Mary Berry

by A. S. Dagnell

  By 1991, Mary’s career was becoming ever busier. On top of the cookery books, her TV and radio work was taking off. She was in demand all the time. As she continued to juggle her home and work life, Paul came up with a suggestion that would be potentially lucrative – to bottle the home-made sauces and salad dressings she made for their meals at home and sell them. It seemed like a brilliant idea, and none of her family could fathom why they hadn’t thought of it sooner. With her media work becoming more and more frequent and high profile, Mary was beginning to understand the power of her name. She had a legion of loyal fans who read her recipes and books, and would eagerly present her with examples of their own baking whenever she went to speak at a charity event. So it was logical to use that name to promote her businesses and reach an even wider audience. She may have struggled with maths at school, but there is no denying that Mary is a canny businesswoman, heading an empire that has spanned books, television and, later, a cookery school. Now, as well as seeing her name on the spines along a bookshelf, Paul had presented an idea that would see ‘Mary Berry’ become a familiar name in the supermarket aisles as well.

  She was a pioneer in this way. No cook had really successfully transitioned from writing cookbooks to having products bearing their name at that time. Mary really became the first cook to use her name to build a business empire that would become far bigger than her cookbooks – not that she realised this at the time.

  To begin with, however, Mary had little time to devote to this new enterprise. But Annabel, with her entrepreneurial streak, saw the opportunity to create a successful business. She said ‘[Mum] was very busy … But she thought it was a great idea and told me to go ahead.’ She seized the chance to get involved.

  There was another reason why Annabel was so enthused by the idea. She had grown up eating her mother’s sauces and dressings. She knew the products inside out and she even admitted in one interview that when she was little she couldn’t eat anything unless she had some of her mother’s trusty salad dressing on the dinner table. ‘Since I was a toddler, I have been addicted to it!’ she said. ‘I remember when I was five, we were in our VW camper in France and I wouldn’t eat any food because Mum forgot her salad dressing. She bought the ingredients and we shook it in an old bottle and I drank it.’

  Her love for her mother’s recipe was reflected in her determination and dedication to move it from their kitchen table on to the tables of millions around the country. And so Annabel set about creating the business from nothing through sheer hard graft. There were no big investors or backing from supermarket chains in those days. Selling food products off the back of a cook’s name alone was an unknown quantity and no one knew how successful it would be. So Annabel quite literally built the business with her own hands. In 1994 she saved £100 in cash, before heading to a market in the East End of London, where she bought some old-fashioned bottles with corks in. Next, she made up a batch of salad dressing. ‘I drew flowers on the labels and called it Mary Berry’s Original Family Recipe Salad Dressing,’ Annabel said. ‘Then I tied the label around the neck of the bottle with string and sticky tape!’ Then aged 21, Annabel travelled the country just as she had done with Cosmetic Candles, and started selling the sauces and dressings at up to 40 agricultural shows a year. ‘I started selling the dressing at shows, festivals … Then in 1994, the range was launched and branded “Mary Berry & Daughter”,’ recalled Annabel. Original Family Recipe Salad Dressing was quickly followed by Mary Berry’s Special Mustard Dressing.

  Demand for the products, which were then sold at Mary’s Aga Workshops, was so high that they decided they needed to expand. The company quickly progressed, landing a contract with kitchenware chain Lakeland, and soon their products were being distributed nationwide. The range was launched in supermarkets across the country, and eventually in Ireland and Germany as well – and they can still boast that they are the UK’s leading provider of gourmet salad dressings and sauces. And it didn’t stop there. Annabel continued to develop more products from her mother’s recipes, and the range today includes Caesar Dressing, three unique chutneys and an Oriental Sauce. In 2008, a fine food distributor called RH Amar bought a minority stake in the brand, whose annual sales were worth £3 million. From £100 cash, Annabel had managed to create a multi-million-pound business.

