HISTORY OF BAKER PERKINS IN ASIA

(See also History of Baker Perkins in South East Asia)

Joseph Allen Baker, by then Liberal member for Finsbury Park as well as chairman of Joseph Baker & Sons, travelled widely during WW1, supporting the Quaker ambulance units that were organised by his two sons. He visited France, Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, Greece and Russia. It was during a journey to Russia that, Augustus Muir records –

“He was asked privately by the Foreign Office to become a King’s Messenger and carry despatches – a task in which he was joined by his young colleague, Herbert Kirman. Both the business and the diplomatic missions were successful, but the Bolshevik revolution prevented the orders he had got for biscuit and chocolate machinery from being fulfilled”.

Another effort to obtain Russian orders was made in the 1920’s and Laurence King managed to sell a complete bakery plant worth £100,00. Muir tells us that –

“On his way home he was roughly handled by Russian officials who suspected him of being a spy. When his train stopped at a small station on the Polish frontier, his baggage was searched and a number of Baker Perkins drawings were closely scrutinised. None of his interrogators knew a word of English and they promptly locked him up. At the end of forty-eight hours, he was desperate and managed to escape, making a dash over several hundred yards of no-mans-land towards the Polish frontier post, with bullets whistling near him – hardly the farewell he expected from a country to which his firm was about to supply a bakery plant”.

Joseph Baker & Sons’ connections with China began just after World War One when Charles Baker became resident representative in Shanghai and was also successful in selling biscuit installations there. In 1968, the largest biscuit factory in the country, in Shanghai, was still operating with Baker Perkins equipment that had been installed in 1922.

The 1958 Annual Report mentioned that the Company had – “entered into agreements for the manufacture of certain equipment under licence in India”.

By 1965, Baker Perkins had a branch office – for the import of group products – in Bombay. This had been set up because of the difficulties experienced with Indian import regulations.

In the post-WW2 years it was not unusual for Governments to disburse Aid to developing countries in the form of equipment to manufacture food. In 1966, the Australian Government, as part of the Colombo Plan of assistance to Asian countries, donated six complete bread bakeries to India for which Baker Perkins Australia Pty obtained the lion's share of the order - A$550,000 out of a total of A$850,000. Whilst the remainder of the equipment was divided among five other Australian bakery equipment manufacturers, Baker Perkins were responsible for all of the erection and commissioning of the six plants which were capable of producing a total of seven tons of bread per hour when erected in major cities throughout India.

Douglas Rownson Ltd supplied a £92,000 plant to Russia in 1968, as part of a new car factory. The order included equipment to mix oil with a special powder, heat the grease which the mixing produced to 200 degrees C, de-aerate and cool the grease before passing it to storage vessels.

In 1967, Canadian Baker Perkins had supplied all of the equipment for three new bakeries in India. But not all opportunities in this part of the world went through smoothly as John Peake – then president of Baker Perkins Inc – ruefully reported in his 1975 Annual Report –

“We have recently reassessed our short and long term plans ………….. this action has been precipitated because a very large bakery order for bakery machinery to be shipped to India has failed to materialize. The Canadian Government had already approved placing this order for approximately $3 ½ million with Baker Perkins as part of its foreign aid programme. However, at the final stage, the Indian Government rejected the project”.

In 1980, Rose Forgrove won an order to supply tea-packing machinery to Russia. Worth £3m, this was the largest single order ever won by the company and Rose Forgrove’s negotiating team spent a very tough fortnight in Moscow before the deal was signed. This was not the first time that the company had supplied tea cartoning machines to Russia. Records show that Job Day (part of the Rose Forgrove sub-group), supplied 18 machines in 1907.

The breakthrough which eventually led to this order from the USSR, started three years previously, when Rose Forgrove sold a tea cartoning machine to Poland -the performance of the machine and the service back-up from the company impressing the Russians, their technicians spending some time visiting a number of Rose Forgrove installations and at company plants assessing its technical and productive capability.

Rose Forgrove signed a second contract with the Russians, again for £3m of Tea cartoning machinery, only sixth months later and a further contract within a year brought the total amount of business gained from V/O Technopromimport of Moscow to over £15m.

In 1974, Peter Newton who up until then had been managing director of Baker Perkins Far East Ltd, provided an insight into the task of selling equipment to the Chinese –

“Baker Perkins Far East have been able to successfully negotiate an order with the Peoples Republic of China worth £750,000. The order covers ten Rose Forgrove lined cartoning machines, weighers and overwrappers for packing tea.

