US lawsuit ‘no effect on strategy’

A threatened legal action against Irish food group Glanbia over alleged misstating of a product’s benefits will not impact the company’s strategy in any way, according to group managing director, Siobhán Talbot.

US law firm Newport Trial Group is alleging that Bio-Engineered Supplements (BNS) — which Glanbia bought in 2011 — misstated the potential benefits of popular bodybuilding supplement, Nitrix, and in doing so has wrongfully taken millions of dollars from consumers.

The law firm filed the complaint in California saying that the possible number of litigants could be in the tens of thousands as it continues to seek consumers who have purchased the supplement to join as litigants.

However, speaking in the aftermath of Glanbia’s interim results which were released yesterday, Ms Talbot said that such legal proceedings were part and parcel of doing business in the US and denied that it would have any impact on company strategy.

“No, none at all,” said Ms Talbot. “We have a threatened action, as you mentioned, that there’s been some limited publicity about.

“Quite honestly, we see those types of events as part of doing business in the US for consumer companies of scale such as ourselves.

“We put a lot of work into the quality regime around our products. The US can at times be a litigious society so we’re not concerned about that,” she added.

Ms Talbot also said that there were no plans to discard its Irish dairy business despite it being the company’s worst performing sector in the first half of the year.

The company’s Irish dairy unit was not among the company’s future growth areas identified by Ms Talbot, however.

“We’re comfortable with the structure of the group as it is at the moment. We have a number of platforms — I think we’ve been very specific that our growth platforms are the two businesses of global performance nutrition and global ingredients...

“Ireland is very much part and core to the overall Glanbia story and I see that sustaining,” Ms Talbot said.

The company is also looking to achieve further growth, both organically and through acquisitions, some of which are currently “in the pipeline”.

“We have a good pipeline, we always try to keep an active pipeline and we pass on various things that we feel don’t meet those metrics for us... I think one of the key parts of the Glanbia story has been our desire to grow the group through a nice mix of organic growth and acquisition and we’d like to continue that trajectory,” added Ms Talbot.