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British consumers view Ireland as local and not as imported product when food shopping, Bord Bia CEO Tara McCarthy has said.
Speaking on the Marian Finucane show on Saturday, she said that in the UK, British consumers trust the supply chain and if you go into the leading supermarkets you will see British and Irish beef.
“That’s how it’s labelled to British consumers – ‘we source British and Irish beef’ – and our research in that market would tell you that normally British consumers view Ireland as local, as shopping local. They don’t see it as an imported product.
“Can you imagine then, and this is the unknown, that if you trust where you purchase your product from today, you trust the safety, you trust the quality assurance, you trust the traceability, the EU regulations, every single part of that welfare that the British are very exercised about in every category, and then you switch that overnight to a product that doesn’t have those standards, then you would want to be a brave retailer I guess that you would undermine the trust in the supply chain,” she said.
Bord Bia has been meeting retailers and food service operators to assure them that Ireland is prepared and that Ireland is producing the beef that their customers want and that we have a supply chain that works for them.
If it’s not broken then why would you interfere with it, she said.
Market access research
On accessing new markets, McCarthy outlined that Bord Bia doesn’t just arrive on the tarmac of a potential new market, like in China last week, and then gets to work – the work happens, far in advance of that.
“We research them. We research not just the macroeconomic details. We research the consumers and that’s a very unique way of doing things.
“We will send our team to go shopping with Chinese consumers, to go cooking with Chinese consumers. We have ethno-graphic research, which is effectively understanding their behaviours, how they speak, how they eat, how they cook so that we can find out what about Ireland will be attractive to them.
“What we have found with them is, in China particularly, they don’t trust their supply chain, they want to know provenance and that the food is safe.
“What we don’t want is to change their eating habits, what we want to do is put Irish beef into their eating habits,” she said.
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