If the Belgians had been a little more understanding about his margarine,
James Averdieck would not today be Britain's unchallenged chocolate pudding
king.
He founded Gü in 2003, after an unsuccessful posting to the Belgian capital.
At the time he was working for St Ivel, the food manufacturer.
“I was sent to Brussels to launch Utterly Butterly,” he says. I'm sorry? “A
brand called Utterly Butterly.” Clearly he expects me to have heard of it.
“It was all the most difficult thing you can imagine. Unilever controlled 80
per cent of the market. The market itself wasn't growing, it was
contracting. There was no interest in a new brand of margarine. Margarine
isn't something people talk about.
“Our final problem was that there wasn't any butter in Utterly Butterly. I had
problems with the brand name.”
Here you could get away with it. But Belgian law took an old-fashioned view
that anything named butter should contain ... well, butter. Likewise
anything named Butterly.
Averdieck had already decided that working for a large branded food group was
not for him. “I had a lot of time in Brussels and I was thinking what would
work,” he says. “Just at the end of the road from my office was this
fantastic patisserie. I'm a chocoholic, always have been.” He liked the
soufflés, tarts and mousses. “I thought, if I could just copy that and wrap
it up in a brand, that would make a great business.”
He had already met the owner of the North London-based Rensow Patisserie,
which supplied airlines with delicacies and was suffering in the post-9/11
downturn, at a trade fair. They agreed to put £65,000 into the venture, and
Rensow's resident patisserie chef created a chocolate soufflé. Rensow now
makes the range; Averdieck and Gü handle product development, logistics and
distribution.
They needed a brand. They approached a marketing agency, Big Fish, in Chelsea,
and handed over the product, in a glass ramekin dish.
“I gave them a very open brief,” recalls Averdieck. A week later he was in the
agency's offices, being shown a handful of existing European brands on an
AppleMac, one of them a chocolate soufflé wrapped in exotic dark packaging
and named Gü.
It was just what he wanted, and Averdieck realised that someone had got there
first. Then he was let into the secret. The whole thing was a fake. The
brand didn't exist — yet.
There was one more test. He produced a few cardboard mock-ups and sneaked them
on to the shelves in a supermarket on the Kings Road — Waitrose, though the
firm is not keen this fact be publicised for fear of imitators. “I said,
I'll give it ten minutes and see if anyone would buy it. Someone literally
picked it up five minutes later. I said to her, there's nothing in there,
but thank you very much. I'm going to launch this brand.”
In May 2003, he was on the phone to Sainsbury's and Waitrose. “Businesses
change. Although I had worked in supermarkets before I didn't have an
address book of existing buyers. I found out who they were and phoned them
like a telesales guy determined to get an appointment.”
Supermarkets are deluged by applications from inventors of new lines. “The
stock response is, send them in and we'll have a look. I wasn't going to do
that. You've got to sell your products.”
The two chains agreed to try the product. One advantage, he says, is that
there is no obvious competitor. Other desserts tend to be more downmarket
and produced by huge multinationals.
Gü is a premium product, initially aimed at young, prosperous, time-poor
consumers. It arrives in a glass container. “This has that added advantage
that if you are the cook, you can cheat.”
There are at present 25 lines, a third of them the Frü fruits dessert range.
Averdieck employs 24 people in a cluttered basement studio in a rabbit
warren of a media centre in Shepherd's Bush, West London. Endemol, maker of
Big Brother, has the top two floors. Staff of the various companies there,
almost all in their twenties, convene in the centre of the building, a
raffish bar that resembles nothing so much as a student union.
Like Häagen-Dazs, the Gü name means nothing in any known language but manages
to hint at continental sophistication. It ships 20 per cent of its output to
France, a difficult market for a British food brand to crack. It even does
well in Belgium.
Paradoxically, the small portion sizes, two helpings costing £3, are another
advantage. This is for people who do not want to put on the pounds. The
chocolate is of the highest quality. There is a quirky website full of
competitions and pictures of people smeared with chocolate, aimed at
attracting just the right type of young, media-savvy consumer.
“It makes a promise and it keeps a promise. That's the basis of brand
loyalty,” says Averdieck, betraying his past as a marketing man. “I know
that sounds cheesy but that's basically what we do. In my view so many
premium or expensive products look very good but there's a part of it that
doesn't quite add up. I think some premium food doesn't deliver against what
it costs.
“Our products are relatively expensive but in the context of your food budget
... £1.50 each, that's the same price as a Zone 1 Tube ticket.”
But to launch and grow a premium product in this market? “Last week we had
record sales. That was in a fairly turbulent market.” Providing people have
jobs, he believes, there will be money for indulgences such as chocolate
puds.
Gü will shortly move into pure confectionery and hot drinking chocolate. He
also thinks there are still about 30per cent of shops in the UK where he
could be represented. But the danger must be that the big grocers such as
Waitrose will appreciate the attractions of the market and undercut Gü with
their own product.
“This stuff isn't easy to make, believe me, Martin” — he has the salesman's
habit of regularly dropping first names into conversation. “We're the market
leader in this area.
“The great thing about confectionery is that it's a bit like the wine counter.
People want choice. If you go to buy laundry powder, you don't want that
much choice. The most interesting chocolate shops are the ones that stock
lots of types of chocolate.”
Business is in Averdieck's blood. His father ran his own Yorkshire textiles
company. At Durham University, where he read economics, he sold shoes and
shirts to his fellow students. After college he went to work for Arthur D
Little, the US management consultant. “In the late 1980s, if you were going
for a top job, you would go into the City — and I was never interested in
the City — or consulting, which was still a job that opened up lots of
avenues. It was good training, and it was pretty well paid.”
A spell at Safeway, though unrewarding in every other way, introduced him to
retailing and packaged goods, and then came St Ivel. Now 42, he was 36 when
he founded Gü, and frets that this was a little late in life to launch as an
entrepreneur. “If I was doing it again, I wouldn't have spent so long.”
CV
Born: Yorkshire, 1965.
Educated: Uppingham; Durham University.
1988 - 90: business analyst, Arthur D Little.
1990 - 94: Marketing manager, Safeway.
1994 - 2002: Various roles, Uniq (formerly St Ivel).
2003 - Managing director, Gü Chocolate Puds.
