Vestey Holdings facts for kids
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Vestey Holdings, once known as Vestey Group and Vestey Brothers, is a family-owned company from the United Kingdom. It mainly deals with food products and services around the world. This company used to own a lot of land in other countries, especially in South America and Australia, and still owns some today.
In 1940, the Vestey family was thought to be the second richest family in Britain, right after the King. By the 1980s, Vestey Brothers was the biggest private international company and the largest seller of meat in the world.
Union International, which was once the main part of the Vestey family's business called the Union Cold Storage Company, faced financial trouble in 1995. The company has been reorganized many times since then.
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What Vestey Holdings Does Now
As of August 2020, Vestey Holdings owns several companies. These include Vestey Foods, Albion Fine Foods & FineFrance UK, Cottage Delight, Donald Russell (which are butchers), and Western Pension Solutions.
Vestey Foods, started in 1994, has branches in the UK, Benelux, France, and other parts of the world. Its main job is to find, prepare, and deliver food products. These products include meat, fish, seafood, dairy products, fruits, vegetables, and convenience foods. Vestey Foods sells its products in 70 countries to stores, restaurants, and other businesses.
The 3rd Baron Vestey (who lived from 1941 to 2021) was the great-grandson of one of the company's founders, William Vestey. He was the Chairman of the Vestey Group from 1995 until he passed away in 2021.
George Vestey has been the CEO of Vestey Holdings since 2010. His brother Robin became the Non-Executive Chairman in 2013.
In 2015, the Vestey family was still very wealthy. They were ranked 160th on the Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated fortune of £700 million. The actor Tom Hiddleston is also related to the family, being the great-great-grandson of co-founder Sir Edmund Vestey, 1st Baronet.
As of 2020, the Vestey family's farming businesses are mostly in Brazil. They are involved in both the cattle industry and growing sugar cane. They also have a large project to plant 12,000 hectares of trees. These eucalyptus trees will provide wood for the iron ore industry in Brazil. The family also owns two wine companies in Australia: The Lane Vineyard in the Adelaide Hills and Delatite Wines in Victoria, Australia.
How the Company Started
William Vestey and his younger brother Edmund started the Vestey business in 1897. It grew from their family's butchery shop in Liverpool. They were among the first to use refrigeration to keep food fresh. They opened a cold storage facility in London in 1895 and then built more stores across the UK, Russia, the Baltic nations, and Western Europe. Their company provided a lot of food to the growing population in the UK during the Industrial Revolution.
William Vestey had worked in meat processing yards in Chicago in the late 1800s. He realized that leftover meat could be used to make products that Britain needed. He and Edmund began a canning business. Later, they saw that fresh meat from the Americas could be worth even more if it could be transported without spoiling. So, they tried out a friend's cold storage. When the first ammonia-compression plant was invented, it allowed them to ship refrigerated goods, and their business grew quickly.
Growing Around the World
In the early 1900s, the company first expanded into China. There, they built a huge business for processing eggs. They even started their own shipping company, the Blue Star Line. This allowed them to deliver products to stores in the UK, USA, Europe, and South Africa for over 50 years.
By 1911, the Vestey brothers expanded into producing, processing, and distributing meat. They bought farms and meat processing plants in Venezuela, Australia, and Brazil. They also had meat plants in New Zealand and Argentina. In the UK, they bought market stalls at Smithfield Market in London and many butcher shops across the country, including the Dewhurst the Butchers chain.
In 1912, they bought the Ord River cattle station in Western Australia for £250,000. In 1914, they started the North Australia Meat Company in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, but it closed after three years. In the same year, they bought the 3,000 square kilometer Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
In 1915, the brothers moved to Buenos Aires after their request to avoid paying income tax in the UK was turned down. The family later managed their business through a trust in Paris. This allowed them to legally avoid a large amount of UK tax until the rules changed in 1991.
In 1924, Vesteys bought the Liebig Extract of Meat Company in Uruguay. They turned it into Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay, which sold Fray Bentos meat extract. This company was also known as the "Anglo Meatpacking Company."
It is said that by 1930, Vesteys had 30,000 employees worldwide and was worth £300,000.
Changes in the UK
As Vestey expanded, it bought other companies. It acquired Oxo and London's Oxo Tower when it bought the Liebig Extract of Meat Company.
In the mid-1900s, Vestey companies were very important in the UK's meat trade. They sold refrigerated and canned meats, as well as leather and other products made from animals. They saved up money and then started a "price war" with US-owned companies. This helped them largely push these competitors out of the UK market. Vestey developed the Dewhurst the Butchers chain across the country. This chain was eventually sold in 1995 because of more competition from big supermarket chains. Dewhurst was one of the first shops to use glass windows in its butcher shops. Before that, meat was often displayed openly. The business also owned the Downsway supermarket group, which had 80 stores in East Anglia before it was sold in 1978.
1966 Gurindji Strike in Australia
By the mid-1900s, the Vestey Group owned a lot of grazing land in Australia. They used many Aboriginal Australians as cheap workers. These workers were paid much less than other workers, sometimes only receiving basic food items like salt beef, bread, tobacco, flour, sugar, and tea instead of money. Samuel Vestey, 3rd Baron Vestey, through the company, owned the Wave Hill Station in Australia at that time.
In 1966, this unfair treatment, along with the fact that their land had been taken by the government earlier, led to the Gurindji strike. This event, also known as the Wave Hill walk-off, happened at Wave Hill. It was a very important moment for the land rights movement in Australia and lasted for eight years. With a lot of public support, the Whitlam government talked with Vestey. A small piece of land at Daguragu/Wattie Creek was given back to the Gurindji people. This was a first step towards giving back more land.
Shipping Business
The first two ships for the Blue Star Line were bought in 1909. The company was officially registered on July 28, 1911, in London and Liverpool.
In 1946, the Vesteys also helped start Repremar Shipping. This was a ship agency based in Uruguay. A few decades later, the Pena family took over Repremar Shipping and still runs it today.
The Blue Star Line owned many refrigerated ships (Reefers). Their business later grew to countries like Egypt and China. They carried passengers and various food items. Blue Star was finally sold to P&O Nedlloyd for £60 million in 1998. However, most of the refrigerated ships were kept by Vestey's Albion Reefers company. This company later joined with Hamburg Süd to form Star Reefers, which was sold in July 2001.
The company had to be rebuilt twice after the world wars before it was sold in 1998.
The 21st Century
By 2000, the company changed how it was organized. Instead of one big company doing everything, separate companies were created to handle farming, cold storage, and food import and distribution.
Land in Venezuela
In Venezuela in 2005, government troops took over a cattle ranch owned by the Vestey Group. This was part of a land reform program started by the Hugo Chávez government in 2001. In March 2006, the Vestey Group reached an agreement with the Venezuelan government. They gave two ranches to the state but kept ownership of eight others.
Helping Others
There was a special "Vestey Chair of Food Safety and Veterinary Public Health" at the Royal Veterinary College, which is part of the University of London. This was recorded in 1992 and 2000 as "the first post of its kind in the UK." This shows the company's support for important research.
Companies No Longer Owned
- The Blue Star Line was sold to P&O Nedlloyd for £60 million in 1998.
- Dewhurst butchers – sold to Lloyd Maunder in 2005, and then faced financial difficulties in 2006.
