Contrary to Frank Sinatra's assertion in High Society, a country estate is
something that few of us would hate. But the John Lewis Partnership's lucky
employees - I should say “partners” - don't even have to debate the issue.
They have one. It is called Leckford, the one-time Hampshire home of the
company's insect-collecting boss, John Spedan Lewis. With its farm, nursery,
golf course and water park, it is every thing Sinatra might get used to.
It is on a particularly idyllic early summer's afternoon that I arrive.
Someone who looks very like a butler, but is doubtless a “partner”, leads me
on to the Victorian mansion's terrace where, before a white linen tablecloth
and 4,000 acres, sits Mark Price, the managing director of JLP's hallowed
supermarket division, Waitrose.
Price looks as if he owns the place, which, alongside the other 38,000
partners, of course, he does. With a pastel jersey hanging casually round
his neck, a broad smile and bags of unruffled charm, Price recalls Bing
Crosby in all his casual elegance, only chubbier.
It is a rude thing to say, I know, but Price has rather brought the adjective
“chubby” down upon himself. When he became Waitrose's MD last year, after a
spell back at John Lewis, he unwisely announced to a journalist that this
marked “The Return of the Chubby Grocer”. He added, in a swipe at the “size
zero” chief executives at Sainsbury's and Tesco, that the quality of a
supermarket's food can be related directly to the size of its boss.
Ever since he married a journalist 17 years ago, Price has had a possibly
unwise faith in the profession, and the widely quoted formulation did not
appear particularly to impress Waitrose's head of communications, who
suggested, in public, that her boss go on a diet. In January, his Not So
Chubby blog was born on the Waitrose website. I wonder aloud if she was
concerned how he looked on TV - he makes appearances on shows such as The
Apprentice - or whether she was worried he was about to keel over.
“I think,” he says, “it was something about, ‘Perhaps you ought to be a little
fitter, Mark'. And my wife, who's wonderful and has never, ever complained
about my appearance, also started to say around Christmas, ‘You're going to
have to look after yourself a bit, simply because you do so many dinners and
your life's so full up'.”
The blog, which attracts some 40,000 hits a month, is a curious affair. A
third of it is a gentler form of Winner's Dinners. A third contains sound
advice from the company's nutritionist, Moira Howie. And a third is The
Secret Diary of Mark Price, aged 46. My favourite entry concerns the mild
sartorial fix he got himself into in Dubai, where Waitrose is about to open
a branch: “So I started yesterday at breakfast with Andy Street (MD, John
Lewis), Jill Little (merchandise director, John Lewis) and David Morton, our
business to business director, in tailored trousers and business shirt,
anticipating business-casual. David, however, had opted for a tie and Andy
was wearing tailored trousers and an open-neck shirt. We then spent 15
minutes discussing what the various people we were meeting would be wearing,
during which time I ate fruit and two poached eggs.”
So how much weight has he lost? “I have lost about 12-13 centimetres since
Christmas, but I've still got a lot to do.” He must have been very big
indeed. “I was large.” What did he weigh? “That's a closely guarded secret.”
But he has lost...? “Moira tells me it's 2lb for every centimetre, which is
27lb.”
Before his first stint in Waitrose, to which he transferred in 1998 after 16
years at John Lewis, he was a thin man who ran four miles a day. “Within my
first two to three years of being marketing director of Waitrose, I put on
5st. Just because of the number of things to do: dinners, constant food
events, suppliers, farmers, tastings.
“And I love it. I genuinely think I've got the best job in food retail. When
you are a kid you want to be a train driver or you want to run a sweetie
shop. Well, for me, running Waitrose, the best food retail business in the
UK, is such a thrill, such a treat. You see a new line, you go, ‘I must try
that'. I really enjoy food and I really enjoy drink, so it's a wonderful job
for me.”
But it might kill him? “Well, you've got to die someday, sooner or later. I
often joke that I don't exercise because I don't see the point of living an
extra ten years and spending it in a chair dribbling. But I don't really
mean that.”
He doesn't, because he has two daughters, Holly and Lilly, and Judith, whom he
met 20 years ago when he was working in the menswear department of John
Lewis in Southampton and she was in the linen department, filling a gap
between university and a journalism course in Florida. After their first
daughter was born, Judith abandoned her career and followed her husband's as
John Lewis sent him round the country, running things. They live in
Pangbourne, Berkshire, a 30-minute, chauffeured commute to his office in
Bracknell.
I am not helping his diet today by joining him for afternoon tea, drawn from
recipes in his new book, The Great British Picnic Guide. It contains 80
ideas, some a little obvious (“Split the baguettes in half horizontally and
fill with the sausages and onions”), some more trouble than they are worth
(“poach the salmon up to 24 hours before it is needed”) but mostly do-able
and different. Their ingredients, naturally, are available from Waitrose.
