INDUSTRY
Domestic market
Rod Slater to hang up the apron BY: GLENYS CHRISTIAN
A
butcher by trade, he teamed up with Peter Leitch, later to be known as the Mad Butcher and knighted, after a chance meeting on a flight from Auckland to Wellington to stave off union protests at plans for Saturday opening of butchers’ shops. Flying back together they hatched the idea of a chain of butchery shops throughout Auckland, with the deal sealed on just a handshake. “Peter was a marketing genius,” Rod said. “He was the first to talk about his own business on the radio which people didn’t do.” Despite there being a supermarket right next door to their first shop at Hauraki Corner on the North Shore, interest was so great that traffic pointsmen were posted all the way from the Harbour Bridge to direct shoppers.
“And when we opened our second shop in Mt Roskill there was a queue 500 metres up the road of people wanting to get in.” Higher volumes of sales with lower margins were the order of the day with 90 percent of meat pre-packaged but customers also had the choice of personal service. In the early 1980s they protested about the compulsory levy butchers then paid to the Meat Board, based on frustration at the lack of promotion of beef and lamb on the local market. That led to formation of the bureau with Rod on the board. In the 1990s they decided to go their own ways and Rod found himself temporarily retired after an unsuccessful foray into selling second hand vehicles imported from Japan. So he was happy to take up then Beef + Lamb New Zealand bureau chairman, Denis Denton’s offer of a job, thinking this would be a very temporary move.
“But consumers didn’t think it was over,” he said. Meat Board director, Bruce Jans, was a convert, spearheading a campaign for meat companies to match the board’s contribution to the bureau, dollar for dollar. So in 1994 the bureau was up and running again after nine months of “going round the traps” by Rod. The immediate focus was the Quality Mark guarantee but the one other bureau employee, marketer, Debbie Armitage, came up with the Ambassador Chef Programme, still running today. One of Rod’s first moves was to pick up the phone and talk to the bureau’s Australian counterpart, now the Meat and Livestock Association (MLA) who suggested he pay them a call. “I didn’t need a second invite,” he said. “And they showed me their iron campaign.”
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