Michael Perich unveils Freedom Foods’ new name and recipe for success

Rebranding is like making silage: get it right and the smell is sweet but get it wrong and you’re left with a stinker. Freedom Foods is aiming for the former.

Michael Perich has gone from running one of Australia’s biggest dairy farms, milking 15,000 cows, to running Freedom Foods, soon to become Noumi. Picture: Tracee Lea

Silage isn’t meant to smell, Michael Perich says, as he begins a discussion about changing Freedom Foods’s name.

The chief executive of the dairy and plant-based protein company is driving a truck loaded with the green fodder between two farms in western Sydney.

Unlike hay, silage is fresh grass wrapped in plastic to preserve it via fermentation. Done right, as Perich is eager to highlight, it should smell slightly sweet. Done wrong — with too much soil or moisture — it absolutely stinks, so much so that even cows will stay clear of it.

“Hopefully, we’ll do a good job of it and it won’t smell,” Perich says.

It is a fine balance and one that Perich shares as Freedom Foods moves into the final stage of its “reset” strategy. The company intends to change its name to noumi — a made-up word that can mean several things but Perich likes to think of it as being a contraction of “nourish me”.

The new name, subject to shareholder approval, is aimed at reflecting the company’s suite of nutritional products from whey protein — used by elite athletes, including the Geelong Cats — to lactoferrin, which is showing promise as a potential treatment for Covid-19, as well as its range of plant-based milks.

Changing corporate names is rare. In Freedom’s case it was a necessity after it sold its cereal and snacks business – the products of which were all sold under the Freedom Foods brand — to Arnotts for $20m last December.

But it also allows Freedom Foods to reinvent itself fully after 2020 was plagued by an accounting scandal that led to the departure of its former chief executive Rory Macleod and Perich stepping in to pick up the pieces.

“We had already drawn a line in the sand really. The new corporate name helps us with that, but we want to be mindful — I use the analogy of ‘you can’t change the cover on a bad book and expect the book to be any better’,” Perich says.

“This is part of driving these six core values within our business around excellence, integrity, collaboration, accountability. Without those, nothing is going to change.

“People will see through us quickly if we don’t do that. That’s the No.1 focus of myself, the board, the leadership team around turning this business back to it once was around that nutrition space, our plant-based beverages and dairy nutrition business.”

Perich took on the top job from overseeing one of Australia’s biggest dairy farms, milking about 15,000 cows.

“When you look across our business and reflect the value of assets under management it’s pretty significant. It wasn’t like I came off a small farm running a few beef cattle.”

The connection to land, agriculture and food runs deep, providing a strong foundation for his role at Freedom and the company’s next phase.

“I see the CEO role as creating the values, creating the leadership with the business to get everybody on the same page and in the same direction. When I stepped out of the role (running the dairy farm) into Freedom, I didn’t leave a gaping hole because I’m actually trying to better people around me who want to be part of our future.

“That’s what Freedom is about. It’s about how do we find those people.”

After selling its cereal and snack business, Freedom has been sharpening its focus on dairy and plant-based proteins, which include the popular Milk Lab brand, rebuilding the company and its reputation. The plant-based beverage space holds particular promise after Swedish rival Oatly listed on the Nasdaq earlier this year in a $10bn float.

The company is making progress, slashing its loss from $136.4m to $38.8m in the past year, and pumping up revenue by 8 per cent to $559.1m. Meanwhile, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation has had a positive turnaround of 141 per cent.

Investors are beginning to reap the benefits, with the company’s shares soaring 22.5 per cent to 49c in the past year under Perich’s leadership. And this week, Freedom received the ‘turnaround deal of the year award’ at the The Australian Growth Company Awards, sponsored by corporate restructuring specialist Grant Thornton and MA Moelis among others.

But creating a new company name proved more challenging. It was not as simple as it was 40 years ago, when all a tech company had to do was think of “A is for apple” and use the elementary lesson and humble fruit to build a multi-trillion dollar empire.

“It‘s very hard to trademark an English word any more, they’re pretty much all taken,” Perich says.

“What we wanted to do was have some good protection from a trademark perspective.” And noumi was born – taking a lot more thought than remembering that ‘A is for apple’.

The company completed more than 50 staff and other interviews to test a range of possibilities before settling on noumi, which will be styled in lower case. Although it sounds like ‘new me’, which would also reflect a new chapter in Freedom Foods, Perich says it was more anchored in the company’s product offering.

“It’s about nourishment — nourish me. It’s about being a positive leader in nutrition. That is really what we want to do. It’s about imagining a healthier tomorrow, and as we look across our businesses, we are building on the foundations of collaboration, innovation and nourishment.

“It’s a word that we did a lot of work around, getting it right.”