In his introduction, he dreamily recalls the “exciting and glorious” picnics
of his childhood. Its nannyish reasonableness catches his voice well. He is
a softly spoken smoothy, and he knows it. Three times he congratulates me on
asking “a good question”, a “really good question” and a “really fantastic
question”, a form of flattery I have previously received only from senior
members of the police force, who have presumably been taught it.
Our picnic is delicious but, then, the quality of the chain's mostly British,
largely organic food is not in question. The complaint you hear is that you
need to take out a mortgage to shop at the place. Does that mean, I ask,
that Waitrose is too expensive or other supermarkets' food too cheap? “Very
good question. Our proposition quite simply is that if you want to buy any
branded lines, Andrex or whatever, you'll pay no more or you'll probably pay
the same as you'll pay in Tesco and Sainsbury's. If you want great quality,
fresh food you'll pay 15 per cent less than M&S but you are going to get
M&S quality and better. Now we could sell cheap food. We could sell
£1.99 chickens.”
Does he take the Jamie Oliver/Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall line on the £1.99
chicken, that it's morally wrong to sell them? “I don't think I'd want to
make it a moral issue. I think that [the Tesco boss, Terry] Leahy's got a
very interesting argument that the £1.99 chicken allows people to eat
chicken who might not otherwise be able to afford to do so. But I think that
for Waitrose and our customers we would want to sell chickens that were of
the highest standard, with the best welfare standards, that taste great.”
Price gives me a history lesson. John Lewis opened John Lewis in Oxford Street
in 1864 and had two sons, Spedan and Oswald, who went into the business.
Spedan ran the Oxford Street branch, but in 1909 fell off his horse and had
to convalesce for two years. He began to visit staff who were also off sick
and was appalled at their living conditions. He also discovered that his pay
and his father's and brother's added up to more than everyone else's put
together.
“The story goes that either because of a philanthropic point of view or
because of the fear about what socialism might do, he decided to give the
business away to the people who worked in it. So he set up a trust in 1929,
an irrevocable trust, whereby all the shares were held for the benefit of
all the people who work in the business. So we share the benefits of
ownership, we all get a bonus at the end of the year, and everybody can come
and stay in our country houses or go fishing on the Test.”
In the interests of accuracy, I should say that Longstock House itself has
only four rooms open to only the 50 senior partners, but there is a mansion
on the other side of the river, a camp with log cabins, and a castle in
Dorset, open to all.
Fortunately, there is a hedonistic streak - no, not a streak, a huge swathe -
to Price, which makes him easier to like than a true saint would be. He
admits that when he graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in
archaeology, he fancied being a professional golfer or a marine
archaeologist, and even applied for a job as a holiday tester for Thomsons.
It was his father, a Crewe food wholesaler, who told him to find a proper
job. M&S and JLP both wanted him. “I like to say now that I chose John
Lewis because of the different operating model and the quality of the people
who work in the business. The real truth was because we owned two golf
courses and five ocean-going yachts. I thought I'd go for it.”
Yet no arcadia would be complete without its snake and, as we look out over
it, I ask what Leckford's is, what worm of worry keeps him awake at night.
It seems there are two. The first is the fear, he thinks unjustified, that
he will not be able to expand the business fast enough and keep up with his
bigger rivals with their “infinitely more financial muscle”.
And the second worry? “It sounds a very grand pull, but it's how we're going
to feed the world in the future. In 1900 there were 1.5 billion people in
the world, in 2000 there were 6 billion, but 2050 there will be 9.5 billion.
David King, the Government's chief scientist, said that because of global
warming and because of urbanisation, half the agricultural land will be out
of use by 2050 and yields, having doubled over the past 25 years, have now
levelled off, so we're not getting more out of our farmland.”
That's enough to worry anyone. “It is. I think, philosophically, that the way
we manage food and the relationship people have with food is going to have
to change. Twenty-five years ago, 25 per cent of disposable income went on
food. It's now 9 per cent. I don't think that's a sustainable position. I
think people will have to start spending more on food as a proportion of
their total disposable income.”
Well, at least, I think to myself, Waitrose shoppers will be used to that
sacrifice. But Price is totally serious. The years ahead will be no picnic.
The Great British Picnic Guide, Ebury, £14.99
Have to agree with the previous contribution. Watrose have so-so quality, grossly overpriced fresh produce and a bad attitude, plus are one of the worst offenders in the 'food miles' stakes. I source my stuff from local shops/markets, and use Sainsburys as my grude supermarket only when I have to.
tom knight, Cheddar, Somerset
As a discerning buyer of food and having the luxury of all the major supermarkets on my doorstep (Gatwick), I've found Morrisons beats Waitrose hands down on quality of meats, fish, own brand stuff, and efficiency of staff. Shopping at Waitrose I invariably end up paying 35% more for less quality.
Raymog, Forest Row, East Sussex