With more than 30 years’ experience working with the food sector through a career in the IDA, Forbairt and Enterprise Ireland (EI), Julie Sinnamon knows the ingredients required to grow Ireland’s agri-food sector.

How important is the food sector to EI?

The agri-food sector is the most important sector of Irish enterprise and therefore the most important to EI. Therefore, it is where EI is placing the largest amount of its investments.

While it is valuable to the country, it is particularly important regionally. It is also one of the few sectors where we have scale and we have developed positions in global markets.

There is a high level of employment and the spend in the local economy is large. For example when we support a food processing plant in the rural economy, the spend locally has a much larger impact than when we invest in a multinational business.

How would you describe what EI does?

EI’s primary role is to accelerate the growth of Irish industry. We work with the agri-food industry on the capacity side, providing capital and employment grants while also focusing on improving the sector’s competitiveness by driving innovation, efficiency and productivity.

What is EI’s ambition for the agri-food sector?

We want to maximise growth while sustaining existing jobs. Our 2020 strategy aims to grow jobs by 60,000 while sustaining the existing 200,000 jobs.

What makes Ireland’s agri-food sector different?

People don’t buy from Ireland because we are nice people. It is because of the innovation in our products and services and the sustainability of our grass-based system is increasingly being recognised globally as something special.

The processing sector is sometimes seen as fragmented – is EI addressing this?

While we do invest in businesses directly, we also fund initiatives such as the dairy processing centre, meat technology centre and more recently the consumer foods centre. This is about improving collaboration between companies and getting a better return on investment for the State. Companies can work jointly on projects which are long term enough that don’t compete from a market perspective.

Do you believe cross-collaboration is a good model?

There is no point in every company re-inventing wheels. This model ensures the sector is maximising its potential as opposed to a single company getting slightly ahead. The real competition is on global markets, not the company next door.

Have we more work to do on improving our productivity?

While we have made great strides in the last 10 years, given the threat of Brexit, companies need to look at continuing to improve productivity.

How does the industry succeed globally?

Innovation is a key differentiator when looking for success globally. It maximises value. The opportunity is to maximise Ireland’s valuable raw material – grass. We are recognised for the consumer appreciation of the grass-based system in a way we didn’t value as much in the past. While it was seen as a cheaper way of production previously, now the consumer is saying it is actually something they want. The industry needs to take this valuable raw material and innovate it to achieve the maximum value from it rather than selling commodities.

Are companies investing enough in R&D?

R&D spend is unacceptably low. We need to encourage more investment in the longer term. There is a body of evidence to show that investing in innovation is not a cost but an investment in the future. We need to get more collaboration between sectors – ie pharma and agri-food. This has huge potential.

What do you see as the biggest challenge ahead?

Without doubt it is Brexit. The advice is to prepare for the worst and work on our competitiveness, innovation and diversification. If there then was a softer Brexit and we were more competitive, more diversified and more innovative that’s actually not a bad place to be. Brexit is forcing us to do things that we probably should have done anyway.

EI is also responsible for attracting foreign direct investment in food – how is that performing?

We have global recognition for food and drink. We currently have the strongest pipeline of investments ever. I believe this is driven by the raw material availability, the science, and the available talent.

Why are we not creating more Irish food companies of large scale?

In food you have small startups and large startups of scale. You don’t typically get a very small startup that becomes a large startup. Large startups need significant investment from the start.

This is very challenging in Ireland due to a lack of funding from the banking sector. This needs to be addressed. It is seen as high risk, with a high capital cost and a long period before profits are made. There is an ambition with a small number of people to build startups of scale but the funding model needs to be addressed. We need to come up with a solution that is a mix of bank funding in addition to equity.

Is EI looking for investors?

There are a number of angel investors in the startup world but we are constantly looking for more.

If there are people who have funds available we would connect them with the business angel networks that connect them with projects.

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