And in dairy, too, a pair of brothers are in the news. Robert Wiseman, executive chairman of Robert Wiseman Dairies, has just been elected chairman of the industry body Dairy UK. Robert was an Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2004.
At the recent Dairy UK Dinner, Jim Begg (Dairy UK’s director general) presented the inaugural Dairy UK Award to Alan Wiseman, who has just stepped down as chairman of the Scottish dairy company.
Wisemans was started by Robert Wiseman Senior – Robert and Alan’s father – in 1947 when they delivered glass bottles of milk by horse and cart. On a family trip to America, Alan saw that milk was being sold by the gallon in the supermarkets (no such places back home in the UK) and grocery stores. He realised that the American way of large quantities and store supply was the future for UK dairy.
I remember going up to Scotland to interview Alan in the 1980s, shortly after he had been named Young Entrepreneur of the Year in a competition in a UK broadsheet newspaper. Diversification was all the rage among the major processing dairies; moving into dairy products was believed to be the recipe for survival and success. So I asked Alan if Wiseman’s would be doing the same. ‘No’ was the unequivocal response.
“Liquid milk is what we know, liquid milk is what we’ll do,” he said. Shortly after, I recounted the Wiseman approach to a director of a rival dairy company. “They will never succeed,” was his response.
The rest, as they say, is history. In 1995, the company opened its first dairy in England with a processing plant in Manchester that allowed them to gain a share of the English fresh milk market. This was the start of its march south. Now, Robert Wiseman Dairies delivers 30% of the fresh milk consumed every day in the UK.
I recounted the story to Alan after the dinner. He smiled, knowingly. “Ah well,” he said. If my memory serves me well, the dairy company where that foreteller of future failure worked is no longer around.
Geoff Platt is editor of Dairy Innovation magazine. He’s also active on LinkedIn.
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