Food Processing: Frozen ready meals - The Marie Case

Résumé du document

Marie is a food processing company that specializes in fresh ready meals and frozen ready meals. Marie manufactures and commercializes products with the brands Marie, Bocuse, Luang (exotic meals), Weight Watchers (light meals) and also the Uniq group which is a major player of the food processing sector in Europe. Frozen products appeared in 1983 with the brand Marie and in 1985 frozen ready meals were launched. Marie's values are simplicity, trust, respect and enthusiasm. Marie has different customer groups: distribution groups in France (Carrefour, Leclerc, System U, Casino), hard discount sellers, shops specialized in frozen products, catering out of home (collective and commercial), importers and exporters. The turnover was about 435 million Euros in 2007 and Marie sold 83,000 tons of products. There are 1,400 employees in the company. 53% of the products sold are frozen products and 47% are fresh products. 80% of the products are sold to the general public, 10% are sold to catering out of home and 5% of the products are sold to export. The head office is based in Rungis. Innovation is really important in this company and takes place in different ways like new recipes, new concepts, and better flavor to the customer and also better quality of the products. More than 50 new products are launched every year for mass-market retailing,. New products in the market that are less than two years old, contribute to 20% of the turnover. 20 new products are launched per year for catering from home.

Extraits

[...] For the catering out of home new products are launched per year Official website Marie; www.lefrigodemarie.fr CORPORATE CULTURE4 Marie has different values to manage their employees: - Simplicity: conviviality and authenticity - Trust: to give a sense of responsibility - Respect: respect of partners, interest in the others - Enthusiasm: to dare, to have the will to succeed and to take risks. Those different values create a good corporate culture among the employees and the brand. THE TARGET We have different targets considering the fact that women are most of the time the ones who go shopping. Their social class is middle. The single woman who doesn't want to lose time in kitchen and wants to eat quickly and healthy to gain time. [...]

[...] But the major disadvantage is that it makes more and more wastes and it is not environmentally wastes friendly. Moving Advertising on cars (Smart) Sales events in hypermarkets Moving advertising is important in the purchasing place for example when you have a presenter in a hypermarket who distribute discount coupons and to speak about the brand. It can be also advertising on cars which is common on the big cities with stickers on small cars like Smart. It costs a lot but you have a good impact on your customers. [...]

[...] But agribusiness, with its impressive figures, managed to put pressure on the government and to avoid such a law. - E.g. If you want to open a factory of Marie frozen food and the town in which you want to implant is reluctant factory would be a problem in the landscape or it would create a high traffic or whatever), you can emphasize the fact that you are going to create X jobs, and when the crisis provokes loads of redundancies, this idea has to be taken into consideration. [...]

[...] For instance, they cannot go and see the government and say want this and that, we refuse this and that's Even if the results in terms of law are the same in the end, the ways used to reach them are different. And Marie (like the whole sector of agribusiness) has to communicate properly so as to keep a positive image and get quite on well with the government while obtaining and rejecting what they want. Thus the techniques of communication are to be considered on two levels: On one hand, you have to show your value to the institutions. [...]

[...] The forecasted budget was gathering industry, scientists and public funds, but today this figure has not been reached.11 - E.g. If we take the problem of obesity, agribusiness industry accepted to write and communicate in their adverts about this issue with the message mange pas trop gras, salé et sucré” for the children, and another general message: Pour votre santé, évitez de manger trop gras, trop sucré, trop salé Lobbying difficulties While lobbying in the US has been used for decades and is considered as a natural and legitimate stakeholder, France has still a long way to cover. [...]