Singapore visit underscores need for smarter marketing, says ASB’s Kristen Ashby

She was among a group of 26 people from across the rural sector including Fonterra, Miraka, the Ministry for Primary Industries, Horticulture New Zealand, Ngai Tahu, AGMARDT, ASB, and FoodHQ who made the trip to Singapore.

The group visited several companies, including Suntory, Wilmar and several venture capital firms.

The country is an interesting case study as it imports more than 90% of its food, providing significant opportunities for New Zealand.

Ashby says the aim of the trip was to see what could be learned from Singapore, a country with very little available land but lots of capital to spend.

“Lots of people were like ‘Why would you go to Singapore? They don’t do any farming’, but it wasn’t about how to do farming. It was more about how to make something with nothing,” Ashby told Rural News.

She says one of the biggest takeaways was how Singapore optimises what little useable land it has.

“They optimise land like you’ve never seen before,” she says. “They’re underground, they’re above ground… the way they optimise space is quite incredible.”

Ashby says that partnership, trust and collaboration are really well valued in Singapore.

“They collaborate with each other, they have partnerships with each other both across the sector and within the sector,” she says.

Additionally, Ashby says that one of the things New Zealand can be doing is to work on shifting away from a commodity- based sales model and shifting towards value-added partnerships.

“We need to be realistic that there is no silver bullet,” she says.

She says that in the case of the sheepmeat market, there is “a real opportunity in New Zealand to look at targeting specific markets that will pay for quality and reliability and target our products to those markets”.

She also says that exporters need to be coupling sales with the story of New Zealand.

“For example, the Singaporean people we met who had been to New Zealand were like ‘Oh my gosh, we’d love to partner with New Zealand’ and they were all giving us their business cards because they’d been here… I think bringing people to New Zealand and showing them our country and putting New Zealand on the map in that way is really important.”

She says the trip also proved to be a “real eyeopener” in terms of the idea of how New Zealand can better market itself. One example comes in the form of the differences between alternative proteins and meat.

Ashby says there has been a lot of research and development into these alternative proteins – or hybrid proteins as they’re also known.

“Unfortunately, these hybrid and alternative proteins don’t really hit the mark so one, they don’t taste very nice, two, they don’t look very nice, three, people don’t actually really want to eat them and actually they’re really, really expensive to make,” she says.

What this leaves New Zealand with, Ashby says, is an opportunity to market its red meat better globally.

“I think we should probably market what we’ve got really well and show people how great our products are,” she adds.

Ashby says that one of New Zealand’s points of difference is the quality of the product it puts out onto the market.

“I think the quality is critical,” she says, adding that while many complain that the sector is overregulated, those regulations help on the world stage.

“I think one thing we should consider is actually, some of those regulations are our point of difference. If you think about our food import regulations and how sometimes going through the airport can be really painful, actually it’s really great that no one brings in apples with bugs in them that ruins our sector,” Ashby says.

“So, that MPI being a pain is actually a good value proposition.”