Yum! brands tips for local food producers

The chief executive of global ­restaurant giant Yum! Brands, Australian expat Greg Creed has some advice for Australian food producers wanting to get their offerings on restaurant tables around the world.

 “Be transparent, the food has to be great quality, has to be safe and I think has to be great value and I think if you have all of those great things you are probably at least in the ballpark and if you are not, then you are a long way of being of interest to a lot of people,” Mr Creed told The Australian.

Yum! Brands is the company behind some 8000 KFCs and 15,000 Pizza Huts around the world.

The big winners, he says, are in industries working around Australia’s agricultural sector.

He says producers of Australian beef would be in the box seat with the Australian dollar now trading in the 70s.

“With the Australian dollar at US70c it makes it attractive for us to buy things from Australia,’’ Mr Creed said.

“I know for example at Taco Bell in the US, they are trying to source Australian beef, so we will bring frozen Australian beef into the US, and I think McDonald’s does the same, as well as others.

“There is no doubt that the beef quality in Australia is probably second to none, and as I just said with the dollar at 70c it’s probably not a bad investment to make.”

Not surprisingly, he says the poultry industry is doing well too with demand for fried chicken “having quite a renaissance, quite a comeback/”

“There is a lot of people that want to cast doom, gloom and despair, but from where I sit around the world whether its developed markets such as the UK or Australia, or US, Canada or developing markets like Asia, Latin America and Africa, there is just a huge runway for growth,” he said.

10th March 2016