Astral Foods has announced that CFO Dries Ferreira will step down from his position at the end of January next year after having accepted a role with a company in the industrial sector.
“We extend our sincere gratitude to Dries for his valuable contributions and dedicated service to the group. His leadership and financial stewardship have been instrumental in driving our strategic objectives and strengthening our financial position,” the company said on Friday.
Astral will now begin the process of identifying a successor, it said.
Ferreira was appointed CFO in February 2023, following the retirement of long-serving Daan Ferreira. Prior to that, he served as group financial manager at Astral and had held leadership roles, including CEO of WellCapital and CFO of Newpark REIT.
During his tenure, Ferreira oversaw a financial turnaround for Astral.
After a difficult first half of the 2025 financial year marked by high input costs and price deflation, the company recovered strongly in the second half, with full-year earnings expected to rise.
Headline earnings per share (HEPS) were expected to rise 5% to 15%. Full-year results are due on November 17.
A constrained consumer environment and extensive retail promotional activity on frozen chicken had put pressure on selling prices for the first half to end-March, it said previously.
The recovery was driven by operational improvements, including increased broiler production and sales, better per-unit production costs, and rising poultry selling prices. Astral’s “Project 3R” strategy — reset, refocus and restart — has been credited with improving operational efficiency.
The company has also faced multiple challenges in recent years, including the ongoing bird flu outbreak, mitigated by permission to vaccinate breeding stock in June, and a cyberattack in March that briefly interrupted production and cut profits by about R20m.
Ferreira’s resignation comes months after Chris Schutte retired. Schutte left the company in January after more than 40 years in the poultry business and 16 years at the helm of Astral.
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