Ten months into the merger between Arrabawn and Tipperary Co-op, or ArraTipp as it is now officially known, and cost savings of between €6-7m have been made, co-op chair Edward Carr has said.

“We’re 10 months now into the merger, it has been a challenging time. Any time you bring two organisations together there’s plenty of challenges.

“There was cost savings identified before ever we went into the merger. Those cost savings have been achieved and most of them have been achieved in year one. There was €10m in cost savings between the two organisations over a two-year period. We’ve already achieved between €6-7m in the first year which is a massive achievement,” he said.

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Carr, who is also president of ICOS, said that plenty of synergies were identified during the merger talks.

“The merger was done in the best interests of our 1,400 farmers. We put our cards on the table to our members, those 1,400 people got an opportunity to vote on the merger, they gave us a 94% endorsement to go ahead and do the merger. I’ve no doubt the real fruits of that will be shown in the benefits to those suppliers over the next year,” he said.