New Zealand Dairy Board

You know, I was CEO of a consulting firm working across New Zealand, Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

Nothing particular about agriculture in my background at that point, but after we sold the business, I joined what was then the New Zealand Dairy Board in its strategy group.

And over the next 10 years, including through the formation of Fonterra, I led a number of different major transformation programs for Fonterra.

I ended up running their ingredient business in Australia and New Zealand and eventually became the head of marketing for ingredients globally.

But it was still going to happen.

So we were in a position where The big companies were actively trying to figure out what it might look like, what the regulation might look like, whether it was a one company situation or two company situation, what would happen to the New Zealand Dairy Board, who would get what, all of those sort of discussions.

The dairy companies had ended up with shares in the New Zealand Dairy Board and even that in itself, there was quite some discussion as to whether The shares in the New Zealand Dairy Board should have gone directly to the farmers or whether it should have gone to the co-operatives.

And there was a lot of debate about that.

No, no, it's a farmer.

But I guess at the end of the day, those big companies realised the inevitability of it.

And it was a question of whether it might be one company or two companies or the likes of ourselves in Westland, you know, four companies doing their own thing or whether there was going to be some sort of a mega merger, which ultimately happened.

But to actually get to the table, if you're one of those big companies, you wanted to own a reasonable percentage of that New Zealand dairy board, which was the international marketing operation and really deemed the jewel in the crown in terms of if the industry is deregulation, there was a ready-made international business that needed to be joined up with the manufacturing side of the industry.