  But aside from Annabel’s hard work, it became clear that there was another reason why people were so keen to snap up Mary’s products. It was soon evident that shoppers knew they could expect the best when they saw Mary’s name on the label. And, typically, her sauces have become kitchen wonders. The dressings are mostly used for salads but are also popular as a spread for sandwiches instead of butter and as a sauce for pasta. The sauces can also be used for marinating, basting and dipping. They can even be used for adding flavour to stir-fries and glazing meat before roasting.

  And in 2011, with perfect timing for capitalising on her GBBO success, Mary Berry & Daughter launched a range of cake mixes for time-poor cooks wanting to bake quality cakes. Sold in Waitrose supermarkets, the range includes Lemon Drizzle, Luxury Carrot Cake and Double Chocolate Fudge, packaged up in a disposable tray to bake the cake in. Food snobs have sometimes suggested that using a cake mix isn’t the ‘proper way’ to go about knocking up a sweet treat in the kitchen. But Mary is defiant, and insists that it simply helps get more people baking who otherwise wouldn’t have done.

  ‘It’s all about encouraging people to have a go. You just add eggs and butter,’ Mary told the Western Morning News. ‘There is nothing nicer than a cake straight from the oven, after all.’

  With her range of branded products, Mary was in many ways a trailblazer. Many cooks have followed in her footsteps, but she was the first cook to use her name as a merchandising tool to reach as many fans as possible. Similarly, younger celebrity cooks such as Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson have endorsed kitchen equipment and ingredients in recent years as they encourage more of us to try home cooking – after all, who is better placed to recommend a product than a professional who spends hundreds of hours a year creating new recipes? But they would be hard pressed to match Mary’s record of cookbook writing. And with Mary’s pioneering business model to look at, they have been able to build their empires in a much shorter timeframe. Unlike Mary, they all seem to have an alter ego as the starting point for their brand. Jamie Oliver was initially known as the Naked Chef thanks to his cockney accent, relaxed appearance and no-nonsense attitude in the kitchen, where he’s often happy to eschew strict weights or measurements in his recipes. Meanwhile, Nigella is the self-styled Domestic Goddess, whose tendency to wear figure-hugging outfits that enhance her enviable curves while she concocts gooey desserts has been the subject of hundreds of column inches from TV reviewers. They are brands too, following in Mary’s footsteps by seeing the potential to capitalise on their name, while giving TV viewers the confidence to cook their dishes at home.

  Jamie Oliver, 40 years Mary’s junior, is following a similar template to hers in terms of mapping out his brand, with a range that includes seasonings, pasta sauces and stuffings. Revenue from his books has allowed him to provide a comfortable home life for his wife, Jools, and their young family. Where Mary had her Aga Workshops, Jamie set up Fifteen, a restaurant run by apprentices who want to move away from their difficult backgrounds through what Jamie calls ‘meaningful hard work’. Such has been the success of the London training scheme and restaurant, there are now branches of Fifteen in Cornwall and Amsterdam, too. On top of that, he’s fought for a new approach to healthy eating in schools in a campaign that took him all the way to Downing Street and eventually earned him an MBE. It was a campaign that may not have gained so much momentum if his profile wasn’t already so high, and his brand wasn’t so popular and trusted.

  Mary is a huge fan of Jamie, telling Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that she thought him ‘absolutely brilliant’ for his attempts to bring real cooking back into schools. ‘Cooking should be in school. When everybody leave
s school, whether they are boys or girls, what do they have to do in the home? Produce a meal. And they haven’t been taught to do it. I think it should be absolutely essential,’ she said. Mary admits to keeping an eye on her successors on TV: ‘I like watching Rick Stein … Jamie Oliver is lovely, too, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has made us all think about the fish we eat. But chefs like Gordon Ramsay … well, I suppose people like it, but I can do without the ranting,’ she told the Daily Mail.

  Another celebrity cook who has trodden a similar branding path as Mary is Nigella Lawson. Her success also means that her brand is instantly recognisable to any fan of her TV series, just with the utterance of her first name. Her first cookbook, How to Eat, sold 300,000 copies and became a best-seller. Two years later How to be a Domestic Goddess won her a British Book Award for Author of the Year. The literary success was accompanied by a move to the small screen, with a Channel 4 series called Nigella Bites. And a few years after launching her cookery career, in 2002, she launched her own cookware range, Living Kitchen, which is valued at £7 million. Mary has great respect for Nigella too. She told Stella magazine: ‘She’s so glamorous, with so much presence… wonderfully clever. I was in awe of her. No wonder people follow her – she’s a powerhouse.’

