Last week, I had a fascinating chat with Craig Dillon, the Head of Sales, Wholesale, and Foodservice at Yeo Valley Organic. Let me introduce Craig: he’s all about developing people and crafting strategies to drive business growth in competitive markets. His core values? Trust, integrity, loyalty, enjoyment, and a relentless drive to succeed (for everyone around him).
Craig’s role involves leading teams at Yeo Valley developing new initiatives across a variety of sectors in the Foodservice and Wholesale Channel. One key focus area is supporting schools and their students on their educational journey, promoting healthier eating habits. Recently, Yeo Valley Organic granted two primary schools a forest experience as part of their outdoors initiative, Yeo Explore! Craig has genuine enthusiasm for this adventure-led program, connecting students with nature and celebrating the great outdoors. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to learn more about him!
What does your Monday morning routine look like?
I don’t drink much coffee, although I have a very nice coffee maker that my wife bought me for Christmas. One of those Nespresso Coffee-pod machines that George Clooney advertises. I’ll have that with either fruit or granola with some of our Yeo Valley Greek Yoghurt for breakfast. I’m quite a light breakfast eater. Workwise it’s always about looking at the numbers. I’ll have a meeting with my team where there will be commentary about individual customer performance. You know – what’s happened that’s good, what’s happened that’s more challenging. Monitoring our numbers, making sure we’re hitting our targets. We have a very ambitious growth agenda for the wholesale food service channel, so I’m quite keen to make sure that we’re on track or even ahead of the track, preferably!
If you could time travel and have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be and why?
Oh goodness, do you know we were talking about that this weekend? My wife and I were saying what list of three leaders have been very inspirational, whether good or bad… interesting that you ask that question! If I could time travel I would like to have dinner with Nelson Mandela. When he came out after being incarcerated for 30 years, he became President and he inspired an entire nation to overthrow Apartheid, which was a really difficult situation for the people of South Africa at the time. He turned that whole country’s thinking around, which I think was just very inspirational.
What’s your all-time favourite movie, and why?
It’s really interesting – this question came up in the office about two or three weeks ago. It’s probably Good Fellas.. I like movies made by Martin Scorsese – Mafia, mobster movies, subject matter like that. It surprises people that I like this! I love the film because, whilst they’re not nice people, they work together as a team and get stuff done – they just do it for all the wrong reasons! I think there are some amazing movie stars in that film as well.
If you could visit any place in the world right now, where would you go?
Mallorca. I go there at least twice a year. I love it. The people, the food, clearly the weather, the beaches. I’m actually going there at the end of the month with a whole bunch of friends. My wife and I go every April for my birthday too. We should probably get around to buying a place there, but we probably won’t.
What’s your favourite way to unwind and de-stress?
Put up my feet with a nice glass of white wine – Sauvignon Blanc, and spend time with my wife just chilling and chatting. That’s what we enjoy.
If you were a superhero, what would your superpower be and why?
I’ve had this before in a job interview! The Invisible Man… you can sneak up on people, hear and understand their conversations and get insight and inside knowledge about what they’re thinking so that when you become visible you can have an open and frank conversation and say that ‘I actually understand what you want and I can deliver what you need.’
What job is the favourite you’ve ever had and what made it so special?
This one! I love my current role at Yeo Valley. What makes it so special is the amazing team of people across the entire business. It’s got such a lovely vibe and a feel to how we do business and grow the business. Everyone’s very kind to each other and very supportive! We’re also being very successful currently in terms of achieving our ambitious growth plans. It’s still a family-owned business, which is lovely but we’re all co-owners. The Mead family, founders of the business entrusted 20% of the business to the employees, so we don’t call each other colleagues – we call each other co-owners. Everyone’s got a voice. Everyone’s got an opportunity to have an input into the running of the business, from somebody on the line in the factory to our chief executive – everyone’s got the same level of voice. It’s unusual I think for a business to be like that in this day and age. One of our core values and core strategies is to remain proudly independent. I think that’s really important and that’s what people like and what we all sign up to. We have a vision which is to Nurture and Nourish People and the Planet, isn’t that just fantastic.
What is your favourite cuisine OR is there a cuisine you’ve never tried but would like to?
