“It was interesting,” he says of the early pandemic days. “When you are CEO, you are supposed to write a 100-day plan. I felt obliged to do that, and I can honestly say the words ‘global pandemic’ didn’t appear anywhere in that plan. So that wasn’t a particularly useful exercise.”

Just a few weeks into March 2020 and Musgrave was dealing with unprecedented consumer demand for basic items, sudden supply-chain surges, new social-distancing measures, and the effective shutdown of hospitality.

But Keeley, who could count on around 17 years of experience at the group, didn’t panic.

“There is always an event,” he says. “And there’s no doubt this event was a very extraordinary event, but it allowed us all to take a step back and ask, ‘How will we get through this?’ As a business, we pulled together.

“We really did realise our purpose, and it’s not just to run supermarkets and distribute food: it is to make sure that people have access to food,” Keeley adds.

Despite the pandemic and all the challenges it threw at Musgrave, the company’s plan to keep the food supply-chain functioning worked.

Musgrave Group’s annual report for 2020 said its retailers in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Spain, which mostly operate as independently-owned franchised stores, reported sales of €6.1bn in 2020, up €700m on the previous year. SuperValu accounted for the majority of sales at €3.4bn, followed by Centra at €2.2bn..

Musgrave Group sales grew 14pc to €4.5bn, with profit before tax up 11pc to €98m.

“It truly was a year like no other,” says Keeley. “The results are a function of what happened in the business, but what happened inside the business was actually quite different.

“There is no doubt that because of our business model and because our retailers are in local communities, that when people were restricted in terms of how far they could go, they rediscovered local shopping.

“I think we have managed to hold onto some of those shoppers in 2021 – and we have every intention of keeping them as well.”

Despite the jump in sales and profit last year, other parts of Musgrave took a hit due to the pandemic.

“So notwithstanding it was a good set of results, there were quite a lot of moving parts inside the business that brought about those results,” Keeley says. “It is very much a mixed bag.

“The foodservice side and high-convenience retailers in city-centre areas had a very tough time.”

The closure of offices, travel restrictions and a radical reduction of footfall in towns and cities significantly reduced convenience, food-to-go and special-event shopping. Keeley says Musgrave’s city-centre and high-footfall retail businesses took significant hits – down as much as 60pc at the pandemic’s peak, depending on location.

With the effective closure of hospitality over many months, Musgrave’s wholesale and foodservice brands also experienced significant declines. At the height of the pandemic, when hospitality shut during the first lockdown, revenue in its foodservice division declined by as much as 70pc.

Musgrave’s foodservice business is in recovery mode, with Keeley hoping to see it back on its feet in 2022.

City-centre convenience is taking tentative steps, with Keeley saying some city-centre stores are still some way behind 2019 sales. As a result, some affected stores were forced to close.

“We don’t believe it will ever be the same again,” he says of city-centre convenience. “People will move to this hybrid way of living – they won’t spend five days, nine-to-five, working in the office.

“We do expect to see a recovery. We are starting to see a modest recovery, but we don’t expect to see any significant recovery in those areas until people return to work, which probably now will be February or March.

“We would anticipate seeing a lesser concentration of city-centre Centras,” he adds. “But when we look at Centra, it is quite a versatile brand. When we look at it from its community market format, it is performing strongly – in rural and small urban towns.”

According to Keeley, driving the performance for Musgrave was strong growth in the SuperValu and Centra brands. As of the end of 2020, SuperValu had 222 and Centra 477 stores in Ireland, which were essential to Musgrave’s performance last year. It also owns the Daybreak and Donnybrook Fair brands in Ireland.

Offering online ordering and delivery services also helped bolster performance, with Keeley adding that demand was up 300pc at the pandemic’s peak. As a result, Musgrave moved resources and staff from foodservice to support its fledgling online operation, from in-store product pickers to delivery drivers.

“There is no doubt there was early demand that came with the pandemic, I suppose to put it into context, it would be like having to construct around 10 SuperValu stores in two weeks – that’s what it equated to.”

Keeley won’t forget the effort from everyone at Musgrave.

“I have to be honest, I was humbled,” he says.

“I think people sometimes forget that those workers had to go to work every day. We still had to operate warehouses, we still had 500 trucks on the road every day, everybody who worked in supermarkets had to go into work to keep the shelves full. They did that every day, relentlessly.”

