the times | Saturday September 5 2020 1GM 57
The ManifestoBusiness
Q&A
Who is your mentor?
My wife: I didn’t just
marry my best friend,
she is an executive life
coach so I have been
coached for 30 years.
Does money motivate
you?
I’m motivated by it a lot
less than I was. I wanted
to look after my family.
What is leadership to
you?
I think it is the impact
you have on other
people’s energy: if you
are sucking the energy
from them or making
them enthusiastic to
hear more. It’s like when
you see some people’s
names pop up on your
phone and you groan oryou want to pick it up
and talk to them, that’s
the difference.
How do you relax?
If I could sleep for just
three hours instead of
five or six, I would. I
don’t really need to
relax to recharge. I get
up at 5.30 and do an
hour’s exercise a day
and then a bit longer
when I can later on.
What’s your favourite
TV programme?
I don’t watch it.
Who’s the person who
inspires you?
Nelson Mandela — what
a human being — I
struggle to comprehend
how he could have
spent all that time in
prison and behaved
how he did. Everyone
wanted him to attack
his enemies and he
didn’t do it.CV
Age 54
Lives Nunthorpe,
Middlesbrough
Education Politecnico
di Milano
Career 1994-2000:
supply chain manager
for Unilever; 2003:
supply chain director
Europe at CSM; 2010:
vice-president of
global expansion,
CSM Bakery Solutions;
2011: managing
director of Friesland
Campina; 2017:
managing director of
Alaska Milk in the
Philippines; 2020: chief
executive of Quorn
Foods
Family Married with
three childrenW
hen Marco Bertacca
arrived at his Airbnb
rental in Nunthorpe,
Middlesbrough from
the Philippines, it wasmeant to be just for a couple of weeks
while he waited for his family to join
him. Instead, the new boss of the
vegan food brand Quorn was stuck in
a small flat on his own for five
months as coronavirus swept the
globe, his family were trapped in Asia
and the business he had just joined
was thrust into a state of emergency.
“Suddenly this all happened and it
meant I spent close to five months
alone in this tiny Airbnb: it was quite
a dark period,” Mr Bertacca, 54, says,
peering into the camera on our Zoom
call, his briefly solemn expression
evidence that he remains haunted by
the intense and stressful period. “It
was an extreme existence because I
arrived in the new job and then had
the mission of keeping the nation fed
and our factories running safely. I was
working all hours and talking to my
family in the middle of the night.”
The company invested £150 million
to boost factory capacity and, during
the stockpiling frenzy, hired extra
workers to keep its sites running
through the night to ensure that
shelves were stocked with Quron’s
meat-free mince and escalopes.
Mr Bertacca’s enthusiasm bubbles
over, his gesticulations growing
wilder, as he conveys the drama of the
crisis and how he had to rally his new
troops. “In some ways it wasn’t
difficult because I knew it was my
choice; I was the one who decided to
stay here and do it. And when you
make your decision, and it is your call,
it is easier to be determined.” Mr
Bertacca admits that he was also
buoyed by the feeling that his three
grown-up children had a reason to be
proud of him during the crisis.
The Italian spent almost a decade
working with food businesses in Asia,
most recently running Alaska Milk in
the Philippines before taking the
Quorn job at the start of the year,
replacing Kevin Brennan, who had led
the company for a decade. Quorn is
owned by Monde Nissin, a Philippine
maker of instant noodles, which
bought the business for £550 million in
- It is named after the
Leicestershire village where its
mycoprotein was developed from
fermented fungus in the late 1960s by
ICI and Rank Hovis McDougall. The
business has changed hands several
times since and has 980 employees
and a turnover of almost £220 million.
It has recently enjoyed a surge in
sales, riding the wave of
environmental awareness generated
by younger consumers who are keen
to lead healthier lifestyles and cut
meat from their diets in favour of
plant-based alternatives. The number
of vegans in the UK has quadrupled
in the past five years to 600,000 and
the vegan food retail market is
expected to reach sales of £1.12 billion
by 2024, according to the market
research group Mintel.
There are also signs that the shift
towards veganism or less-rigid
flexitarian diets has gathered pace
during the pandemic and one in four
Britons think a vegan diet is more
attractive compared with one in ten
before the crisis, says Mintel. “Covid
has touched people so broadly, so
universally, I don’t think that we can
go back,” Mr Bertacca says.
“Veganism is not a movement, it’s a
need. We have to do it because the
problem is too big.” He reels off
statistics to prove the point: 40 per
cent of global greenhouse emissionsI’ve no beef with meat-eaters, but a
plant-based diet is the way forward
Marco Bertacca, the
new head of Quorn,
tells Ashley Armstrong
why veganism is vital
for the planet’s future
Marco Bertacca said that he was keen to emphasise the fitness advantages of the mycoprotein that goes into Quorn, which has been endorsed by Mo Farah, below
come from meat but 30 per cent of
food production is wasted, meaning
that more than 10 per cent of
greenhouse gas emissions could come
from food people do not even eat.
Despite being the boss of a vegan
food business he insists he does not
believe that the environmental
problem is the fault of carnivores.
“The issue is not meat as such — it
has an important social, economical
and nutritional function — but it
absorbs so much of our resources that
if we continue as we are we will not
have those resources.” He talkspassionately about how Quorn’s
“super protein has a positive impact
on both the person and planet”. The
business has committed itself to being
net carbon positive by 2030 and has
added carbon footprint labelling to all
its retail products.
Mr Bertacca, a keen ultra-
marathon runner and triathlete, talks
animatedly, however, about only
being at the fringes of Quorn Food’s
potential. The company has been
working with scientists at the
University of Exeter on research that
shows Quorn can help muscle mass
to rebuild faster than animal protein
can. “I think we need to start
shouting about it. When you do as
much sport as I do, these things
matter. At my age my body is not
doing everything I want it to.” He also
reveals that Quorn is working with
Liverpool FC’s head of nutrition on
introducing more
of its products
into the players’
diets to support
their muscle
recovery.
It is not just sport
though: Quorn has
recently struck
deals with KFC for a
meat-free chicken
sandwich and has boomed on the
back of the unexpected success
of the Greggs vegan sausage
roll. It is quite a turn for a brand
that has long positioned itself
as a healthy alternative to
meat, even calling on the
Olympic athlete Mo
Farah, right, to
boost its campaign.
Mr Bertacca says,
however, that hedoes not “want our food to just be
eaten by health-conscious people or
vegans. I want to offer Quorn to the
widest group of people to reduce their
meat intake.” He adds that the success
of the Greggs vegan sausage roll,
fuelled by the bakery chain’s savvy
use of social media, will open the way
to more deals with restaurant chains.
Striking more partnerships will be
necessary if Mr Bertacca wants to
achieve his ambitious goal of serving
eight billion portions of Quorn a year:
a quadrupling of the business’s
present production levels.
The vegan market, though, is
becoming more crowded with a string
of younger, trendy brands, such as the
Vegetarian Butcher and Moving
Mountains. The enthusiasm for the
booming meat-free movement is even
more pronounced in the US, where
the publicly listed Beyond Meat is
valued at $8.1 billion and its rival
Impossible
Meat at
nearly
$4 billion.
Quorn looks
minuscule in
comparison,
despite its long
history and loyal
legion of fans.
Mr Bertacca
points out that
despite rising
competition and a string of new
entrants three quarters of new
food brands disappear within
their first nine months. “We have
a lot of credibility: Quorn has been
around for 45 years, we just need to
shout about our story a bit more, and
I can use my Italian passion to do
that.”QUORNd