Oh, I really like Italian food! I’ve been to Italy a few times – not as often as I’d like to. What cuisine I’ve never tried? I’ve never been to South America and I would like to go because I think the culture and the diversity would be quite interesting to understand, and the food clearly goes with it. I am a foodie! My wife also works in the food industry, so we’re generally interested and passionate about it. She looks after a business that makes ready meals, but we’re actually scratch cooks ourselves!
If you were to write a book, what genre would it be?
I did actually start writing a book about 20 years ago and then I shelved it. It was all about family business – almost like back to Good Fellas; organised crime – because it interests me. So it would be that kind of thriller ‘Strike’ drama based on some sort of family gang. I’m going to sound a bit warped on this front aren’t I? But I’m genuinely fascinated about stuff like that. Pablo Escobar was the other leader I came up with over the weekend. A horrible individual, but he had thousands of people working for him and at some point he became the world’s richest man doing horrible things. Why didn’t he apply his leadership values to some good rather than the really horrible things he did?
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
It’s from an old boss of mine about 25 years ago, just before he retired. I listened to him and learned a lot from him in the younger years of my career. He used this mantra – a phrase which I still live by 25 years later. ‘It’s nice to be important. It’s more important to be nice!’ I love it and still live by that.
What’s your favourite season and what do you love about it?
Winter. Skiing! I like sunshine and sunny holidays as well but I’m very lucky; I’ve got a friend who owns a chalet in Meribel, so we go skiing. We haven’t been for a couple of years, but we go as often as we can and my son is a natural born skier. He’s brilliant at it and he loves it. My brother, who passed away 15 years ago, actually had a ski company based in Chamonix. He had about 300 people working within the business – like a chalet host and he just loved it. It’s a fabulous lifestyle.
What’s the most adventurous thing you’ve ever done?
Skiing is a fabulous one but it’s a bit normal for me now! I own a race car, so I have driven that race car around various racing circuits, including Silverstone. I think that’s probably the one that scares my wife the most because she knows that when I do it you know, it’s hurtling round Silver’s at 150 miles an hour. It’s quite an exhilarating thrill! I’ve been into my cars ever since being a teenager, so I’ve always had a nice sporty car – I can’t do bog-standard. My best friend is exactly the same. We’re both petrol heads. The pair of us always had nice cars, even when we were 18 years old. We had hot hatches, that we probably shouldn’t have had because we were too young and inexperienced, but we did. We had done track days in various cars – hired cars – but then we decided to buy one. And now we’ve got two!! One is a circuit car and one does hill climbs. We were planning to go to Monaco Grand Prix for our joint 50th, myself and my friend James but that was Covid year in 2020 so we shelved it. We will go. I think it might happen next year.
What are you currently listening to?
I’m really into Sam Fender at the moment. He’s got some great songs like Hypersonic Missiles. Brit-pop kind of stuff really. Aside from Sam Fender, and I did watch them when they played at Glastonbury, is Coldplay. We’ve seen them play a couple of times and they are absolutely fantastic live performers. The three of us, myself, Claire and Sam, my son went to go and watch a tribute band called Ultimate Cold Play in a local venue in Cheltenham and no word of a lie, you would have thought it was Chris Martin on the stage. This guy looked like him, sounded like him, dressed like him, moved like him. I actually thought, that could really be Chris Martin in disguise – it was a fantastic night.
What is your favourite food/drink product on the market right now and why?
Yeo Valley, obviously!! In the range, I particularly like our fruited big pot yoghurts and the one that I like the most, and I didn’t think I would like it but I do, is Rhubarb flavour. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Apart from that, I do like a nice coffee, so we get some nice Nespresso and experiment with different flavoured coffees. I enjoy that.
What would you do if you weren’t in the Food, Drink & Hospitality industry
Racing driver! Again, it was a conversation I had with my mum over lunch. We were watching the Grand Prix and we were talking about me doing the track days and things like that with my racing car, so she’s like – ‘Craig, why didn’t you ever become a racing driver? Because you’re so good at it.’ And I was like – ‘Because Mum, you were a single parent, you didn’t have any money and it costs so much money to get into that sport.’ So we couldn’t do it. I can afford it (just) to indulge my passion. I’m kind of doing it much later in life.
You can connect with Craig via his LinkedIn profile.
