On 1 October, when Danish Crown begins a new financial year, Danish Crown Pork, which slaughters the owner farmers’ pigs and sells the fresh meat, will merge with Danish Crown Foods, which is responsible for processing the fresh meat into a range of products from bacon to sausages.
“We aim to become the leading global provider of meat measured in terms of carbon footprint by 2030. To help us achieve that, our Feeding the Future strategy prioritises value over volume. To build a strong position for our products, we need to build even closer relations with customers and consumers, and we must work even closer together across the Group. To that end, we are now pooling all the strong skills of Danish Crown Foods and Danish Crown Pork in one unit, and I would like to emphasise that this is in no way a cost-cutting initiative, but an investment in the future,” explains Jais Valeur, Group CEO of Danish Crown.
The new business unit will naturally be named Danish Crown, consisting of the three main areas of Sales, Operations and Categories.
Kasper Lenbroch, the former CEO of Danish Crown Foods, will be in charge of Sales, which is the global commercial organisation, and Søren F. Eriksen, who has been heading Danish Crown Pork, will be in charge of Operations, which covers the supply chain. A recruitment process has been initiated to find the right person to head up Categories, which will include some of the strong brands like Tulip, Friland and Danish Crown. The three executives will all report to Group CEO Jais Valeur.
“To achieve the goals defined in our Feeding the Future strategy, we will be revisiting, innovating and investing in all parts of our business. As part of our strategy process, we have therefore concluded that we must take a new path by pooling the strong skills we possess in Foods and Pork to maintain the farm-to-fork perspective throughout the value chain,” says Jais Valeur.
The organisation of the activities in the three new main areas of Sales, Categories and Operations is more or less in place, and intensive efforts will be made in the period until 1 October to recruit resources for the new organisation.
The other business units – KLS in Sweden, Sokolow in Poland, Danish Crown Beef, ESS-Food and Dat-Schaub – will continue unchanged, remaining focused on strengthening collaboration across the Group on a large number of strategic projects.