Summary
The view from the top of business. Presented by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line cuts through confusion, statistics and spin to present a clearer view of the business world, through discussion with people running leading and emerging companies.
Evan and a panel of guests from the worlds of farming, packaging and investment discuss the importance of raw materials - and how the price of commodities affects their companies.
The panel also discusses emotion. Evan asks his guests how 'touchy feely' they are, as they consider whether business is a place for emotion and sentimentality.
Evan is joined in the studio by William Chase, farmer and entrepreneur; Miles Roberts, chief executive of FTSE250 packaging company DS Smith; Colin Melvin, chief executive of Hermes Equity Ownership Services.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a download from the BBC. This edition of the Bottom Line, Radio 4's business discussion |
| 0:05.9 | program, was first broadcast on the 21st of October 2010. Here's Evan Davis. |
| 0:12.8 | Hello and welcome to the bottom line. We get right down to earth today and talk about raw |
| 0:18.2 | materials, physical raw materials of the kind that come out of the |
| 0:22.1 | ground. And then, well, we drift up into the clouds because I'm going to ask my guests how touchy |
| 0:28.6 | feely they are. Is business a place for emotion and sentimentality? When did they last cry? |
| 0:35.4 | But before we do all of that, let's spend a few minutes meeting each of |
| 0:39.2 | my three guests. And first is farmer, William Chase, who took his own potatoes and set up a |
| 0:45.2 | gourmet crisp company, Tyrol's. More recently, you've moved into vodka, haven't you, William? |
| 0:51.7 | I should say, production of vodka, not consumption of vodka. |
| 0:55.0 | Just tell us the story of how you sort of move from farming into the business side. |
| 0:59.7 | I set out as a potato farmer and got quite good at it and then got quite bad with market trends. |
| 1:05.4 | Started back up again supplying potatoes for supermarkets, built up a good business and that sort of tailed off end of 90s, got very tough. |
| 1:12.9 | And then one day I came up with the idea to turn the potatoes into crisp. |
| 1:15.9 | Looking at another gourmet crisp manufacturer, we're not going to give them any oxygen. |
| 1:19.4 | They were making very big burnt crisps at the time. |
| 1:21.4 | So I was treading potatoes, and some of our potatoes ended up in there, and that's what gave me the eureka moment, the idea. Were these organic potatoes? were these all |
| 1:07.1 | no they went |
| 1:07.6 | they were conventional potatoes |
| 1:08.6 | but we were growing super |
| 1:09.8 | potatoes |
| 1:09.9 | but we were growing supermarket potatoes on the farm as a commodity and getting other farmers to grow them. So we moved from that to high dry matter, special potatoes for crisps. It was the whole time of the whole foody movement and local food and nobody was making a really good quality one at the time |
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