Wayne Hudson, MD of Young’s Frozen Business, spoke this week (on 25th March 2015) at a prestigious event on building trust in the FMCG sector. Hudson spoke about commercial management and trust in the food sector at a ‘B2B Commercial Management event, ‘The Great Debate – Building Trust’. The event was attended by a range of retail, financial services and FMCG professionals and was held at The Crystal at Victoria Royal Dock, London. The event was organised by Customer Attuned, a group of Customer Management experts providing consultancy services to organisations around the globe.
Wayne Hudson, MD of Young’s Frozen Business, said: “I was delighted to accept the invitation from Customer Attuned to speak at the Great Debate on Building Trust and Commercial Management in the FMCG sector. At Young’s Seafood Limited, we are committed to building trust with our customers and continuing to embed, and reinforce, it in our culture, values and behaviours. Be it trust in the quality of your Brands, trust in the quality of your cross functional customer management teams or trust in the quality of your people overall, it really is the key to building deeper more interdependent and sustainable B2B relationships.”
During his speech, Hudson highlighted the role that building trust has had in the successful performance of the company which now has a turnover of almost £600million. The Young’s brand, across both frozen and chilled is now worth over £231million. The company’s Gastro brand, offering restaurant quality fish dishes has become one of the fastest growing brands in frozen food and is now worth £22.3million, demonstrating that consumers have a strong level of trust in Young’s frozen fish.
The Young’s Seafood’s brand has a 200 year heritage and, with a team of 3,000 people across multiple sites, now sources over 30 different species of fish from 5 continents. Hudson highlighted his view that, “To be trusted, all you have to do is what you say you are going to do – always!” During his speech he also highlighted the role that Young’s Seafood Limited’s Fish for Life Corporate Social Responsibility programme has had in nurturing trust with multiple stakeholders. Outlining some of the steps he has taken within the business, Hudson touched on how he has set out a new vision for the frozen business, improved the quality of some key lines and brought back some iconic lines within the Young’s portfolio whilst at the same time reduced the complexity and number of SKUs overall. He also touched on the future vision for Young’s Seafood Limited and the importance of building commercial capability, aligning teams as well as building plans from the bottom up and top down to ensure that ‘Trust’ is embedded and gathers serious momentum both internally and in the customer base.
Mark Hollyoake, Director of Customer Attuned, said: “We were particularly pleased Wayne could speak at this event. He is a forward thinking Commercial Director that ensures new concepts, ways of working and business models are grounded against practical and pragmatic applicability. His track record and commercial achievement provide a level of comfort to others that you can drive positive commercial change, embrace new thinking and drive the bottom line. He has been closely involved in some of the thinking and discussion around the subject being covered at this event. Within the debate, Wayne is able to provide people with the art of the possible and how to go about developing relationships based upon trust, interdependence and equitability. This is all against a background of a sector renowned for its customer management challenges and commercial rigour.”
