Case Studies
Issue No. 6 - July/September 2002
Cottage Meats
Meeting Market Expectations
Cottage Meats is a family owned wholesaler manufacturing a wide range of value-added meat, poultry and game products.
The company supplies more than 80% of the supermarket chains in Australia and has enjoyed staggering growth during the past few years, raising turnover from about $2 million in 1998 to almost $8 million in the financial year just closed.
Cottage Meats owner, Kevin Coombs took responsibility for the wholesaling side of his family’s predominantly retail meat business (three butcher shops) some 17 years ago. The first major breakthrough came with an agreement to supply four types of fancy sausage to the Coles supermarket chain’s SA stores.
The relationship grew as Coles took up more of Kevin’s lines, which he developed and ‘pitched’ regularly. Cottage Meats was formally founded in 1989 and by 1995 employed a dozen people including Kevin and many of his family. They were doing “very nicely thank you”.
Then Kevin made the mistake of coming up with the ‘barbeque pack’, a package of cuts amounting to a readymade hotplate meal. This piqued the interest of Coles at national level and the chain placed its first multi-state order—to be filled within days!
“It was an explosion of work,” Kevin recalls. “We started 30 new people and were down to only two we wanted within a week.”
While struggling to train new workers and allay the desperate manpower shortage, Kevin and his original staff put in incredible hours in their bid to maintain Cottage Meats’ game. They succeeded, but the episode taught Kevin a lot. Now, Cottage Meats strives to maintain a highly skilled and knowledgeable workforce.
It also was instructive about management diversification. Kevin believes his attitude to management was “amateur” in that he was trying to run a large business and physically work in it at the same time.
“I was slow to react and employ a person like [marketing manag...
