JD Durkin: Dominic Brisby, CEO of Nomad Foods, Europe’s largest frozen food company. Not just here for any day, he’s here for Investor Day nonetheless. Nice to see you here today.
Dominic Brisby: Nice to see you, JD. Thanks for having me.
JD Durkin: What makes this the right moment to put a brand-new value creation plan firmly and confidently in front of investors?
Dominic Brisby: Well, it’s a great moment. So I took over as CEO of Nomad in January this year. I’ve been spending a lot of time working out what the right strategy for us is, how we can execute that strategy and how we can have a consistent path for growth year after year after year.
So we had a great session today with analysts and investors, and it seemed like the right time to do it.
JD Durkin: What looks different inside of Nomad Foods over the last year that makes this plan maybe a bit different? How does it depart from what might have been a bit of an older playbook, so to speak?
Dominic Brisby: So there are a few big differences. First of all, historically, Nomad focused very much on its core business, which essentially is lean protein and vegetables. Frozen fish, frozen veg, frozen chicken. These will continue to be very big. They’ll continue to be very important to us.
But we’re now moving beyond those into other categories where we have a right to win within the frozen food category, categories like pizza, categories like fries. And so we’re expanding our total addressable market very significantly, bringing in very exciting new consumer concepts and very exciting new innovations to the market as well.
JD Durkin: Do you have to take into account consumer feedback? Are they actively telling you and your team the sorts of products they want to see you offer? And if so, how does that give Nomad overall more of an edge against the competition?
Dominic Brisby: So consumers are very active in telling us what they want. They’re also very active in telling us what they don’t want. And we make sure we pick up on that and listen to everything they say.
And one of the advantages that Nomad has versus some of our competitors is we’re by far the market leader across the whole of Europe. So we’re more than double the size of our nearest branded competitor. And it means we can pick up insights across multiple markets very quickly. And when we see something is working really well in one place, we can quickly roll it out to other places.
JD Durkin: What gives you confidence the turnaround targets that you are putting in front of investors are really achievable?
Dominic Brisby: Well, the first thing is, you know, I can give beautiful presentations and say beautiful words all day long, but what people really want to see is performance.
And what you see in Q3, I updated the market on what we expect our Q3 to be today, which is meaningfully above consensus. And it will be the first quarter in which Nomad Foods has grown since 2024.
So Q3 this year, we have a meaningful inflection, and we’re delivering organic growth for the first time in quite a long time. So people can listen to the presentations, can hear the beautiful words, but actually the actions and the results speak louder than that. And I hope that they’ll see that these results are coming through.
JD Durkin: And congratulations on the beautiful words as well as the actual substantive growth. Dominic Brisby, CEO of Nomad Foods. Come back and see us again soon. It’s nice to see you.
Dominic Brisby: Thank you.
