When Peter Fowler decided the time was right to buy his own company, as you would expect, he went about it in the right manner. He consulted his solicitor and paid £1,100 for the obligatory 26-page contract to be drawn up, before taking that to the vendor for his agreement.
That vendor, though, was Covent Garden veteran Lenny Cooper, who was retiring - at least in one sense of the word - and selling Fowler his C&C business in Nine Elms. “Lenny took one look at the contract and said ‘you know what you can do with that?’,” says Fowler. “He took a blank sheet of paper and wrote - ‘if at any time, you fail to pay me my money by mid-morning every Saturday, the company reverts to my name’. I must have been mad, but I signed it.”
He never did miss a Saturday payment either, even when that meant, as it often did in the early days, that he and his fellow director to this day Michael Roberts went home without their pay packets. “Mick would ask me how we would pay everyone and I’d say ‘I’ll sort it out’. To be fair to him, he never complained when he found out it was us who had to explain to our families why we were going home with no money at the end of the week!”
Fowler was well versed in the wholesale market approach to doing business, having begun his career boiling beetroot having followed his father into old Covent Garden in 1963. He had spent the last 19 of those years as a salesman for Lyons & Dean, latterly building up a reputation as one of the pre-eminent exotics salesmen on the market and, by dint of the market’s still lofty status in UK wholesale affairs, the country.
The Fruit Trades Journal, as FPJ was known on June 6, 1986, dutifully recorded the purchase and the premises were located at A60-62 in the market. The C&C of Lenny Cooper was, in fact, a soft-fruit and topfruit specialist. “I bought the premises and the name really,” says Fowler. “We shifted the last bits of fruit on the first day and started out in business as an exotics specialist. Exotics, of course, was an entirely different concept then and the avenues of supply were pretty short.” The products were different too - no doubt C&C’s regular 20 trays of kiwifruit a week represented the height of exotic sophistication in the late 1980s.
“Demand changed for all sorts of reasons, and every time a customer asked for a new product, we’d go out and find it, even if it was just a couple of boxes. We’d get on the phone to our suppliers in Kenya, or wherever, and find out what the product was and where we could get it from to improve our mental database. Invariably, the name would be wrong - or at least the English version, which no-one in the producing country had heard of.
“Products that are commonplace today, like chillies and pitahaya, were unheard of. I remember when the first bell chillies came in and, as always, I wanted to try the gear before we sold it. I took one bite and then had my head under the tap for 20 minutes! But getting hold of those new products made a huge difference to our business.”
After a reshuffle, the company moved to C25, before buying more space to open C&C Fruit Co (Growers Pavilion). The purchase of Gilgrove a decade ago increased capacity still further - and C&C Group firms now occupy eight units at Nine Elms.
It is indicative of the weight and regularity of acquisitive activity undertaken in the preceding years that Fowler says C&C has made “about 16” purchases since its inception. As well as the Nine Elms presence, the group now comprises C&C Fruit Co, which opened for business in New Spitalfields on the day the new market was unveiled and is now run by James Leonard, Gilgrove (Spitalfields), run by Danny Killington, C&C Fruit (Borough), Elsey & Bent, brought into the fold five years ago at Borough, and Oranfresh UK, which sells orange juicing and coffee machines on licence from Italian company Agroindustry Advanced Technology (see box).
Other companies have come and gone - most notably Specialist Food Supplies, a catering specialist established at the beginning of the 1990s and sold for a “decent profit” some years down the road. And on many occasions, a cash injection from C&C has aided and abetted the formation and successful establishment of fruit and veg firms in the UK and overseas.
Fowler’s approach is to take a hands-on role in all new ventures, for instance at Spitalfields, where he bought out a firm in the old market and sat on it for a year to assure himself of a place in the new market. “Spitalfields was hard work at first,” he says. “Myself and my [eldest son] Damian were there on the first day and we didn’t know a single customer. But through sheer hard work we built the business up and eventually bought the company next door and also African European.”
Damian now heads up group operations, based at Gilgrove in Covent Garden. The board of directors also includes Peter’s wife Christine, Robert and Paul Ashley. Damian’s sister Kelly is accountant and retailer at Elsey & Bent and his brother Lawrence heads up operations at Elsey & Bent. “C&C remains a family firm in the real sense of the words - made up of other families who have made the market their livelihood,” says Damian. “We have several instances of fathers and sons, uncles and nephews working in the group. Continuity is something we value. In my family we’re looking back at three generations of Fowlers working in the industry, and although my son Finlay is a bit too young to enlist, at just eight months, I’d like to think he’ll be part of C&C’s future.
“We take great pride in the reputation that Peter has built up for the company through the years. Reputation is worth far more than money in the bank. C&C has always been scrupulous in reinvesting in the business to help it grow and provide a safe future for not only our family, but the many families whose lives are linked with C&C.”
Also an integral part of the C&C “family”, many of the suppliers from day one remain. Peter Fowler is one of, if not the longest-serving, Carmel salesman in the country, as the series of Carmel Millionnaire Club plaques on his office would testify. And in the exotics arena, companies such as Wealmoor, Konyn’s, JO Sims and several Dutch exporters have been steadfast colleagues as C&C grew through the wholesale and catering ranks. “It was a very different world when we set up the company,” says Fowler. “Loyalty was a big factor and even if your suppliers followed you, they would remain suppliers to your old firm, which was perfectly reasonable. As long as you paid, you would have their support, but it made for a very competitive environment.”
