Can Patak's fiery flavour survive in ABF's big corporate cooking pot?
MARTIN VANDER WEYER Ihave long been a fan of Patak's, the Lancashire-based Indian sauce-andpickle empire that was acquired last week by Associated British Foods for an undisclosed price thought to be somewhere north of £100 million The business that now sells 30 million jars of curry sauce a year and supplies three quarters of Britain's Indian restaurants has not only encouraged British eaters to explore the wider possibilities of subcontinental cuisine, but has set a shining 50-year example of family entrepreneurship. As global stock markets, big-city real estate and corporate takeovers continue to sizzle like a King Prawn Korai on a red-hot skillet, there will be nine-figure fortunes aplenty this year, but none will be more deserved than the cheque just collected from ABF chief George Weston by Kirit Pathak and his wife Meena.
I may be in danger of overcooking my curry metaphors, but the success of the Pathaks (who dropped the 'h' from their brand name to make it easier to pronounce) is all the more admirable for the fact that this was never a just-add-chicken-and-bungin-the-microwave story of business development. Kirit's father Laxmishankar Pathak, who arrived from Kenya with £5 in his pocket and started making sweets and samosas in a basement in Kentish Town in 1957, was a hard taskmaster with a habit of getting into trouble. He almost went bankrupt after burning his fingers on a dodgy distribution contract in the late 1960s, and the company really prospered only after he handed over day-to-day running to Kirit and Meena (who was a food technology graduate) in 1976. Pathak senior went on to entangle himself in fraud allegations against the former Indian prime minister N.V. Narasimha Rao, to whose personal guru Pathak claimed to have paid $100,000 to secure a newsprint supply contract which never materialised. Meanwhile Kirit fought — and is said to have settled for £9 million — a five-year legal battle with his two sisters over their claim to shares in the curry business.
Despite these ructions, the brand became a favourite with British supermarket shoppers. Stacked alongside glossier concoctions from the likes of Uncle Ben and Loyd Grossman, Patak's sauces speak of authenticity even if they are sometimes distantly related to what is actually eaten in India — and even if the temptation to mix in extra ingredients can sometimes lead to disaster. I once attempted to entertain Spectator readers by road-testing a bizarre selection of 'cook-in sauces', among them Patak's Goan Pineapple, which I turned to tasteless mud by adding uncalled-for fried onions. 'This one was a lovely shade of yellow in the jar,' I wrote. 'I was tempted to paint the kitchen with it, and I might as well have done.'
Patak's will now become part of the vast ABF brand portfolio, from Kingsmill to Twinings, and will form part of a division, chaired by Kirit, which includes 'panoriental' Blue Dragon products and other 'world food' lines. It will be a shame if this mix of big-corporate ingredients produces the sort of bland mess that I found in my cooking pot; despite the change of ownership, the Pathak family enterprise should fight to retain its distinctive, fiery flavour.
Light at the end Eurotunnel est sauve,' declared its chairman, Jacques Gounon. The great black hole is not, after all, destined to become the world's longest mushroom farm, as Christopher Fildes once suggested here that it might. An astonishing 87 per cent of its mostly French and usually rebellious shareholders have accepted a restructuring which slashes its debts from £6.2 billion to £2.8 billion and gives it a fresh corporate start as 'Groupe Eurotunnel'. Investors in the old company end up with only 13 per cent of the new one — the banks own the rest — but its prospects have been transformed by the removal of a huge burden of unpayable interest, while the competitive threat from cross-Channel ferries is these days much diminished. The 4,000 mostly British investors who were entitled to lifetime free travel (having bought into the 1987 flotation and hung on through thick and thin) have now lost that perk; but Eurotunnel says only 'a few hundred' used it anyway, and all shareholders in the new company will be entitled to 30 per cent ticket discounts, three times a year. What's more, observed Le Monde, Eurotunnel's new lease of life pomettra de quitter son statut de "penny stock" though it was certainly behaving like one last week, when the old shares shot up from 25 pence to £1 in frenzied trading before settling back to 75 pence. Rumour has it this was caused by hedge funds scrambling to cover short positions, or privateequity infrastructure funds trying to build long ones, but I trust that a few astute British holidaymakers have made a quick turn to cover the cost of their summer tunnel tickets.
£8 Enigma Sir Edward Elgar, whose 150th birthday we have all been celebrating, was perpetually worried about money and prone to complain that he was cruelly under-rewarded despite his standing as the nation's most treasured composer. In Portrait of Elgar, Michael Kennedy records that by 1904, five years after its first performance, 'Elgar reckoned the Enigma Variations had made him about £8."My lovely works do not pay for the rent of a studio,' he wrote bitterly to his friend and publisher Augustus Jaeger, going on to lament a 'whole winter wasted. . . in a hell of noise', because he could not afford anywhere quieter. It seems odd to think that the nearest things we have to national musical treasures today, Paul McCartney and Andrew Lloyd Webber, have been rewarded so far with an estimated £1.5 billion between them (not to mention, in Lloyd Webber's case, unlimited prime-time television slots for his tiresome talent contests). Mind you, Elgar was not so poor that he could not occasionally turn his nose up at subventions from patrons: he once sent back a cheque from the railway financier Sir Edgar Speyer because it was the profit from share speculations of which he disapproved. But it is nice to think that Elgar's old age was made secure by a then-substantial £7,000 legacy from another money-man, Frank Schuster, in whose house in Old Queen Street The Spectator now lives — watched over, we hope, by his benevolent ghost.
Previous page