Business transactions really commenced in 1972 when Sir Ivor Baker, Jack Stanton and myself visited Kwongchung at the time of the bi-annual fair. At that time general discussions were held and we subsequently sold wrapping machines worth £50,000.

In the autumn of 1973, a delegation from the China National Products Corporation visited the Rose Forgrove factory and also a Brook Bond Tea packaging factory in England. In the summer of 1973 we commenced a detailed exchange of correspondence with the Chinese Machinery Import and Export Corporation and in October I went to Canton to continue the discussions. I was soon joined by Barry Gunton from Rose Forgrove in the UK.

After twelve days of discussions it was decided that further technicalities would have to be clarified in the UK by laboratory tests and Barry returned to Leeds to arrange this. Whilst I was on leave in Australia at Christmas an urgent call came from the Chinese Government inviting me to go to Peking to discuss the project further. The temperature was 12 degrees C below zero and the first thing that I did was buy a fur hat and gloves.

A visit to Er Li Ku in Peking, the headquarters of the Chinese National Machinery Corporation, was the start of fourteen days of hard negotiations and a constant flow of telexes between Peking, Hong Kong and Leeds. But eventually the order was finalised and signed. During negotiations, discussions were usually held from 9.30 to 11.30 am and occasionally in the afternoon, each day, including Saturday and Sunday. The Chinese work a six day week and on Sunday when the State requires.

The procedure commenced with the passing of pleasantries and copious cups of tea. Then, facing upwards of seven professional negotiators, the talks would begin. It was constantly brought to my attention that I was negotiating with the representatives of 800 million people whose word is, and has proved to be, as good as their bond”.

Baker Perkins Group Sales by Region

In 1982, the last year in which figures were split at this level, the sales by geographical area were as follows:

Baker Perkins BCS Ltd formed Baker Perkins Hong Kong Ltd in 1985 to meet the growing opportunity represented by the People’s Republic of China.

Despite the fact that bread was not a traditional Chinese food, the Chinese government were investing a colossal amount of money in flour milling, bread baking and noodle manufacture, partly because of their moves to reduce the traditional two-hour lunch break to one hour. The hope was that, by making bread available, workers would be encouraged to bring their lunch to work instead of going home to eat.

The Australian and New Zealand Baker Perkins companies carried out two-years of intensive marketing in China in anticipation of this change and were rewarded, in 1985, with four orders, each of around $A1m, for automatic bread plants. Ovens, provers, coolers and conveyors were manufactured in New Zealand and the unit machines in Australia. The plants were tailored specifically for the Chinese market, with an output at 3150 loaves per hour, being somewhat smaller than was usual for Australian equipment and lacking micro-processor control as the Chinese were, at that time, worried about servicing and cost.

Also in 1985, the British Food and Beverage Group was formed with the specific objective of encouraging links between China and the UK. Baker Perkins and United Biscuits were members and, in 1986, co-operated in a Trade Mission to China under the leadership of Earl Jellicoe. The visit co-incided with a visit to China by the Queen and Prince Philip and the opportunity arose for the mission, of which Mike Smith, managing director of Baker Perkins plc, was a member, to ‘borrow’ the Royal Yacht Britannia for a day to give a seminar to 60 senior Chinese visitors. The seminar recognised the need to improve the nutrition of Chinese babies, with the development of baby food being seen as a vital priority. United Biscuits had developed a infant rusk product in their laboratory in Maidenhead, that addressed the general iron deficiency in Chinese babies’ diet and Baker Perkins were able to supply the necessary process equipment. The hope was that this unprecedented services package of equipment, technology and formulation would persuade the Chinese to purchase a number of infant rusk plants.

Terry Nicholson, whose story is also told in History of Baker Perkins in South East Asia, recalls that in 1988,

"After 9 weeks of negotiations at the Negotiation Building in Beijing, with China’s Ministry of Commerce, buying agents CNTIC, and representatives from five user factories from different provinces, we secured a contract for £7.25million to supply five Infant Rusk Plants. During those nine weeks I was supported daily by the Peterborough team and by visits to the negotiation by Iain Davidson, my General Manager; by David Duffin, the Divisional Manager; and by Paul Parkinson, the MD of Baker Perkins. Of course they could go back home, or on to other business in Japan, Australia, or America. Me, I got to stay. Each of five separate contracts, each of 60 pages, and each in three copies, every one fully bound in heavy covers, took me a full day to countersign every page, and I narrowly avoided paying excess baggage charges on the flights back home”.

Derek Exton, a Service Engineer who started with Baker Perkins as an apprentice in 1947 commissioned a biscuit plant for a major Chinese customer in May 1998 and shares some photographic memories of the commissioning party.

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