COMING FULL CIRCLE

– Zoe Kavanagh, CEO, National Dairy Council

WORDS: Nessa O'Mahony

For Zoe Kavanagh, the newly appointed Chief Executive of the National Dairy Council, her new role represents something of a home-coming. Kavanagh studied Agricultural Science and Food Engineering in UCD and so got an early grounding in the agri-food sector; She will be putting that knowledge to good use as she settles into life at the NDC. She succeeded Helen Brophy as CEO at the end of March. “When I get beyond the counting of weeks (in the job), I’ll be truly settled in,” she laughs.

Zoe spent 16 years with PepsiCo, and was General Manager (Ireland-Beverages) when she was offered her new job. “I would have had to do a lot of stakeholder management in Pepsi, so coming into this role doesn’t feel hugely alien because you just bring it back to the principles of customer satisfaction: am I listening to people, do I know what they want and am I delivering accordingly?” she explains.

She also believes that this is the perfect time to join the NDC. “The Council is really busy delivering a number of their key initiative. For example, on day three of week one, I found myself down in West Cork at a health and wellbeing event. Then on day four I was in Dungarvan on the farm that had won the Quality Milk Award in 2010 and I had the privilege of being given a farm walk by the two Walsh brothers who had won that award. The following week, it was the final of the Milk IT Advertising Awards, which was the first year that the NDC had invited secondary schools to participate in setting up an advertising agency to boost awareness and consumption of dairy.”

Zoe is accustomed to hitting the ground running. She had to learn fast about the soft drinks business when she joined PepsiCo from UCD on a graduate training programme in 1994. She began working in the Cork concentrate facility; the graduate programme took two years. “I ended up doing three and a half years in Cork, then moved to London for a six-month project (to develop a quality training tool) and came back home ten years later.” During that time she gained more experience of operations and the marketing end of the business and found her nationality a distinct advantage. “The Irish identity as you go around the world is such a friendly calling card; I would have found that it made my life easier than some of my cultural counterparts.”

Read more about Zoe Kavanagh in in the Summer 2011 issue of WMB, on newsstands June 1st!