Anthony Ng’s North Star

Imagine the coldest place you’ve ever been to; it’s how you’ll feel once you step inside North Star Meat Merchant Inc.’s cold storage area here in its 2.1-hectare meat facility in Bulacan.

The thermometer reads -20 degrees Celsius. It’s literally a giant freezer because this is where the company stores its inventory of both local and imported meat—pork, beef, etc, of different cuts and sizes.

I had to put on thick thermal wear, the same kind I wore in ice-cold Harbin some years back, before I could enter North Star’s facility.

There’s a sprawling area for storing boxes and boxes of imported meat, a place where they can do quality check and inventory; there’s also a place where newly arrived livestock are stored and checked.

Outside the storage and meat cutting areas, there are also rooms for meetings, training sessions, etc. It’s a sprawling facility that is clean and well-maintained.

North Star Meat Merchants is the largest end-to-end fresh frozen meat retailer, operating in all SM Markets namely Supermarket, Hypermarket, Savemore; WalterMart and Alfamart across the Philippines.

The company was founded by Filipino-Chinese businessman Anthony Ng in 1997. Ng was then a college student at the University of Asia and the Pacific, who used his family’s simple meat shop in Iloilo as his thesis for a business class, with the goal of providing food security and food safety in local communities. In a few years time, his meat shop started to supply frozen and fresh meats to SM Iloilo.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Ng grew the business by pioneering an agile and dynamic system that integrated all the expertise needed — from sourcing, processing, and logistics to retailing -— to bring meat safely to the public.

Indeed, North Star’s facility is ice-cold, but Ng’s passion for the business is scorchingly hot.

In fact, the company was supposed to do an initial public offering this year, but because of the prevailing market volatility, it decided to postpone the IPO.

Ng said the company is still determined to go public in the near future, possibly next year or 2024.

While waiting for the right timing for the IPO, the company has been receiving strong interest from both local and foreign investors looking to acquire a stake in the company, said its CFO Jet Tan.

Discussions are ongoing, but in the meantime, North Star is focused on growing the company and possibly have a bigger public offering in the future, Tan said.

Strengthening its presence in Alfamart

For instance, the company is strengthening its partnership with the SM Group’s Alfamart.

While the company’s products are already available in Alfamart, North Star is putting up mini meat dispensing stations in some Alfamart branches to provide an even better customer experience to shoppers.

The mini meat dispensing Alfamart branches will provide additional value to customers as they can access ready-to-cook meat products and request for their own preferred cuts as well.

This is essentially why they go to wet markets, but Ng said that with modern trade, as what North Star and Alfamart can offer, customers get to access the products in a more convenient way.

The target is to convert 1,000 Alfamart branches for this plan. The company is already tweaking 12 stores for the initial roll-out. These branches are in the greater Metro Manila.

Food security

I enjoyed my visit to North Star’s facility and the chat with Ng and Tan. It’s always a pleasure to learn about the success stories of Filipino companies, especially companies in the food business because the problem of food security is one of the biggest issues our country is facing now.

I hope that as North Star grows bigger in the years to come, it will continue to support local food growers by sourcing its meat products locally.

Ng said for now, the ratio of the company’s imported and local meat supply varies, depending on availability and completeness of the stocks, prices of local and imported products, and the animal disease situation in the Philippines.

The company also supports the Department of Agriculture’s Integrated National Swine Production Initiatives for Recovery and Expansion (INSPIRE), which seeks to help the hog industry recover from the African swine fever. It also works with the Gawad Kalinga, as well as commercial farms that are compliant with its standards.

“In the end, it’s always about having what the consumer wants or needs, but we make sure it is affordable and accessible through our network of distribution,” Ng says.

Ng founded North Star in 1997, more than two decades ago. It wasn’t easy starting a business from scratch, but Ng persevered and committed the company to the tenets of good corporate citizenship, which means being a responsible business, paying the right taxes, providing jobs to the communities, supporting the government, and providing quality products to clients and customers.

How did Ng do all this? Perhaps, he simply followed his own Stella Polaris or the North Star.

Iris Gonzales’ email address is [email protected].

Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.