  Another example of a cook developing into a brand is Delia Smith, who has sold 14 million books and whose television programmes attract millions of viewers. She published her first recipe in 1969. If ever there was evidence needed to prove Delia’s personal marketing clout, her name even made it into the dictionary. Much has been written over the years about this so-called ‘Delia Effect’, in particular after the publication of her hugely successful How To Cook books, the first of which was released in 1998, and tied in with her TV series of the same name. The ‘Delia Effect’ was used to describe the phenomenon whereby supermarket shelves were suddenly emptied of particular items after they had featured on her shows. There was reportedly a 10 per cent rise in egg sales in Britain as a result of the series, for example. A struggling Lancashire firm was brought back from the brink of collapse after Delia used their omelette pan on her show and described it as a ‘little gem’. Sales went through the roof and the firm reported that they went from selling 200 pans a year to 90,000 in four months. Other ingredients that instantly went out of stock included cranberries – there was apparently a national shortage in 1995 – as well as vegetable bouillon powder, limes and kitchen kit such as pestles and mortars. Sea salt, prunes and instant mashed potato were also boosted by Delia’s recommendations. The phenomenon suggested that celebrity cooks could have a powerful influence on our eating habits, and this was not just restricted to Delia Smith.

  By 2001, after the third and final How To Cook book was published, the ‘Delia Effect’ was such a frequently used phrase that it was entered into the Collins English Dictionary. The BBC reported that the noun ‘Delia’ was included in a new edition of the dictionary after publishers had found that it had passed into everyday usage. Using a computer database of 418 million words that were spoken and written in English, pooled from various television shows, books, conversations and newspapers, a staggering 700 references to ‘Delia’ were found. Other entries in the dictionary centred around Delia’s name included a ‘Delia dish’, described as a recipe or the ‘style of cooking of British cookery writer Delia Smith’, as well as ‘Delia power’ and ‘Doing a Delia’. Speaking about her inclusion in the dictionary, Delia said at the time to Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I think it’s quite extraordinary. I’ve been doing recipes for about 30 years now and I suppose it’s because I’ve been around a long time. My husband had the best remark – he said it’s not bad for somebody who can’t spell.’

  Jeremy Butterworth, from Collins Dictionaries, said at the time: ‘Delia has become part of the language in a very special way.’

  Mary herself admits that Delia is one of a kind and has frequently referred to the fact that she is impressed with everything she has achieved. ‘I think Delia is marvellous,’ Mary told the Daily Mail. ‘Though I have the advantage of having children who say, “Mummy, you look dreadful, get your hair sorted out,” or whatever. Delia is on a pedestal, uncriticised, whereas I get the home truths.’

  Christmas food sales have been transformed by the triumvirate of Jamie, Nigella and Delia. Both Jamie and Nigella recommend goose fat to help cook roast potatoes and get them crispy, and supermarkets have all said sales of the product have experienced unprecedented growth around that time of year as a result. The Daily Telegraph reported that, at Sainsbury’s, sales of cinnamon sticks in 2009 were up 200 per cent on the same time the previous year, while sales of Marsala wine, an ingredient in Delia’s panettone trifle, increased by 300 per cent. Sales of pickled walnuts doubled after Delia coupled them with braised venison in a recipe. The newspaper reported that her recipe for chestnut cupcakes also caused shoppers to stock up on new ingredients, including crème de marrons, a sweetened chestnut purée, and chestnut flour, which hadn’t been stocked by the retailer until Delia’s series Classic Christmas. A spokesman told the newspaper: ‘Every year we get calls about the ingredients that feature in celebrity chef tips. In the past we have answered calls on goose fat, cranberries and, last year, semolina due to Nigella Lawson’s roast potato tip, with sales shooting through the roof. This year calls have led to us stocking the unusual chestnut flour in our special selection range,’ said a spokesman for the stores. And, of course, Mary would always have her own part to play in helping thousands of people around Christmas time. Her trusted Christmas recipes, books and writings in Good Food magazine would be relied upon during the festive season.

