THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW: FRANCESS MACDONNELLtalks to Brian Irwin, Chief Executive.

ON THE RECORD

Name:Brian Irwin

Position:Executive Chairman Kenneth Irwin & Sons

Born:February 1954

Education:Portadown College, BA from Durham University MSC from Warwick University.

Surprising fact:Irwins Bakery best selling batch loaf Nutty Krust contains no nuts.

KNEAD THE surface a little and the first thing you discover behind Brian Irwin’s gentle charm is a man with a hunger to succeed.

Some would say it is a fitting quality for the executive chairman of one of the largest independent bakeries in Northern Ireland. There has been an Irwin in some form or other delivering the North’s daily bread for nearly 100 years.

Irwin’s Bakery was founded before the first World War by Brian Irwin’s grandfather, WD Irwin, in the heart of Portadown.

Their grandfather had a thriving grocery business in the Co Armagh town, but the secret to Irwin’s current success really began with Brian’s grandmother and great-aunt, who were talented home bakers.

WD Irwin recognised a business opportunity when he saw one and began selling his wife and sister-in-law’s cakes, bread and bakery produce in his shop. The rest is baking history.

WD Irwin passed the business down to his son Kenneth, Brian’s father, in the 1920s who successfully continued in the family tradition. Today the business is in the hands of Brian and his brother Niall, who is Irwin’s technical director and co-owner.

It is fair to say that the bakery business is in their blood. Brian and Niall were born into it and, as children, even lived above the original bakery in Portadown for a short time.

Brian Irwin’s grandfather may not have envisaged that his decision to sell his wife’s home baking would one day lead to a £30 million-plus a year business which employs more than 450 people. But, according to Irwin, the basic ingredients which made his grandfather’s business a success are equally as relevant today as they were in 1912.

“The values espoused by my grandfather – sticking to your principles, valuing your customer and showing persistence – are the values which we have established over a long period of time. We know what we make well, we believe in our product and we believe in our team. We believe in giving our very best service to our customers and we believe in delivering the very best of quality and the best value for money.”

Even in 2009, there is something inherently romantic about a business which takes raw materials such as flour, buttermilk and oil and transforms them into products that virtually everyone is familiar with. As you approach the bakery’s headquarters at Carn Industrial Estate in Craigavon, your senses are bombarded with the almost intoxicating smell of fresh bread.

It creates an immediate impression, one which is immensely comforting and in a sense misleading. Because, according to Irwin, the business reality of managing a successful bakery is far from romantic.

“It is true that people do get emotional about the product – and that’s a good thing from our point of view because no matter whether it is a customer or a politician, everyone can relate to bread. But a wholesale bakery business today is a very busy, very dynamic business which has to operate very efficiently.

“The real price of food has come down for many years in a row and this has resulted in major consolidation in the market. A wholesale bakery business now has to operate to very high levels of efficiency with low overheads, a good supply chain and very effective marketing. This is a 24/7 business where you must deliver quality, service and value for money,” Irwin said.

Irwin formally joined the family firm, WD Irwin & Sons, in the early 1980s. At the time, he and his brother Niall had one over-riding ambition for the business – to grow it.

“We had big aspirations for growth, but we also wanted to make the business more efficient and, most importantly of all, we also wanted to improve quality.

“The broad vision we had back then was that we knew growth was not going to come in Northern Ireland because we would just keep bumping our head off the ceiling at that time. Way back then, there was over-capacity in the market so we quickly realised we had to be innovative and we had to grow outside of Northern Ireland,” he said.

Irwin also took the decision to diversify from the core business into a non-related sector – property. He also invested in developing another existing family business, Irwin’s Quality Aggregates.

One of Irwin’s flagship projects was to redevelop the site of WD Irwin’s original bakery on Woodhouse Street in Portadown. The bakery relocated to a new purpose-built factory in 1994 and the multimillion-pound High Street Mall was subsequently developed on the site. The 160,000sq ft shopping centre is currently home to 34 retailers.

WD Irwin Sons has also been involved in the development of a multimillion-pound mixed housing regeneration scheme in Monaghan.

Today, Irwin’s Bakery has more than 1,000 retail and food service customers and produces over one million loaves and other bakery-related products every week. The bakery division now sells half of its total output outside Northern Ireland.

According to Irwin, developing successful relationships with major supermarket multiples in the UK and the Republic has been key to expanding its business in recent years. Irwin’s Bakery now lists the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Dunnes and Superquinn among its key clients.

Brian Irwin believes the family firm’s commitment to innovation has been one of its key strengths down the years and the secret to securing new orders from such a variety of clients. The bakery range now extends from the traditional to the innovative with soda bread to batch bread and its celebrity chef range – the “Rankin Selection”.

But Irwin firmly believes that the most important person the company has to please at the end of the day is the consumer. “No one knows our product better than the consumer. It is the personal experience in the house on the plate that counts most for us. It is all about eating it, loving it and buying it again.”

Irwin does not necessarily believe that bread is completely “recession proof” in the current economic climate but he firmly believes Irwin’s has a good strategy in place to deal with the situation.

“In these recessionary times consumers are looking for value for money – which is always important to us so we direct our research and development very carefully, we look at issues such as appropriate package sizes and how to reduce waste and costs,” he adds.

Both Brian and his brother Niall appear to be as passionately committed to the business as they were almost three decades ago when they first took over the reins. The dynamic of having two brothers so closely involved in the day-to-day running of the multimillion-pound business has proved to be a winning combination in this instance.

Brian will joke, however, that it “is the worst thing the world and the best thing in the world” at times to work with your brother.

They remain intimately involved in every detail of life at Irwin’s from the packaging of the product to the quality of the cinnamon in the Rankin Cinnamon Raisin Loaf.

Irwin’s enthusiasm for the business is infectious and he remains quietly content about its prospects in the long term. “These are challenging times in the current recession – there is no doubt about that – but we have the confidence to overcome them. A family business has a long-term perspective – it has had to overcome difficulties before in previous operations and it has no short-term-orientated goals such as this quarter’s figures to worry about.

“Our objective is to grow Irwin’s in the long term in markets outside of Northern Ireland and to grow organically by offering quality products. It is our intention to grow the brand and most importantly for people to continue enjoying our product.”

To anyone else it may be just something to be buttered and sandwiched together but for Brian Irwin, bread is more than just a slice of his life.