Over the years, our workforce has shown a sense of commitment to our business and there is considerable depth of experience among our management team and employees. When C&C floated on the stock markets we acknowledged that by granting 5% of all the shares issued to employees.

In 2007, in recognition of the outstanding year, a further €2.5m of shares was granted to employees

Our facility at Annerville, near Clonmel, is the best cider making plant in the world. This achievement is down to our vision of what our business should be and down to the people who are making that vision happen. Innovation is a key dimension of how we do things. Across the extensive site, we have excellent buildings, efficient layouts, good work flows and great systems. But its success as a facility depends mostly on the quality of our people.

Annerville is more than just a combination of bricks, mortar and metal. The welfare of the people who work here is paramount as well. We have an extremely good track record in reducing our rate of accidents and injuries. Building on that, this year we were accredited to the internationally recognised health and safety standard, OHSAS 18001. This certification took us two years to achieve. It involved not just installing new systems, procedures and practices but – just as importantly – creating a mindset among our workforce and managers that constantly puts health and safety at the centre of how we do our business.

Our policy is to achieve and maintain the appropriate internationally recognised standards governing all facets of our business. We have already achieved and are implementing the Quality Assurance standard ISO 9001, the Food Safety standard ISO 22000 and the Environmental Management Systems standard ISO 14001.

Caring for our environment is common sense. But, because it reduces medium term costs, running our business in ways that help the environment also makes commercial sense.

To complete the suite of world class operational standards that apply at Annerville, we signed an agreement with Sustainable Energy Ireland to work towards the achievement of Energy Standard IS 393. If and when we achieve this, we will be only one of a small number of companies in Ireland certified to that level.

In November 2007, the Minister for the Environment, John Gormley TD, was present at the official opening of the world’s first ever ‘cradle to grave’ carbon neutral industrial building. Our new bottling hall houses three state-of-the-art bottling lines, capable of bottling fifty thousand bottles of cider every hour. The envelope of the building was constructed using carbon neutral materials, all of them traceable from manufacture to end use and capable of being fully recycled whenever the building is decommissioned. To achieve full carbon neutrality, CO2 emissions used in manufacturing the building materials were offset by equivalent savings in renewable energy and energy efficient projects elsewhere. These projects have social as well as environmental benefits for local communities in developing countries.

Our development of the anaerobic water treatment plant at Annerville exemplifies our innovative approach to process improvements. We completed the second part of this project in 2007. We recover all the site waste to a single location where we use organic material to process it. The resulting clean water eventually makes it way back to the nearby River Suir and an important by-product of the cleansing process is methane gas, which we now use on site in our bottling plant. This has resulted in savings on the amount of natural gas we need to purchase externally for bottling purposes.

Cider making involves fermentation and CO2 is a by-product of this part of the process. We have started recovering the CO2 and after cleaning and treating it, it is used to carbonate our products. This has two gains: it cuts our purchases of CO2 and reduces our carbon footprint.

There is increasing awareness of the importance of reducing carbon footprints as part of a range of measures to counter climate change. In 2007, with external expertise, we measured our carbon foot print. This exercise has given a base line against which to plan to reduce our carbon foot print into the future and to help us develop a series of practical plans to achieve this outcome, in areas like manufacturing, offices, transport and distribution.

We export millions of glass bottles of Magners and our main format is the pint bottle. In Ireland, our glass bottles have been re-usable for many years, but this is not the case in Britain. We looked at ways of reducing the weight of bottles for export and have begun the first phase of a programme to minimise weight while retaining robustness. This initiative not only reduces our costs but also our supplier’s carbon footprint.

Our marketplace in recent years has become increasingly complex. We sell considerable quantities of cider in diverse export markets. Our strategy is based on reflecting consumers’ changing tastes and needs and responding to these through product innovation, new forms of packaging and better marketing.

Our products are made from natural ingredients, brewed or distilled with craft and care and backed by a time honoured heritage and tradition. Every time one of our products is consumed it is judged on its fine taste. They are premium products easily distinguishable by taste from their competition. We, therefore, invest much time and effort into product quality and assurance systems and operate these to world class standards.

Alcohol adds to the enjoyment of life when consumed sensibly. We support a number of public campaigns that encourage drinkers to be sensible. We are members of Mature Enjoyment of Alcohol in Society (MEAS), an independent body that campaigns on the issues of drink driving, under age drinking and binge drinking. We have long been members of the Cider Industry Council, whose main aim is to tackle under age drinking. We also worked closely with the Irish Spirits Association to create a marketing code of practice.

At the moment many of our apples come from county Armagh, in Northern Ireland, and we continue to develop our concept of sourcing as much as possible of our apples from the island of Ireland. We do this for sound marketing and business reasons because it emphasises our cider’s legitimate claim to naturalness, tradition and a distinctive sense of being original and Irish.

However, we are keen to increase the numbers of apples grown in our hinterland around the plant at Annerville. To encourage local farmers, a few miles from Clonmel, not far from the historic mountain of Slievenamon, we have planted 45 hectares of new orchards at Killurney. We have introduced a new technology for growing apples, called a fruit wall. Instead of using traditional trees, we grow the apples like grapes on a vine. The initial investment cost is higher but we get a crop within three years, compared with the traditional ten.

Killurney is a way of showcasing to farmers the relative ease with which apples may be grown and harvested. We hope that more farmers in our hinterland, whether fulltime or part-time will include apple growing in their enterprises, and thus access the good commercial returns that can be made. We provide long term contracts for growers that give them a greater degree of commercial certainty. Increased growing of apple trees is good for the environment because it offsets our carbon footprint. We are in discussion with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food about how we can progress this ambition further.

The loss of one hundred and forty jobs last year at Annerville was a serious blow to Clonmel and its environs. Bulmers, and increasingly Magners, is synonymous with Clonmel and south Tipperary and through our wage bill, purchasing and payment of taxes we are an enormous boost to the economy of the area. We still are. And the decisive action we took ensures that we will be into the future.

Despite those events, there is still enormous regional pride in our business as well as loyalty. With local support, we have put in place all the statutory planning permissions we require for any future developments under our Site Master Plan. We have invested in finishing the development works on our site to a very high standard and the road frontage of C & C Group at Annerville provides a striking introduction to Clonmel on one of the main roads into the town.

We continued our active involvement in the local community. We support Clonmel Chamber of Commerce, we donate to a number of local charities and our Cidona Awards are a popular and coveted acknowledgment of sporting achievement in county Tipperary.