Mission: Expand Freybe’s market share in North America and continue its recovery from two years of tough sledding
Assets: Lifelong experience in the sausage-making trade and experience working in a range of family-run businesses
Yield: A company that generates $80 million in annual revenue and is back on the road to corporate growth
By Glen Korstrom
Sven Freybe believes it’s inevitable that he would choose to run his family’s sausage business differently from any of the five generations of Freybes before him.
The only question is whether the changes are driven by his distinctive business vision or whether they’re a natural evolution of Freybe Gourmet Foods Ltd.
“The big difference between my dad and myself is my focus [is] more on the customer than on the production of the product,” Freybe said while sitting on a restaurant patio, sipping draft beer and enjoying an unseasonably warm October afternoon.
Earlier, he had attended an event organized for what he called “mommy bloggers” – mothers who blog and do most of their family’s grocery shopping.
The 38-year-old answered questions about:
- how his company keeps potentially deadly listeria bacteria out of its products;
- where he sources his ingredients; and
- how to use his products in recipes.
“It was exciting. It’s not often that a company, which is already established, puts the time and money into [asking what moms think],” Coquitlam blogger Lindsay Dianne told Business in Vancouver.
Dianne learned that the company was local and that 60% of its sales are in B.C. About one-third of Freybe’s sales are in the Prairies. Ontario and the U.S. split the remaining sales.
“I was impressed that they reach out through social media,” Dianne said. A lot of companies aren’t quite there and aren’t embracing that yet.”
Freybe uses Twitter and employs people to tweet on behalf of the company. He plans to create smartphone apps modelled along the lines of the ones that Ethical Bean Coffee CEO Lloyd Bernhardt recently released. Bernhardt’s apps enable users to enter a code from their package of coffee beans and identify the exact field where their coffee beans were grown.
Freybe chuckles when reminded of the adage that consumers don’t want to know how their sausages are made.
“I don’t agree with that,” he said. “It’s a fascinating process. We find that people either want very narrow info or they want to know everything. There’s no in-between. One of the biggest challenges we face is how do you talk about an industry that people don’t necessarily want to talk about, and which hasn’t been talked about in a positive light in the last few years?”
Freybe admits that his company’s revenue was hit hard following the listeriosis outbreak in 2008 linked to a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto. Twenty-two people died, and there were 57 total confirmed cases. The deaths prompted the largest processed- meat recall in Canadian history. Part of the problem for luncheon meat producers, however, is that listeria is a hardy bacteria that breeds rapidly at low temperatures.
In 2000, Freybe had to recall approximately 400 pounds of sliced salami and ham that might have been contaminated with listeria, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Freybe’s revenue, which will be approximately $80 million in 2010, has only recently recovered from the dip that it took in the second half of 2008 and during the sluggish economy of 2009. Freybe expects it to continue to grow thanks to his consumer-focused vision for the future, which involves more than tapping social media.
Renaming products is likely next.
Freybe recently visited a Costco in San Diego where store employees urged shoppers to sample Freybe products such as German dry-cured Schinkenspeck ham. The employees demonstrating the Schinkenspeck pronounced it’s name as though it were made with chicken and were oblivious to the fact that it has a silent “c” and not a silent “s.”
“It’s tough to sell a product when people don’t know how to pronounce it and don’t know what it is,” Freybe said.
Unlike those food demonstrators, Freybe’s entire life has been steeped in sausage making.
His father, Henning, showed both Sven and his sister, Anouchka, the company’s sausage factory when Sven was a child.
Henning never pushed his children to take over the business, but he let them know the enterprise was theirs if they wanted to put in the work required to continue its success.
Freybe Gourmet Foods’ origins go back to 1844, when Johann Carl Freybe founded the company in what was then Prussia. Johann’s great-grandson Ulrich, who is Henning’s father, moved to Vancouver and in 1955 opened a new handcrafted-sausage production facility on East Georgia Street.
Sven has been the company’s designated CEO since he was in his mid-20s even though he only officially took over the CEO reins from his father in November 2009.
Henning still logs about two days a week whenever he and wife Brigette are not travelling. He also set up an advisory board that includes him, his son, two industry CEOs and a former business owner.
Much of Sven’s preparation for the job came after he completed Grade 12 at West Vancouver secondary school and secured a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of British Columbia.
Henning sent Sven to Europe in 1995 for several years to apprentice at several other family businesses on what was largely a volunteer basis. Henning supported Sven during this time.
“It was valuable experience,” Sven said. “I’d never worked in another company other than volunteering once at Whistler. I never understood how other companies function – the job interviews, the performance reviews and all the structure.”
Germans, he said, “fit the stereotype” of having a work culture that is more regimented, top down and stiff than the one at Freybe’s 115,000-square-foot office.
“Sven is a student of business who is keen to learn,” said Whitefish Group CEO Jay Garnett, who knows Freybe socially and whose kids go to school with some of Freybe’s children, who are aged 10, eight and four.
“He very much has the Executive-Committee, Entrepreneurs Organization, Young Presidents Association mindset and shares the leadership-through-learning mentality.”
Outside work, Sven and his wife Juliette are active sports enthusiasts who ski in winter, sail in summer and otherwise cycle, run and play tennis.