Devizes told how Loyd grossed a food fortune (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Devizes told how Loyd grossed a food fortune

7:00am Sunday 4th July 2010 in Local By Lewis Cowen

Former TV presenter Loyd Grossman told an audience in Devizes how a rumbling stomach led to a £65million-a-year pasta sauce business.

Mr Grossman is probably as well known now for his bottled sauces as he is for hosting the original Masterchef and the celebrity show Through the Keyhole.

“I think about eating all the time,” he told a business lunch in the Bear Hotel on Friday, hosted by Claire Perry MP.

It all started for him one night in the early 1990s.

“I came home and couldn’t find a thing to eat apart from some pasta and had to go to all the trouble of making a sauce, the last thing I wanted to do. I said, why can’t I buy a tomato sauce I like the taste of?”

By coincidence a friend’s company had taken over a redundant sauce factory in Lowestoft, Suffolk. He agreed to rent it for a year and handed the recipe to the production technicians. When the first batch was ready, he pronounced it absolutely disgusting.

The head of the technical team told him: “We made it to your recipe – except we used water instead of olive oil as it clogs up the nozzles.”

Mr Grossman said: “It was an object lesson to me that people in the food industry are not interested in food.”

The next step was getting the product into shops. He went to see a buyer for a national chain. He was asked how much it would cost and replied £1.29 for a 350ml bottle.

The buyer replied: “If my wife spent more than 99p on 500ml of sauce I’d kill her.”

“And he meant it,” said Mr Grossman.

Despite all this and a focus group criticising the range for having too much flavour, the Grossman sauces are now a multi-million pound business.

He said: “The food business is a jungle that makes the House of Commons look like a tea party. You have to have questioning, persistence and excellence – and never try to make ketchup.”