Overherd catches up with the Glanbia Ireland Ingredients Team – Dubai Office

Glanbia Ireland is well established in the Middle East and Africa, supplying dairy products to the region for the last 20 years. The team has grown over the years and there are now eight GII staff at our Dubai office, who are dedicated to growing the business across the Middle East and Africa (MEA). To learn more about the team and its ambitions, Overherd caught up with Kieran Duggan, General Manager for MEA who relocated from Ireland to the UAE in 2013 to develop the Glanbia Ireland business.

Kieran, please tell us about Glanbia Ireland’s activity in the MEA region.

We established our regional office in Dubai UAE in 2010. This was prompted by the impending removal of milk quotas in Europe and the need for Glanbia Ireland to establish direct routes to market in the region. We have had tremendous growth across the region over the past decade and now have a team of eight permanent staff working from this central sales hub.

Our primary business in the region is the supply of our range of dairy ingredients to B2B customers. These products include fat-filled milk powder, cheese, milk proteins, butter, whole milk powder and skimmed milk powder. These are the key building blocks for dairy finished product manufacturers in the region. As this is a milk-deficit region, as our customers grow, they must import more products. Our key markets in the Middle East region are Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq. In Africa, we have key supply positions in Algeria, Egypt, Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Mali and Togo.

Why is Irish produce attractive to Middle Eastern customers?

Ireland has long been recognised as a key supplier of dairy ingredients and Glanbia Ireland, as the largest processor of milk in Ireland, has a very strong position in this space. The MEA region imports from the key dairy-producing regions in Europe, the US and Oceania. With the removal of milk quotas, our annual production has grown significantly over the last five years; Glanbia Ireland processed over three billion litres of milk in 2021 from our 5,000 family farms. This increase in production has been attractive to buyers and brought Ireland as an origin for supply to greater attention. Buyers seek out European supply given its closer regional proximity to the USA and Oceania and the challenges of the supply chain during Covid-19 brought this into more focus.

What challenges has Glanbia Ireland faced exporting to the MEA?

Business in the region has been traditionally conducted face-to-face. It requires investing time with the customer, understanding their needs and wants and responding to them in a timely manner. There is an expectation that a supplier invests in the region if they are going to secure business continuity. Taking a position to establish our customer-facing sales team in the region demonstrated this intention and has opened opportunities for us, year-on-year. We are close to the key markets, working in their time zone and sensitive to changes in market conditions. Post-Covid and the widespread adoption of virtual meetings does help the ability to access key customers once a relationship has been established, but new business development needs to still be led by feet on the ground.

Our colleagues in Dubai are pictured from left to right Paul Costello, Regional Manager West Africa; Kieran Duggan, General Manager MEA; Parveen Kasim, Customer Service; Keren Aguinaldo, Customer Service; Nitin Agarwal, Regional Manager, Middle East. Also part of the team but not included in the photo are Vipan Kumar, Regional Manager, Indian sub-continent; and Karim Yacoubi, Regional Manager, North Africa.

What are the future plans for the region?

We see continued growth in our fat filled milk powder portfolio and will respond to the development in this category. There is significant innovation happening within this space. Our Millac brand has a long legacy in the region and gives us a very good position from which to build on the next generation of products. We also continue to build on our range of branded solutions tailored to respond to customer challenges.

Our CheddMax functional cheese solutions range provides performance benefits to processed cheese recipes but also as ready-to-use solutions such as tabletop, retail, foodservice and as an ingredient cheese. Our Opti-Yo range provides a range of solutions for yogurt manufacturers including high-protein solutions, low lactose solutions or indeed, plant-based solutions. We are still at the early stages of our journey in foodservice and B2C in the region, but see good opportunities in some niche categories such as cheese and UHT Cream. We are present in foodservice with the Wexford brand across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and use a number of appointed distributors.

For Irish companies to be successful in MEA, we must reach out and invest time and resources. We must be sensitive to their culture, ways of working and traditions. It’s a large region and a critical assessment of the business opportunity must be done in advance. We work with government agencies like Bord Bia and network across business industries in each target country. This way, we plan to continue to develop strong relationships with our customers and potential customers in the MEA region.