In 2008, Philip Reynolds walked out of Dublin airport following a two-hour sit-down with Larry Goodman.

The Longford native came out of that meeting with a signed one-page document having agreed to sell 50% of his business, C&D Foods, to Goodman’s ABP Food Group.

At the time, C&D Foods was a €100m turnover pet foods business based in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford, with most of its customers in the UK.

Following a disastrous fire in 2006 that destroyed the original pet food canning plant, the company had rebuilt a new facility and had ambitious growth plans.

However, with the world falling into a financial crisis in 2008, finance capital was scarce and Reynolds needed a partner to fund the growth plans for his family business.

“I convinced Larry that he was buying into a business that was going to consolidate the pet food sector across Europe. He wasn’t interested in buying into a small, family-owned company. What we did at C&D Foods was really just an extension of what ABP already did. But we needed to have scale,” said Reynolds, who was the keynote speaker at the launch of this year’s Irish Farmers Journal/KPMG Agribusiness report in Dublin.

Reynolds said he could see a lot of other family-owned pet food businesses across Europe were struggling as the financial crisis took hold and the opportunity to consolidate was there.

Today, C&D Foods is a €500m turnover business and the largest private-label pet food manufacturer in Europe with manufacturing operations in Ireland, the UK, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Spain.

In the years that followed, Reynolds continued to sell down his shareholding in the company to Goodman.

In February this year, just over 10 years since he first struck a deal with Larry Goodman, Reynolds sold his remaining stake (15%) in the company that was founded by his late father and former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds.

Aside from acquisitions, the successful growth of the company over the last decade is down to C&D Foods’ intimate understanding of its customers.

“We lived with our customers and really got into their DNA. It’s not obvious but there’s a big difference between a Sainsbury’s shopper and a Tesco shopper and we understood that,” said Reynolds.

C&D Foods never built a pet food brand of its own but it invested heavily in developing private-label brands for its retail customers.

In a warning to the agri-food industry, Reynolds said Irish companies need to resist being seen as commodity producers.

“There are many people who would like to label what we do in C&D Foods as a commodity. But you have to resist that. Any company that’s selling in tonnes has already raised the white flag against becoming commoditised. All the companies we acquired over the years were commodity businesses,” said Reynolds.

“We always spoke in cases at C&D Foods rather than tonnes and it worked. And if you can stop pet food from being commoditised, then you can do the same for beef and dairy.

"The biggest difficulty I see for medium-sized Irish food companies is scale. At a certain point you need scale to compete so you can bring some power back to your side of the desk when negotiating with the big retailers,” he added.