By Gerald Piddock

Copyright farmersweekly

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Four months after he took the reins as Synlait, CEO Richard Wyeth believes the beleaguered dairy company has the makings of a path back to prosperity.

In the short term that path includes completing the sale of Synlait’s North Island assets for $307 million to United States company Abbot and developing a new strategy for the dairy company.

“At Synlait, I’m still developing the full strategy but the ‘Big Fix for ’26’ is what we are focusing on this year,” he told Farmers Weekly.

That focus is on operational stability, quality performance, customer satisfaction, financial resilience and strengthening the company’s culture.

“Synlait is filled with great people who have been through a huge amount of challenges over the last few years. My observation coming into the business is that it’s very much a culture of reactivity that’s driven some of those challenges.

“I want to reset the business so we can really focus on proactive performance.”

The strategy for the next three to five years will be finalised in the next two to three months.

In the short term, its business mix of advanced nutrition, ingredients food service and consumer will remain largely unchanged. However, Wyeth hinted at opportunities to alter that in the future.

“We need to earn the right to grow. The current products we’ve got are good, so we need to make sure we are utilising all of the assets accordingly, so we earn the right to go again and grow.”

Dealing with Synlait’s financial woes is familiar territory for Wyeth, who spent four years as CEO at Westland Milk Products, where he turned around the fortunes of the Hokitika-based company.

Prior to his time at Westland, he spent 11 years at Miraka, spanning the creation of that business to building it up.

It has resulted in Wyeth being seen by some as the dairy industry’s ‘Mr Fixit’. He said he never intended to have that reputation.

“It’s the nature of turning Westland around after many years of poor performance to have three to four years of good performance there.

“I’ve always loved a challenge and all I can do is utilise my knowledge and experience to help it improve.”

While Synlait and Westland had similar financial situations, how they got into those situations was different, he said.

Westland needed to understand the business it was in and in his four years in that role he was driving that understanding within that company.

Synlait, on the other hand, had manufacturing challenges and required a different solution, he said.

The biggest lesson from the experience at Westland was the value of simplifying the focus of the business. That involved initiating a cultural shift so that people understand what they need to do, each and every one of them every day, to make the business go faster.

That proved to be very successful at Westland.

One of the reasons Wyeth came to Synlait was that its fundamentals were so strong, he said.

“I was attracted to this role due to the company’s strategic strengths. It has world class assets, and its foundations are strong.”

After the sale of its North Island assets, Wyeth said, Synlait will be a more focused company and will use the Dunsandel factory’s three dryers to make the highest value products possible.

“We have the UHT business, and we still have plenty of capacity with those assets so we’ll be focusing on how we grow that business quickly and also supporting Dairyworks and their growth.

“When you have less things to look at, it makes it easier to focus. It’s a reset – it’s Synlait 2.0.”