You say potato, I say vodka
May 18, 2010 4:04 AM Subscribe
In March
a little known potato vodka made in the UK by a Herefordshire farmer, William Chase,
won best in class at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition [warning: PDF].
Chase was 20 when he bought his father’s 75-acre farm, in 1984 with a £200,000 loan from the bank. This is his second venture: in his first, he bucked the trend and
told supermarket giant Tesco to get lost when they wanted to sell his
potato chips.
Chase is partly interesting because he's are rare success of a business that successfully fought back against supermarket dominance: he has said that he started to make potato chips after his margins as a potato farmer were virtually wiped out by supermarket demands for low prices.
But perhaps it is the same old, same old... Chase has sold his potato chip business to
private equity. Tyrells crisps are sold in Tesco's rivals. And underlying the ethos of some of the UK's best known "homespun" brands big business and private equity
is increasingly getting into fresh and ethical food, buying up
Green and Blacks,
Innocent, and
Dorset Cereals, amongst others.
Very different from grain vodkas, which to be told, are pretty much industrial grade ethanol designed to disappear into sugar syrup and fruit juice, even at the high end. (There's a reason Smirnoff keeps winning blind taste tests.)
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:33 AM on May 18, 2010 [2 favorites]