Roger McKechnie launched his first entrepreneurial venture after being offered
a job he didn’t want. He had spent much of his early career working his way
up from marketing manager to chief executive of Smith’s Crisps, but he left
when the parent company United Biscuits wanted him to move to southern
England.
Born and educated in Northumberland, McKechnie was reluctant to go. “It meant
moving down south where houses were expensive and schools were ridiculous,”
he said. “I was told that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have a job in six months.”
Instead, McKechnie stayed closer to home and founded Derwent Valley Foods,
which made the Phileas Fogg tortilla chips. Ten years later he sold the
company to United Biscuits for £24m.
“It was the right time to sell it,” he said. “Once it got to the point where I
was employing huge numbers of people and there were politics and
organisational issues, I started to lose interest. I’m more of a creative
independent.”
On a whim, McKechnie bought a derelict country house in the Lake District and
converted it into a boutique hotel, the Samling, which luxury travel
magazine Condé Nast Traveller soon listed as one of the world’s top 100.
“The point of difference was that it was just small enough to take it in its
entirety,” said McKechnie. “Very quickly people like Nicole Kidman and Tom
Cruise picked us up. The spin-off from that was fantastic.”
Ill-health led McKechnie to sell the hotel in 1999 and return to the food
industry. He became a marketing consultant to Northumbria Larder, a group of
60 meat, cheese and game producers.
Keen to see the group grow, McKechnie suggested they combine their products
and produce ready meals. However, research showed that the market was
dominated by big retailers, such as Marks & Spencer and Tesco.
Similarly, the frozen-food market was the province of established names and
required an infrastructure of storage freezers and a frozen-food
distribution network that would be too expensive for small-scale producers
to establish. “The only way I could think of to do it differently would be
to produce meals that could be stored at room temperature — but nobody knew
how to do it,” said McKechnie.
While on holiday in Spain, he stumbled on the solution. In a nearby shop, he
noticed packaged ready meals sitting by a newspaper stand in 30C heat. “I
thought, how does that work? So I bought the whole range and took them back
to England thinking if we could reproduce this packaging we could be on to
something,” he said.
After learning how to make the packaging at an exhibition, McKechnie jotted
down a business plan on the back of a cigarette packet and gathered three
former colleagues from Phileas Fogg to begin experimenting with slow-cooked
recipes using fresh produce from Northumbria Larder.
The final step was to find a way to pressure-cook the meals to give them a
long shelf-life. McKechnie heard about a method used in Italy to preserve
tuna and tomatoes and got in touch with an academic, Professor Miglioni, the
world expert in the technique.
McKechnie loaded his 4x4 with rabbit, venison, sausages, cheese and smoked
haddock packed in ice and drove from County Durham to Parma in Italy to see
if the professor could help. “I had all these peculiar British ingredients
with me which we knew we could cook in a slow-cooker.
“I asked the professor if he thought they would work in a pressure-cooker and
he said he didn’t know. So we sat in a lab in the University of Parma and
cooked them up and they all worked virtually first time.”
His experimentation complete, McKechnie invested £500,000 from his own savings
and a government grant and set up the company, which he called Tanfield. He
bought a thermal processing machine from Italy, leased a factory in Consett
and began marketing the meals.
Shortly after launching them, branded Look What We Found, in March 2005,
McKechnie attended the International Food Exhibition, where his long-life
meals drew interest from Waitrose, M&S and Virgin Atlantic. “We were
effectively up and running after that exhibition,” he said.
However, in comparison with the launch of his Phileas Fogg snacks, McKechnie
has found progress slow — despite sales of just over £1m in the first year
of trading. The reason, he said, was that it had been hard to raise capital.
The Look What We Found brand is in all big supermarkets and more than 400
delis. Turnover has reached £6m — a figure the firm hopes to double within
18 months.
McKechnie, 67, puts the secret of his success down to his creativity. “It’s
the thing that marks me out,” he said. “I believe creativity can make up for
other shortcomings.”
He advises other entrepreneurs to look for something that makes their product
stand out from the rest of the market. “You have to find a point of
difference,” he said. “My mantra is: do it differently, do it better and,
when you’ve done it, flaunt it.”
