Can Patak’s fiery flavour survive in ABF’s big corporate cooking pot?

I have long been a fan of Patak’s, the Lancashire-based Indian sauce-and-pickle empire that was acquired last week by Associated British Foods for an undisclosed price thought to be somewhere north of £100 million. The business that now sells 30 million jars of curry sauce a year and supplies three quarters of Britain’s Indian restaurants has not only encouraged British eaters to explore the wider possibilities of subcontinental cuisine, but has set a shining 50-year example of family entrepreneurship. As global stock markets, big-city real estate and corporate takeovers continue to sizzle like a King Prawn Korai on a red-hot skillet, there will be nine-figure fortunes aplenty this year, but none will be more deserved than the cheque just collected from ABF chief George Weston by Kirit Pathak and his wife Meena.

I may be in danger of overcooking my curry metaphors, but the success of the Pathaks (who dropped the ‘h’ from their brand name to make it easier to pronounce) is all the more admirable for the fact that this was never a just-add-chicken-and-bung-in-the-microwave story of business development. Kirit’s father Laxmishankar Pathak, who arrived from Kenya with £5 in his pocket and started making sweets and samosas in a basement in Kentish Town in 1957, was a hard taskmaster with a habit of getting into trouble. He almost went bankrupt after burning his fingers on a dodgy distribution contract in the late 1960s, and the company really prospered only after he handed over day-to-day running to Kirit and Meena (who was a food technology graduate) in 1976. Pathak senior went on to entangle himself in fraud allegations against the former Indian prime minister N.V. Narasimha Rao, to whose personal guru Pathak claimed to have paid $100,000 to secure a newsprint supply contract which never materialised. Meanwhile Kirit fought — and is said to have settled for £9 million — a five-year legal battle with his two sisters over their claim to shares in the curry business.