  A 2009 BBC programme, The Rise of the Superchef, discussed how celebrity chefs have changed the British attitude to food forever. One woman, Borra Garson, even set up a talent agency just to manage celebrity chefs, with Jamie Oliver one of her first clients. She oversaw the signing of his contract with Sainsbury’s, worth a reported £1 million.

  ‘When they first approached, I can’t say that he was 100 per cent convinced this would be a good move,’ she recalled. ‘We talked endlessly about it before he decided to sign on the dotted line. I remember leaving the law firm, after Jamie signed the contract, and I turned to him in the elevator and I said: “Congratulations, you’re now officially a millionaire.”’

  Merchandising also brings in the money for today’s celebrity chef. Fiona Lindsay, who runs Limelight Celebrity Management, the agency which helps Mary promote herself and her products, says the popularity of goods with a name behind them lies in that person’s reliability. ‘We’re buying trust,’ she has said. ‘We’re buying into reliability, but we’re also buying a part of the celebrity; a piece of our favourite celebrity chef.’ That reliability is what people love about Mary. In a 2010 poll to find the most trusted cookery writer, she was in the top three alongside Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith. Her fans just know that her recipes will work.

  Daughter Annabel says the success of her mother’s brand taught her the most important lesson of her life. ‘Mum worked from the bottom up, and she instilled in me a work ethic which is there to this day,’ Annabel told Yours magazine. ‘As young as five I remember accompanying her to demonstrations and helping with little jobs like grating cheese!’ The business has gone from strength to strength. Meanwhile, outside of work Annabel has continued to have a zest for life – with her mother describing her as the ‘artistic’ one of her three children. Among her hobbies are travelling, snowboarding, fishing, sailing, scuba diving, swimming and camping in a tepee, with which she has travelled the world. As the business ticked over, Annabel flew to Australia, where she worked on a fishing trawler for a brief stint, then took a diving course in the Galápagos islands, trekked in the Amazon rainforest and worked in a restaurant in Goa in western India. Among all that, she also met Dan Bosger, an experienced businessman himself, while she was travelling in Kenya. They married in 2002 before going on to give Mary three more grandchildren – Louis, Hobie and Atalanta. The g
randchildren are a constant source of delight for Mary and Paul – and a frequent source of laughter. ‘The grandchildren being naughty when they think that none of the grown-ups can see them,’ was once Mary’s reply to a question about what made her laugh.

  Annabel’s rich life experience only added to her relationship with Mary, whom she came to see as not only her mother, but also her best friend and business partner. ‘We work well together because we both like to experiment,’ said Annabel in the interview with Yours magazine. ‘We meet halfway and are not afraid to criticise each other. Mum has always been, and continues to be, a huge inspiration to me. She inspired me to try different flavours, to see what went together, to extend my palate. And I can’t believe she works more now than ever before! But it’s her fuel; it’s what she was born to do.’

  Meanwhile, Mary remains proud of her daughter and is impressed by her worldly-wise ways. ‘She’s well travelled, far more than me, so she brings lots of different foods and flavours from around the world. And she does love cooking. Isn’t that lucky for a young wife and mother? You’re going to be doing it for your whole life, so you might as well enjoy it!’

  Twenty-one years later, the business is still going strong, with Annabel also managing to balance her home life with the family business. In fact, even more of the family became involved in it. Paul became the business’s company secretary – and Annabel describes him both as a ‘very brave man’ and the ‘backbone of the company’ for taking up the role. While also running his own business, Tom took shares out in the family business. Meanwhile, Sir Robin Buchanan, chairman of Michael Page International plc, the global specialist recruitment company, became a close family friend of the Berrys. He often helps out with the direction of the business and became what Annabel described as ‘our family mentor’, often dispensing business advice and helping to give them all an outside perspective.