With the days of Covid-enforced lockdowns over, industry figures from Kantar show sales in grocery retail have slowed. Keeley says the market is currently down around 4pc year-on-year, with Musgrave down between 2pc and 2.5pc.

“So we’re outperforming the market,” he says. “We are still seeing fairly significant volumes over and above 2019, and there probably is still an amount of rebalancing to happen. The events industry has still to reopen – and when you see some of these things coming back, you will see a further rebalancing between foodservice and grocery.”

Keeley adds that Musgrave’s online business has also fallen back from its pandemic highs, though it is still double the level it was at before Covid hit.

Growing up in Tullamore, Co Offaly, Keeley’s interest in business came from his father’s side of the family, which owned a furniture business in the town. His father worked for DE Williams, which owned a local distillery, had a soft-drinks business and several grocery stores.

“It was the midlands equivalent to Musgraves,” he says with a laugh.

Due to his father’s position with DE Williams, Keeley got a part-time job in grocery retail when he was 13.

“It is ironic that I find myself working back in that industry,” he says.

After school, Keeley worked in a denim manufacturing business before he and his wife moved to Canada in 1989. In Canada, he worked in various roles, including as a recruitment consultant, HR worker, and CEO of a health board.

He also went back to education, completing a diploma in healthcare administration and an MBA at Queen’s University, Ontario.

By 1999, Keeley and his wife felt the magnetic pull of Ireland growing stronger. With two young children and the Irish economy booming, they decided to move to Cork.

Keeley initially worked in HR at University College Cork before receiving a call from the retiring HR director at Musgrave, asking if he would consider taking his role.

“When I began to learn about the business – its scale, its size, what it did on the island of Ireland, its commitment to sustainability and communities – I felt it was a business with a true purpose,” he says. “That was one of the things that attracted me.”

Keeley made the switch to Musgrave and has thrived there. Over the past around 17 years, he has moved from the group HR role to others, including heading up the warehousing operation and the growth of SuperValu and Centra in Northern Ireland.

Motivating Keeley’s rise through the business was a sense of purpose.

“You may have heard the story of two people sitting side-by-side in a quarry, breaking rocks,” he says. “They say to the first guy, ‘What are you doing?’ He replied, ‘I’m breaking rocks.’

“Then they ask the second guy, and he says, ‘I’m building a cathedral.’

“For me, it was always critically important that whoever I was working for, I understood the cathedral I was building – and also that the people on my team understood how they contributed to building the cathedral.”

In September 2019, Keeley was given the opportunity to build a cathedral – albeit in grocery retail and food wholesale. He landed the chief executive job at Musgrave after the retirement of Chris Martin. He started in January 2020.

“Notwithstanding the fact Musgrave is over 140 years old, the number of leaders it has had is still in single digits,” he says. “I suppose that is maybe indicative of the importance of the job.

“I feel very privileged to have the role I have. I have been lucky enough to inherit a very strong business.”

Pandemic aside, Keeley has big plans for the future of Musgrave. This year, the group has added 18 new stores and welcomed 652 new employees across the island of Ireland. It has also invested over €15.2m in SuperValu across the island, as well as over €17.5m in Centra.

While Keeley already believes Musgrave is a world-class business, he knows competing against international retailers – Tesco, Lidl and Aldi – means it needs to invest to stay ahead continually.

“If you want to play in that league, you need a world-class team,” he says.

Keeley is keeping a close eye on the latest consumer trends and plotting how he can keep Musgrave’s retail and wholesale brands ahead of the competition.

He believes delivery from third-party aggregators such as Just Eat will continue to grow, and frictionless ‘tap-and-go’ services will thrive. He also feels consumers are more concerned about sustainability and the provenance of goods than ever before, and that easy food solutions will become more popular.

He hopes to transform and grow SuperValu both as a brand and as a “shopping destination”. The brand’s new store in Knocklyon, when open, will demonstrate its latest thinking. Keeley says the company will roll this out across the country.

Centra is also set for innovation. Already working with Just Eat across some Dublin stores, Musgrave plans to roll out “quick commerce” further to see products delivered to consumers. It will expand the Happy Pear range, and will add concessions in some SuperValu stores.

