Deborah Hill Cone: It's time to put a little sizzle in the cowshed

When I hear the word Fonterra, my eyes glaze over. Yours too? No, don't stop reading. I am not going to bore you with milkfat payouts. All I want to say is, isn't it a shame that Fonterra, our only really big company and earner of almost a third of the country's export returns, is just so darned uninspiring. If you're going to be a small country and only have one notable company, couldn't we be sexy like Finland with Nokia? Although if Nokia was owned by a bunch of farmers, they would probably still be making brick-sized handsets.

I can't imagine Fonterra is ever going to feature as a case study for anything much, except how not to handle a crisis like the San Lu case. There was little grace in the way the dairy giant responded to this commercial and human nightmare. I remember hearing chairman Henry van der Heyden interviewed at length on Kathryn Ryan's radio show and all he seemed to have to say was that the company was drawing a line under it and "moving on". Then the company acted as if its own $139 million writedown was a loss akin to the losses suffered by the victims of the poisoned milk.

Questions about why it took a month from the time New Zealand's diplomatic staff in Beijing were informed that there was a product quality issue until the whistle was blown have never been answered.

The media certainly seem to have lost interest - they would when Fonterra is deemed to be so boring. In contrast, questions about whether a TVNZ executive knew or didn't know about a sports presenter's domestic with his girlfriend are still commanding front-page treatment. But TVNZ is glamorous, Fonterra is not. In fact Fonterra is so non-glam that another TV network, Sky, didn't even manage to broadcast the dairy company's announcement on its capital restructuring plans.

So how could we make Fonterra more sexy? List it, is the obvious answer. If you had some shares in it and stood to make a profit all of a sudden it would seem a lot more exciting. But that's not going to happen any time soon. In the meantime the only PR that matters to Fonterra is whether its shareholder farmers like it.

It is not as if it doesn't do some cool stuff. Subsidiary ViaLactia Biosciences identified a low-fat-producing cow it named Marge. There are new products like Chesdale Chocolate Cheese Slices, exciting medical nutrition products and pharmaceutical-grade protein. But there are hardly any bold moves to grow the company with those value-added products - just 31c/kg of last year's bumper $7.90/kg payout came from value-added sales.

The other puzzling thing about Fonterra is, for a company which is so much bigger than any other in this country, how little effect it seems to have on spawning other independent companies riding its coat-tails. I remember seeing a Hamilton milk tanker company in the running for Entrepreneur of the Year a few years back, but there is hardly a fizzing scene around Fonterra. Fonterra is 8 per cent of our GDP - can't we sex it up?

deborah@coneandco.com