IN THE HEART of Monaghan there’s a family-owned business that has become world-renowned for Chinese-style duck, with chefs such as Heston Blumenthal singing its praises.
According to Micheál Briody, chief executive of Silver Hill Farm, gaining this reputation took a lot of hard work and “obviously a bit of luck along the way”.
But Briody never planned to head up an international duck business. He trained as an accountant and worked in the lighting industry before going on to start his own retail and wholesale furniture business, Land of Furniture.
However, the recent economic downturn took a toll on his operation and caused him to change focus.
“During the recession I looked at my business and decided it wasn’t scalable. We had eight shops around the country, but it was very tough retail market at that time,” he tells Fora.
“There were a few goods years before then but in 2010 somebody was prepared to buy it, and I decided it was time to exit left of stage.”
After Briody sold the furniture business he went on to join Silver Hill as the company’s chief financial officer.
“Even though it was a well-established company, nearly 45-50 years on the go at that stage, when I came to Silver Hill there were some things on the financial side that weren’t being done correctly,” he says.
“But it was a good company with an excellent product, so I would have sooner come in and fix those issues then have to go out and find a new product.
“There were a lot of easy changes in the first six months, sorting out costing and targets, and then we started to grow from there.”
Family affair
Silver Hill Farm was started in 1962 by Ronnie and Lyla Steele, and was later taken over by their son Stuart.
When Briody joined, he was the first person from outside the family to work in the company’s management team. Although Stuart Steele is still the managing director and sole shareholder of the business, Briody took over as CEO in 2014.
“Stuart realised that he wanted to grow the company further and to do that he had to hand over the reigns,” Briody says.
“It wasn’t difficult taking over, but you have to be mindful sometimes that it’s still a family business.”
Briody now oversees more than 250 staff from the company’s headquarters in Emyvale, Co Monaghan.
He says that Silver Hill’s duck is “completely unique” as the Steele family worked for several years to develop their own breed of bird.
“While every other duck producer back in the late 80s, early 90s, was heading towards breast meat, Silver Hill went down a different route.
“Our duck is specifically aimed at the ethnic Chinese market, supplying restaurants in Manchester, Birmingham, London, Paris. In those cities with a Chinatown area, there’s a strong culinary tradition and a roast Peking duck is well sought after.”
In terms of production, Briody says with a laugh that Silver Hill “hatches, matches and dispatches” ducks.
“Because it’s a unique breed, we can’t buy in extra stock, so we have to generate all our ducks,” he adds.
The company has a breeding farm in Tyrone where 14,000 eggs are laid every day. These are brought to a hatchery in the south, and then the ducks are sent out to farms across the island of Ireland.
“We have two of our own farms – one in the north and one in the south – but we also use outside farms, and we have quite a few both sides of the Border, from Cappoquin up to Tyrone,” Briody says.
After the birds have grown, they are brought back to the processing plant in Monaghan, where both meat- and feather-based products, such as duck-down pillows and duvets, are prepared and packaged.
Briody says that the unique nature of the product and its supply chain gives the company a competitive edge.
“Competition is something we can’t be complacent about, but it’s certainly not something that keeps us awake at night,” he adds.
Growing the business
Briody says that Silver Hill’s main business is selling raw whole ducks to the Chinese-food market, but it also supplies prepared duck products to retailers and wholesalers.
“We deal with the five main retailers in Ireland, selling ready-to-cook products like crispy duck and pancakes, honey-roast half-duck, confit legs. And then we sell oven-ready ducks as well, which is basically a raw duck in a bag.”
Overall, Briody says that about 70% of his business is export-based, and Silver Hill now sells to 28 countries around the world.
“The UK has traditionally been our biggest and best market – we’ve done a lot of business in that area around Chinatown and the West End of London for the last 30-odd years.
“But I suppose we have the UK saturated at this point, so we’ve made inroads into France, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.”
Looking ahead, he says that Asia is the company’s main target for future growth.
“We’ve been in Singapore for the last three or four years, and now we’re sending out three 40-foot containers of frozen duck to our customers there every month.
“But Singapore is a relatively small market compared to the rest of south-east Asia, so now we’re trying to get trade agreements sorted with other countries like Indonesia and Malaysia.”
But expansion hasn’t been all plain sailing. Briody says the biggest challenge was getting business on track when he first joined at the tail-end of the recession.
“When I started it was basically just about keeping the show on the road – we had to do a bit of cost-cutting, a bit of streamlining.
“So it wasn’t a case that I came in as CFO saying, ‘Grow here, grow there, take over this.’ The climate wasn’t there – there was no readily available finance from the credit institutions because they were all in disarray.
“So you had to make do with what you had. It was a case of survival in the first few years, but once we turned that corner, in around 2013, we’ve been on a growth path ever since.”
Silver Hill is an unlimited company, which means it doesn’t file publicly accessible accounts and Briody declined to discuss the firm’s financial figures.
Expansion plans
However, he says that when he started at the company, Silver Hill produced 35,000 ducks per week and capacity is now at 85,000.
“Some weeks we could get up to 90,000, but that would be a long week, stretching into long hours,” he adds.
However, there are now plans to increase this figure to 150,000 with a €3 million expansion at the company’s site in Emyvale.
Looking ahead, Briody says that Brexit is a concern as the UK is the company’s biggest market. But he adds that Silver Hill’s location gives it a “definite advantage”.
“It’s not by accident that we have farms on both sides of the Border. If something like avian flu hit the UK it wouldn’t affect us in the south, and vice versa if something happened in the south, we have the contingency that we have farms in the north.
“We have plans to keep expanding at Emyvale and it’s not out of some romantic idea, it’s because it’s a good fit for our industry.”
The new facilities are expected to be up and running by 2020, and Briody says that this should set Silver Hill up for continued growth in the future.
“There’ll be a lot of good things if we can crack this plan. It’s definitely going to be a busy few years ahead, no doubt about it.”
Written by Sarah Harford and posted on Fora.ie
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