The voice of business in the Tees region | 109
The Business Buzz
With award-winning
writer Harry Pearson
WHAT NEXT? THE QUORNISH PASTY?
F
or a long while I held the opinion
that the toughest job in the history
of business would have been
working as financial advisor to 1950s’
middleweight boxing genius Sugar Ray
Robinson.
Encouraging fiscal prudence in a man
who not only has a hairdresser on standby
24 hours a day but also employs a bloke
full-time just to whistle during his training
sessions was clearly a monstrous task –
and when your client is more than happy to
step in the ring and trade punches with Jake
“The Raging Bull” La Motta, there’s little
hope that you can simply shout at him till he
does as he’s told either.
My opinion on this topic changed one
night in 1993 when dimple-chinned England
rugby union captain and Sloane Ranger
to royalty Will Carling popped up on my
television screen and tried to persuade
me to make a nourishing pasta sauce out
of what I soon learned was a soil-dwelling
mould named fusarium venenatum.
I mean, even trying to talk The Sugarman
into maybe, say, cutting back on the number
of dancing animals in his entourage and
putting the money into something nice and
safe like an ISA seemed simple compared
to convincing a British public – who were
only just getting the hang of spaghetti that
didn’t come in tins – to tuck into grub that
had the words “a fungal biomass for human
consumption” somewhere in its product
description.
Yet some brave, bold and ingenious
person took on the task and did such
a brilliant job of it that these days
this microfungus, discovered in the
Thames Valley, named after a village in
Leicestershire and developed by white-
coated boffins from ICI, is one of Teesside’s
most globally renowned products – Quorn.
Now owned by Philippines’ food giants
Monde Nissin, Quorn’s HQ is in Stokesley
and its main UK factory in Billingham. The
latter is now the biggest meat-alternative
production facility in the world, knocks out
the vegetarian equivalent of the meat of
1,600 cows each week and provides the
filling for every London-based hipster’s
favourite “down with the workers”
lunchtime snack – the Greggs’ vegan
sausage roll. (Personally, I’d like to see
them take it to the next level and produce a
Quornish pasty.)
Having grown up in the 1960s – with an
aversion to bone, gristle and those tubes
you used to get in liver – when the only
meat-alternative was an empty space on
your plate, I can’t help thinking this is a
situation to be welcomed.
Quorn is by no means Teesside’s only
major link in the food chain, either.
KP Snacks (the KP stands for Kenyon
Produce, nothing to do with peanuts –
although they are the world’s biggest buyer
of them) recently celebrated 50 years in
the region by opening a new £6m plant in
Billingham. It’s the home to McCoy’s, Pom-
Bear, Discos and Hula Hoops (and while
we’re on the Hula Hoops topic – how about
bringing back prawn cocktail flavour?).
And as we know from the recent visit
of our esteemed PM, Tetley now make
all their UK and Canadian tea products –
and they are the biggest tea firm in both
nations – in Eaglescliffe. Tetley was started
in Huddersfield by two brothers who began
selling salt off the back of a horse and now
belongs to Tata Global Beverages, part of
the Tata Group that once owned the blast
furnace in Redcar.
But then massive consortiums are a
bit random like that. For a brief while in
the 1980s I worked for the same global
consortium as my father – Trafalgar House.
He built the Humber Bridge and I made
dainty snacks at the Ritz Hotel. No Quorn
was involved at that point. But these days…