Catherine Keogh, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Kerry Group on her career to date

Catherine Keogh grew up in Kells, County Meath and from a young age, she had a desire to travel. She spent her school summers in Germany and despite heading to Dublin’s Trinity College to study maths, the grá to travel influenced her studies and she moved to DCU to study international marketing and languages. She tells me that back then, having a language was perhaps more important than it is these days and she set her sights on international business with the idea to move to Germany after she graduated. As part of her course, she spent a year there, witnessed the Berlin Wall coming down and even worked as an extra on one of Germany’s long-running soap operas to pay for her year abroad. Working in Germany was the goal, or so she thought.

Two weeks after her return for her final year, she met Pascal, her now husband, who was from France, so her plans were eventually switched up; she ended up moving to France post-studies. The career intention was to spend a couple of years here and there, gathering experience through the companies she joined but as it happens, she walked into Alltech in 1992 and remained with the company for 23 years.

Alltech, the Irish-American animal nutrition company, was started in 1990 by founder Dr Pearse Lyons. When Keogh joined the firm, it was a $30m company and throughout her span it grew to a $2bn company. Keogh was integral to its success. She built and led Alltech’s global marketing strategy as well as all the other demands that came with joining a company in its early days. You are never just the CMO, and as the company grew, so did Keogh. The very thing that she thought she’d require from moving companies every few years, she realised she was accumulating naturally at Alltech. “One year it was a $50 million company, the next year it was an $80 million company – we were growing so fast, I always had to learn more. Every couple of years, it was like a new company,” says Keogh.

Her career at Alltech provided a lot of experience “travelling the world with family, lots of moves, lots of change, lots of growth – it was a hyper growth organisation, just very exciting,” she says. This is where she cut her teeth in marketing, then built out a whole playbook for a billion-dollar company. Marketing has changed greatly over the decades, but she explains how the principles are still the same. “It’s about the four Ps – the product, place, price and promotion,” she tells me, and joining Alltech, she was fresh from college with all the theory done. “I suppose it only really connected when [it was put in practice]. I didn’t know what I knew until I started doing it.”

“We were a company, an Irish-American company in France, and we were essentially selling ingredients for horses and dairy cattle. I suppose what I learned about marketing is that it actually doesn’t really matter what you’re selling. It’s the same kind of process, as long as you believe in the brand you’re working for – identifying where the targets are, identifying where the potential is, and really investing in ways to build relationships and influence,” she says.

As her MBA thesis, Keogh took on a full investigation into the power of integrated marketing communication to drive business in a B2B organisation. “My passion fairly early on was to try and build a really strong identity and set of values and purpose that would connect with teams in the organisation and culture but also connect and be meaningful to the external world, specifically customers and the environment,” she explains. Incidentally, Keogh showed her tenacity when she took on the MBA. “I did my first year in 2001, and I was pregnant with my eldest daughter, Saoirse, and I had Saoirse then in September. It’s a two-year MBA, nights and weekends, and so I didn’t do the second year and then got pregnant again in 2003 and did the second year. That year was the hard one, because I had a toddler, and I was expecting and I was working full time, actually, that was pretty brutal,” she says.

Her passion to create more than just marketing campaigns for Alltech meant she was fully invested but Ireland beckoned and it was time to slow down the travel. By this time, they were living Stateside, in Kentucky. “When I wanted to move back to Ireland, because my kids were at an age where they were fed up with moving around, and we had to settle them in for school, somebody reached out from Kerry,” she tells me. It was a perfect fit for her. An Irish company, with global reach, a bigger firm than where she had come from and she also wanted the opportunity to move for a role closer to the consumer. “It was still in the nutrition space, essentially going from the feed to the food industry. But again, that B2B brand building, marketing, reputation, crisis management, government relations, all of those things,” she says.

She tells me Kerry works with most of the food brands in the world to help build sustainable nutrition into their products. “I think we’re in a really important space in the food industry, because we can’t feed a growing population with the planetary resources that are already having issues with climate change and restrictions; we’re working with our customers to find natural solutions to those real issues.”

Keogh admits that she didn’t really know much about Kerry Group apart from the fact that they hired a lot of financial graduates. “That was my idea about them. But the words that were coming back [about the company were] integrity, humility, success and hard work. Kerry is known to be a very hard-working organisation, and still very entrepreneurial,” she says.

“Even though I went from private to PLC, and a $2 billion company and we’re about $7 billion in Kerry, culturally, it actually wasn’t a huge change, which you would think it should be. At the core, there were values and a culture that I could really, really relate to,” she adds.

Initially, she joined marketing and was the anchor of the company’s Beyond the Horizon sustainability strategy, and the rollout of Kerry’s purpose, Inspiring Food, Nourishing Life. After nearly two years at the firm, she moved into her current role in corporate affairs, something she had experienced as part of her broad role in Alltech, so this position felt more like ‘stretching and stimulating’ that experience.

We talk about what has surprised her most about herself in her career and she says that she has realised that bringing her ‘whole self’ to work is a leadership strength. “I’m much more comfortable in my skin today than I would have been 20 years ago. Seeing the people that I’ve mentored over the years thrive gives me joy, as does mentoring younger grads,” she says, explaining how these things energise and motivate her.

Before we leave the call, I’m keen to know what the dream is. She says that while she’s very happy at the moment, the dream would involve “spending more time in a warmer climate, seeing my children succeed and be happy and continuing to have purpose in my work.”