Ethical Partners

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Do we really care about Tesco's ethics? Are they bully boys looking for desperate partners who would sway toward the brand dominating the market place and at the expense of local businessmen? I read this on the Time online and drew several comparisons of my own relating to the current Stadium debate, a debate in which Tesco's themselves seem to have stayed extremely quiet... Just wait till they get the no vote.

Article from Times online:

Ask William Chase why 500,000 bags of his Tyrrells crisps are sold every week and he'll tell you it's because customers like a company with a good story. Chase's rise, fall and rise wouldn't make a bad plot line for The Archers parts of his story mirror that of young Tom Archer. To summarise: he took on the family farm in Herefordshire aged just 19, and ran it for eight years before debt and badly judged deals with the supermarkets took him under. After bankruptcy, he spent a quiet decade toiling as a potato trader, only to have a eureka moment at the age of 40 crisps. Not the mingy, artificial kind that Jamie Oliver might campaign against, but posh, "sustainable" crisps, whose journey from potato field to small local shop, or upmarket independent store, could be fondly imagined as we washed them down with a nice merlot. It worked so much so that last year Chase had to fight off Tesco, who tried to sell Tyrrells products sourced on the "grey market" (bought from a third party, without the manufacturer's permission). There was a David-and-Goliath skirmish which ended with Tesco backing down. Chase is the only British crisp maker to carry out the process from seed to bag even though he tells me it would be more profitable to buy his potatoes elsewhere. "We keep the farm going because it's part of the story," he says. It helps that growing potatoes is Chase's passion: "I'd hate to be stuck inside all day." The crisps, made from root vegetables as well as potatoes, are hand-fried in small batches. "In most crisp factories starch is washed out of potatoes so they don't stick together when you fry them. But this also removes the flavour," says Chase. "Here we leave it in and have a chap with a big rake separating them."

He admits that it is the dream of many small producers to be taken up by a supermarket such as Tesco, which has 31 per cent of the UK grocery market: "It was a tough decision saying no. When you're offered the chance to expand a business that you've raised from nothing, your instinct is the opposite. But I knew going into the mass market would take the edge off the brand," he says. "I'd lose my major suppliers such as Selfridges; and looking back at how Tesco treated me after I politely declined, I know I did the right thing." Chase says that going bankrupt was the making of him. "It makes you braver. I know how failure tastes and it's not the end of the world," he says. Would he consider selling up as Green & Blacks have to Cadbury Schweppes and Body Shop to L'Oreal? "Not yet. I'd rather find ways of expanding the brand without it losing its pedigree." Next up, Tyrrells vodka. Hitting shelves this June, made from, obviously, the finest Herefordshire spuds. www.tyrrellspotatochips.co.uk
David O'Brien, Southend on Sea     Posted 08/08/2007 at 20:36:23

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