Kepak's all-Irish beef deal
MSVC said it chose Kepak to implement its policy of buying only 100% Irish beef and lamb, on account of the meat group's outstanding record in guaranteed Irish supply and processing, food safety, product innovation and animal welfare.
Kepak now becomes the source of MSVC's 21% share of the Irish beef retail market.
The Meath based company has 15% of the cattle kill in Ireland more than 250,000 animals per year including the KK Producer Cub and Certified Irish Angus Alliance.
The group is also one of Ireland's biggest lamb processors.
The MSVC deal is good news for more than 2,000 Bord Bia Quality Assured farms, which supply more than 35,000 prime beef animals into Kepak at Watergrasshill, Co Cork per day, producing 9,000 tonnes of beef worth €70m at retail level.
Although most of the beef for MSVC comes from Munster, some of the cattle carcases put through the integrated Watergrasshill plant and its unique Foodtrace system come from Kepak's plants at Clonee, Co Meath and Athleague, Co Roscommon. This €15m plant replaces the company's previous plant on the site, burned down two years ago.
It generates at least 250 jobs, 130 or which are already in place, with added security for employees, compared to much of the seasonal work in the beef industry, which has traditionally depended on unreliable export and intervention markets.
Kepak's home market breakthrough heralds in a unique meat traceability system jointly devised with MSVC and the EAN bar coding standards body, which will eventually enable the labelling of meats in the MSVC shops with farmers' names and addresses.
Already, in the initial stage of this Foodtrace system, if customers query the quality of any piece of meat, the Foodtrace number on the pack allows the retailer to track it back, through the beef factory and to the farm.
The group are first to perfect an electronic system which labels the primal cut after an animal is slaughtered and tracks it through the meat factory to the consumer pack or to the shop cash register from which the price label is generated for "serve-over" meats freshly cut by a butcher.
The system can equally be used for traceability of other meats, such as chicken or lamb.
In the trial stores, staff have welcomed the time saving from not having to hand-write prepack labels, or write out the "whiteboard" on which all butchers are required by EU legislation to identify where their retail meat comes from.
The EU requires all food and feed businesses to have a traceability and recall system in place by 2005. Foodtrace complies with current and impending EU legislation, and replaces the less reliable, manual "whiteboard".
EAN Ireland, which upholds bar coding standards, worked with MSVC and Kepak to put Foodtrace in place.
Together, they have perfected a system which provides all the relevant product information at the touch of a button, in the event of a food quality problem.
The new traceability system has got the blessing of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.
"This Information Technology solution means that any customer query as to the source of the beef and its movement through the food chain can instantly be checked," said Dr Wayne Anderson of the FSAI.
MSVC's Fresh Commodity Category Manager Denis Cronin says they will also use the Foodtrace system to reduce the variation in the eating quality of Irish beef.
MSVC Managing Director Michael Nason says the retail group's unique and exclusive arrangement with Kepak has very distinct advantages.
"Both companies are Irish privately owned."
"We both have clear long term strategies for the beef category, based on fundamental consumer research. We simply make sure we talk to and listen to our customer and, most important, we act", said Mr Nason. "The overall objective is to support a long-term, sustainable beef business for both parties, which also supports the Irish economy and jobs".
He revealed that MSVC will shortly release the results of independent tests carried out in University College Cork which showed eating quality, taste and tenderness of the group's beef were unsurpassed in the Irish market.
