W. Galen Weston, a polo partner of Prince Charles who remodeled and expanded the international food empire founded by his grandfather, a baker, and then collected luxury department stores, died on April 12 at his Toronto home. He was 80 years old.
His death was announced by George Weston Ltd., the family-run holding company of which he had served as chairman until he retired in 2016. The announcement did not state what the cause was.
When Mr. Weston joined the family business in 1961, he controlled bakeries in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, as well as grocery stores such as Fortnum & Mason, Queen Elizabeth’s grocers, and British, Canadian, and American supermarkets and grocery wholesalers. Dairies, chocolate makers, and a Canadian paper mill were also in the mix.
After working for the company in Ireland, Mr Weston was given the unenviable assignment in 1972 of determining the fate of Loblaw Groceterias, a Canadian supermarket chain that gradually controlled the family by 1956. The chain was fraught with debt and bad sales swayed on the verge of bankruptcy.
Part of Mr. Weston’s plan was conventional: he quickly closed unprofitable businesses and cut Loblaws, as the company is now known, in half.
He also hired Dave Nichol, a former college classmate who worked for McKinsey & Company. Working with Richard Currie, another Canadian who was not employed by McKinsey, and designer Don Watt, Mr. Nichol transformed the remaining stores from fluorescent-lit boxes with metal shelves into spacious and almost luxurious outlets.
The key to making Loblaws the dominant grocer in Canada was the group’s approach to the previously sleepy private label business, starting with household staples. Mr. Watt developed a bright yellow packaging with bold, black Helvetica lettering for a series of “No Name” products that promised to exchange unusual packaging for low prices and quality.
The real breakthrough, however, was the decision to develop private label products like Memories of Kobe Tamari Garlic Sauce and Candy Cane Chocolate Fudge Crackle Ice Cream, which were of higher quality than branded goods and most importantly, distinctive and fashionable while still being less expensive.
President’s Choice, as the line was called, started with a chocolate chip cookie. The market leader at the time, Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy, had 24 percent chocolate chips and used vegetable oil. President Choice’s decadent cookies were 40 percent fries and used butter.
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To create the new line, Loblaws supplemented its traditional grocery store flyers with something that resembled a cross between a magazine and a comic called Insider’s Report. Instead of promoting weekly sales, the report featured Mr Nichol in photos with his family dog and told stories of new products that were becoming more profitable than branded products for Loblaws.
As President’s Choice attracted copycats, some American grocers began buying or licensing the products. Walmart hired Loblaws to develop similar products for its US stores.
“The impact has been profound,” said Daniel Bender, food cultural historian at the University of Toronto. “Loblaws have expanded their stores to look more like a market than a supermarket.”
Willard Gordon Galen Weston was born on October 29, 1940 in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, England. He was the youngest of nine children of Willard Garfield Weston, who had become president of the family business in 1924, and Reta Lila (Howard) Weston, a former school teacher.
The family returned to Canada after World War II. According to a brief profile in the New York Times in 1978, Mr. Weston was “the archetypal playboy of the western world” as a young man who “chased girls and spent almost as many college hours in cinemas as he did in the classroom.”
Mr. Weston graduated from the University of Western Ontario before joining the family business. He started in Ireland, where he was expanding to buy supermarkets. When he was in Dublin, where he had also bought the luxury department store Brown Thomas, he noticed pictures of a model on billboards all over the city. He married this model, Hilary Frayne, in a ceremony in 1966 followed by a reception where the wedding reception wore clothes styled after the 1890s gold rush in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
Ms. Weston worked in the family’s luxury businesses now anchored by Selfridges in the UK and which include Holt Renfrew in Canada.
In 1983, counterterrorism officers in Ireland warned Mr. Weston that he was the target of a kidnapping operation by the Irish Republican Provisional Army. At her request, he left a car in his Irish house as a decoy before heading to England. When there was a shootout at home between seven masked gunmen and police, injuring four of the possible kidnappers, Mr Weston was playing on a team with Prince Charles Polo in Windsor.
Under Mr. Weston, Loblaws continued to expand through acquisitions, including the acquisition of Canada’s largest drug store chain, and through the introduction of new types of stores. It also struggled initially, however, when Walmart began supplying its Canadian stores with fresh groceries in 2006 and the botched introduction of a new inventory system resulted in empty shelves in Loblaws stores and overflowing warehouses for the company.
Mr. Weston left Mr. Nichol (and his French bulldog Georgie Girl) to be the face of Loblaws in television and print ads. But he regularly visited Loblaws stores to speak to shoppers and inspect the store’s junk, one of his favorite indicators of efficiency.
While rarely giving interviews, Mr. Weston became more of a public figure when his wife became Lieutenant Governor of Ontario in 1997 – Queen Elizabeth’s deputy to the province. She worked in this position for five years.
Mr. Weston’s wife survived, as did his son Galen, who succeeded him as chairman and executive director of George Weston. his daughter Alannah Weston, the chairwoman of the Selfridges Group; five of his siblings, Grainger Weston, Nancy Baron, Wendy Rebanks, Gretchen Bauta, and Camilla Dalglish; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Weston’s conversion of George Weston was underscored not long before his death when the company announced that it was selling the last of its bakeries, long its predominant activity, to focus on its grocery and real estate holdings.
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