COMMUNITY NOTES: BALLYHAUNIS - WESTERN PEOPLE (APRIL 14 EDITION)
In a wide-ranging interview with The Irish Times – which named him its Irish businessman of the year in February – Niall Browne, CEO of Dawn Meats, explained how cattle killed in Ballyhaunis and five other Dawn-owned sites supply most of McDonald’s needs across the UK and Ireland.
Browne said Dawn had a turnover of €4.75 billion last year but booked a profit margin of only two per cent on that, suggesting profits of €95 million.
Browne said he’s spending part of his time in New Zealand to integrate the Alliance Group, which the firm recently acquired. He plans to help Alliance sell more in Europe while the New Zealand firm will use its focus on Asian markets like China to help Dawn sell more meat there.
With the addition of Alliance, Dawn Meats is now processing 1.6 million cattle, eight million sheep and 70,000 venison each year.
On the EU-Mercosur trade agreement, which allows increased but limited access to Latin American meat processors, Browne, whose firm hires a large percentage of its factory operatives from Brazil, said companies in South America “will be allowed to cherry pick what cuts they put in”.
“They can just decide to put in striploins, for example, so with the sheer scale of the quantity of product from there if they were to dump five or 10 containers of strip loin into an important market like Germany, it would have a very dramatic impact on the price.”
However, Browne said global demand for red meat is set to rise with the expansion of the middle class in Africa and Asia. He also cited medical advice of American health secretary Robert Kennedy who advocates for more red meat consumption.
