Page 44 - Food&Drink Business magazine June 2022

The four Rs of leadership
AUSPACK 2022 allowed an industry to come together for the first time since the pandemic. Its Leaders’ Forum enabled experts from trends to technology, traceability to tendering to share their wisdom. Kim Berry shares her highlights.
THERE were four key themes that weaved their way through the AUSPACK 2022 Leaders’ Forum: risk, resilience, rebalance, and reward.
In her keynote to launch the forum, Rose Herceg, ANZ president of communications and creative agency WPP, outlined the 10 trends businesses need to know about.
Topping the list was the concept of ‘taking control in a world without any’. In the last two years in Australia, 380,000 businesses were registered – more than in the previous eight years combined.
While our lives were so altered by the pandemic, it created an environment for people to be more entrepreneurial; to look at their skills and specialisations and question how they can be applied differently.
The second trend she touched
on – ‘digital seniors’ – looked at how Covid nudged a generation who could use the internet but didn’t, to get online, with 67 per cent of those aged over 65 using the web for the first time in the last two years.
The implications of this are immense when you consider
55 per cent of Australia’s wealth is held by those over 65, but for every 100 media dollars spent, only two per cent is targeted at the demographic.
There was one trend that really caught my attention; for every trend there is a counter trend.
Sometimes the opportunity is the opposite to where the trend is heading. For example, while health and wellness is growing, consider developing a luxurious product at the full fat, full flavour end of the spectrum.
Think of it, for every protein ball packed with dates and cacao nibs, there is a decadent,
smooth truffle.
Herceg’s final piece of advice:
don’t let the urgent crowd out the important.
CHANGING OF THE GUARD
The presentation and panel discussion led by one of the country’s most highly regarded business strategists, Kate Whitehead, was an absolute highlight.
Founder and managing director of Avant Group, Whitehead provided valuable insights into state and federal grants as well as analysing factors impacting the current business climate.
“As a whole of government strategy, they are looking to make manufacturers scale up. All the buzzwords you’re hearing around Industry 4.0 and 5.0 technologies – invest in these, automation, production efficiencies, cost effectiveness
– they are the type of projects [governments] are investing in,” Whitehead said.
With the election just days after AUSPACK, Whitehead looked at what the Coalition and ALP policies offered. While the Coalition would operate largely as business as usual, the then opposition’s $1 billion advanced manufacturing fund had a different funding structure.
“It is fundamentally different, based on access to capital through loans or capital investment but not grants.
“The issue here is it is very hard to get the money out of these programs because of where the money is coming from – superannuation funds and other large reserves of capital. There is less appetite for risk, so it slows down the process.
“If the opposition do get in, it will be interesting to see how much of the $1 billion actually
44 | Food&Drink business | June 2022 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au