The company will also develop a digital platform for Musgrave Wholesale. Musgrave hopes it will become the primary shopping channel for its wholesale customers, with a target for 60pc of business being transacted digitally by 2026.

“Think of it as the Amazon of foodservice,” he says.

Bolstering its network of Irish suppliers is also set to continue. For example, SuperValu has 1,800 local food producers and suppliers, with Keeley stating that number is set to grow.

Keeley thinks Brexit has made Musgrave’s Irish suppliers even more important. Supporting Irish suppliers, he says “ensures the robustness of our supply chain as well”.

“We need to make sure we can produce enough food to look after the people who live on the island.”

Keeley says Musgrave prepared well for Brexit – and with 70pc of its supply sourced on the island of Ireland, it did not experience some of the supply-chain pressures that affected others. Musgrave has lessened its reliance on suppliers based in Britain, redirecting to the EU “where it made sense” to do so.

He adds he does not anticipate some of the scenes in UK supermarkets, where supply-chain issues have led to some supermarkets having empty shelves, making their way to Ireland.

“There is no doubt that there have been significant challenges on the global supply chain, but we have worked very hard to minimise the impact that has on the consumer,” he says.

“Our availability is excellent and continues to be so. We are confident we’re well prepared to trade successfully through into Christmas.”

Brexit has also brought about international opportunities for Musgrave and its SuperValu own-brand products. With some UK retailers such as Tesco set to shutter their international wholesale businesses, Musgrave has found itself supplying British ex-pats with SuperValu products mostly in Spain, Portugal and Belgium.

Keeley says Musgrave is set to open its first Centra outside of the island of Ireland in Qatar early next year. It also plans to franchise its “hugely successful” Frank and Honest coffee chain internationally.

Global economic challenges created by Covid, and to a lesser extent by Brexit, are also on the minds of Irish business leaders and consumers.

As prices for energy, labour, commodities and building materials continue to soar, inflation is expected to hit consumers in the pocket. However, Keeley is quite confident that the competitiveness of the Irish grocery market will see his business do its best to maintain value for consumers.

“We are not calling food inflation at the moment,” he says. “It is only running at 0.6pc. When you look at that relative to fuel or energy and everything else, we are not starting to see it come through yet.

“But there is no doubt these things will create a level of pressure that could potentially increase that. As I said, it is a very competitive market.”

Skills shortages have also been grabbing the headlines in Ireland and abroad. Musgrave claims to be Ireland’s largest private sector employer together with its retail partners, with over 41,000 people working across the business and its brands, 35,000 of them working in Ireland.

Keeley admits that Musgrave has experienced some labour challenges mostly in its operations division and with attracting in-store staff. Musgrave has even hired internationally for its operations arm, having brought in some employees from Croatia.

“There is no doubt there are challenging pressures within the labour supply chain,” he says.

Despite the challenges faced by growing competition, increasing innovation and global events, Keeley is confident Musgrave and its brands will thrive into the future.

“I am very optimistic for the future of Musgrave,” he says. “I believe we are a business that will continue to evolve and innovate. The next evolution for us is our digital transformation – and we will continue to invest to stay ahead.”

While Keeley admits the world of retail has undergone massive changes since his 13-year-old self was stocking shelves in Tullamore, he learned one thing 40 years ago that he believes will always remain true.

“Good retailing is about giving people what they want, when they want it, at a price they are willing to pay.

“It has always been thus, and it always will be thus. That lesson has stuck with me.” 

Curriculum Vitae

Name: Noel Keeley

Age: 54

Position: Chief executive officer at Musgrave

Lives: Rochestown, Cork

Education: MBA, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada.

Experience: Over 30 years senior management in public and private sector

Family: Married with two daughters, aged 24 and 22

Favourite book: ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ by Ernest Hemingway

Favourite film: Dead Poet’s Society

Favourite TV series: The Queen’s Gambit

Business Lessons

How did you deal with the pandemic at Musgrave?

“What we always do when we are faced with adversity in Musgrave, we just knuckle down and say how do we work our way through this.”

What is the lesson that has stood to you most throughout your career?

“Be yourself. When I look back over my career to date, being true to myself has really stood to me in everything that I’ve set out to do.”