The Sweet Smell of Bread

In 1933 a little-known Canadian baker named Garfield Weston journeyed down to Wall Street armed with an idea and $10,000. The $10,000 he paid to a Wall Street tipster to get him just five minutes with some of the cash-heavy New York financiers who had made a killing by selling short in the Great Crash. Then, to five of Wall Street's biggest "bears," including Bernard E. ("Sell 'Em Ben") Smith, Weston offered his idea: buy up British bakeries at Depression prices to provide a readymade outlet for Canada's vast supplies of cheap wheat. So convincingly did he argue that the five put up $2,000,000 to back his venture.

Since then, capitalizing on the same combination of audacity, ingenuity and persuasiveness, slim, strong-minded Garfield Weston, 64, has built the biggest business ever fashioned by a Canadian--a food-processing and retailing empire that reaches into nine countries on four continents and last year ran up sales of $3.4 billion. The world's biggest baker and one of its three biggest grocers,* Weston has 400 supermarkets in Europe alone. Among his holdings: the U.S.'s National Tea Co., Canada's Loblaw Groceterias, Australia's Tip Top Bakeries, Britain's huge (more than 200 subsidiaries) Associated British Foods Ltd. and London's staid old Fortnum & Mason store in Piccadilly, where upper-class Britons have bought their Yorkshire pies and potted shrimp since 1710.

Tied Accounts. Weston was born "to the smell of bread" in an apartment over his father's bakery in Toronto. As a World War I private in the Canadian cavalry, he used his leaves to haunt the bread and biscuit factories of Britain. When he returned to Canada, he got his father to import some of the machines and recipes he had learned about. By the time the elder Weston died in 1924, the family business was already growing rapidly. But Garfield Weston was not satisfied. Said he: "I'm not going to build a costly monument to my father. I'm going to make his name known round the world."

With his arrival in Britain in the '30s, he began to do just that. With a simple, almost bulldozing directness, he set about buying up bakeries. Picking sites carefully, Weston amassed a storehouse of knowledge about each owner--his family, hobbies and idiosyncrasies--before opening negotiations to buy. His friends liked to say: "Weston can't go out in the afternoon without coming home with a couple of bakeries in his pocket." Weston never lost sight of his original goal--more outlets for Canadian wheat. Says he: "I'm not an intellectual, and my success has not been due to brilliance but to sticking to an idea like a dog to a bone."

There was more to it than that. With a growing string of bakeries, Weston began buying up flour mills to supply them, then added supermarkets to sell his bakery products. Today in Britain his bakeries use every pound of flour produced by his mills, and Weston supermarkets sell 58% of his bakery goods. Because his operations provided a ready market for paper packaging, he bought up two Canadian paper companies. "All my life," he says, "I've been looking for tied accounts--the sort you don't have to sell all over again each day."

Bucking the Market. As his empire grew, so did Weston's reputation as a fearsome international competitor. In 1958, when word leaked out that he had his eye on Germany, 24,000 West German grocers petitioned the Adenauer government to keep him out. Hustling over to Bonn, Weston put his case to Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard. "You need a man like me,'' Weston told him. "I'm a specialist in keeping down the cost of living." Erhard gave Weston the go-ahead--and a signed copy of the latest Erhard opus, Prosperity Through Competition. Within two years, Weston had opened 103 supermarkets in Germany.

Despite his operations in Germany and France, Weston is a passionate opponent of British entry into the Common Market. A superpatriotic Canadian--though London has been his headquarters for 24 years, he still spends a part of every year in Canada--Weston argues that joining the Common Market would pull down British living standards and, more important, break the ties that link the Commonwealth nations. ("Why are you British deserting us?" he once asked Britain's Queen Mother.) Extension of Common Market tariff walls to Britain would probably force his British bakeries to buy French instead of Canadian wheat.

Ensuring the Succession. Throughout his business life, Weston has reserved two full days a week for his sizable family--six daughters and three sons, two of whom now work in Weston enterprises in Australia and Ireland. He has also made sure that control of his business will pass to his children. To do so, he has limited his family's private fortune to an estimated $400 million and put the bulk of the Weston business ventures under the control of two family-run charitable foundations, one for North America and one for the sterling area. Thus most of the Weston holdings will escape inheritance tax. Wreston is no man to talk retirement. "Why," he booms, "in five years' time we'll hit $4 billion a year."

* The other two: A. & P. and Safeway Stores.

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