes I think will continue to be hugely important in providing a point of difference for our customers and driving forwards.

I think the thing you can’t afford to do, in any industry but particularly in produce and where we sit, is to stop innovating and stop challenging ouselves. You have to challenge yourself and keep looking at what you’re doing – is it the best way, and what are the better things we can do.

How can we drive quality? How can we drive innovation? How can we drive sales, customer growth, customer satisfaction? You just have to challenge those all the time.

So that’s the key thing about making sure that you know you’re going to still be here in 10 years' time. I think you can look at lots of companies that don’t exist anymore – it’s because they stopped. They stopped adding value to either the growers or to the customers.

What’s your advice for MDS graduates, or new starters in the industry?

I think the best thing about MDS is it gives you a real platform to see lots of areas all in a very short space of time.

I think my advice would be just throw yourself at it and just talk to as many people, see what’s going on, just get involved in many things as possible, within your remit, obviously.

But you’ve got a fantastic opportunity for two years, whether it be 6 months or year-long placements depending on what it looks like.

So that would be my advice – just throw yourself into it and talk to with many people and see and get to understand as many ways of working as possible.

I think you have to keep always doing something differently and bring in fresh ideas, new talent. It is very easy to become stuck in your ways, and I count myself in that – I’ll have been here 13 years. I might like to think of myself as innovative but actually new people coming in, challenging it and changing the pool of talent brings in new eyes, fresh ideas.

Are you in touch with many people from your cohort?

You have quite a few ex-MDS at AMFresh across both sites, obviously there’s Tim (Johnson) and Rachel (Botha) here, and James Bradshaw at Tesco. There’s a surprising number of people throughout the industry and I think that’s credit to MDS as a career provider, and a really good platform within which to learn quickly.

James Dale, I see relatively regularly at industry events and bits and pieces.

Archie Stuart’s another one who was actually the MDS placement under me when I was at M&S and he was working up at Dobbies and up in Scotland. So yeah, various different people. So, I would say some of some from the cohort and some just from who I have worked for and with since then.