During the trip down the Thames held on June 2 to celebrate the company’s “coming of age”, Peter Fowler’s ‘modesty’ and ‘integrity’ were to the forefront, both in the speeches and in the words of others amongst the 250 guests. “A few of the companies we’ve had have had to close. It’s been an unfortunate element of the trade in the last 15 years. But every time we’ve closed a firm, every single person got paid - out of my own pocket when necessary. If I owe someone money, I pay them,” says Fowler.
When asked what has propelled C&C to the upper echelons of the wholesale trade in London, the Fowlers have a refreshingly simple answer. “It’s a well-known fact that people don’t like change and the wholesale business has often suffered from people’s fear of taking risks,” Peter says. Damian adds: “But we’ve always felt that you must change, and to stay ahead, you have to implement change before everyone else does it. I think we’ve adapted as the business has evolved, the majority of our customers now are catering suppliers and that’s because we’ve tailored our business to our major customer base.”
The company was one of the first on the market to offer its wares in split pallets and packages. “No-one used to serve anyone anything less than five to 10 packages because they didn’t see it as worthwhile,” says Peter. “We recognised the value in the old adage from small acorns grow large trees, and the catering customers in particular were not looking for big volumes.”
Damian adds: “You never know who could be walking across the front of your stand, and unless you’re keeping ahead of the market trends, there are plenty of other stands they can go to. The first person to do something new almost invariably ends up with the largest portion of that market.”
Peter presents the policy of reinvesting 60-65 per cent of profits as “covering yourself for a rainy day”, which makes sense in the often perilous world of wholesale, but also reflects the over-riding company strategy. “We’ve seen so many instances of a company going down here and taking two or three more with it,” says Peter. “They can’t always help it, but you have to protect yourself against it. It’s all very well having a fleet of cars and a few houses, but that is all money that isn’t going back into the business.”
The instances of companies coming to their natural end are likely to increase too, Damian adds. “There are a number of owner-driven businesses that are finding it harder and harder to find young staff to come into the industry. With no management back up, the owners find themselves working six days a week at least, with no holidays, just to keep the company going. It takes its toll and three firms have come to an end like that in the last 18 months. I think we’ll see a lot more changes in the next few years in the Garden, particularly when the leases expire in 2010. If you’re 64 years of age, it’s unlikely, you’ll want to take another 10-year lease - but you might not want to retire, so you’d be looking for investment to ensure your short-term future.”
Peter believes he has spotted a consumer trend in London of moving towards the greengrocers and away from the supermarkets, driven in part by the changing demographic of the population in the capital, but also by a desire for something different. “This presents us with some interesting challenges,” he says. “We have to be far more dedicated to our customers as an industry, dovetailing what they need with what we offer. The quality of fruit in general has increased significantly in the last decade, but customers want traceability to give them the confidence that it will perform after they’ve bought it. If they get to the kitchen and the product falls down, they haven’t got time to change it.”
Damian says that the forward-thinking attitude still predominates within C&C, giving it the financial capacity to benefit from this evolutionary process. “We have no intention of resting on our laurels. We will be creating new opportunities, exploring new ideas and meeting the challenges of a continually evolving business, including purchasing companies when they can add something to our business. I’m looking forward to building on our solid foundations and guiding this business into its next 21 years, developing plans for a profitable future.
“I’m proud to be part of our industry and immensely proud to be part of a modern family business, which puts old-fashioned principles and values at its heart.”
JUICE AND COFFEE ADDED TO C&C MIX
For C&C, the decision to open Oranfresh, the UK and Ireland arm of Sicilian-based juice machine manufacturer AAT, was certainly a departure, although it has obvious synergies with the day-to-day business.
The Italian machines are competing against two main Spanish competitors and employ a novel way of squeezing juice in a drum, which takes the peel out of the equation and therefore removes the oil content from the final product. “It’s a unique process and the machines can squeeze up to 70 litres an hour,” says Paul Ashley. “AAT had enjoyed significant success elsewhere with the machines, but not really taken off in the UK.”
C&C provides a consignment of oranges with each purchase, which in real terms reduces the expenditure for the customer to virtually zero. “When we approached AAT, it was obviously attractive that we were also able to supply the fruit to potential customers. It is a slow-burn area, though, and you have to be prepared to put a lot of time into each sale. But it is an attractive product for juice bars, coffee bars and retailers. We are also close to tying up our first deal with a supermarket,” Ashley says.
There are obvious opportunities in the schools market too, and Ashley says the venture could in fact prove very beneficial to the citrus sector. “It is a big opportunity for instance, for our customers - when we install a new machine on one of their customers’ premises, they will need to buy more fruit.”
On the back of the Oranfresh business, a deal has also recently been struck with French coffee machine manufacturer Unic, which sees the C&C Group become the exclusive distributor of the trendy Unic portfolio in the UK.
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