Big shot of the week
ROONEY ANAND, 54 CHIEF EXECUTIVE, GREENE KING
THE pub trade has always been a contact sport. Rowdy patrons, till-skimming staff, bully-boy breweries. Plus you’ve got the modern treble whammy of the smoking ban, drinkdriving crackdowns and cheap-as-chips supermarket grog. It’s not a job for soft-as-silt shandy drinkers.
Fortunately, Greene King’s Rooney Anand is one of the industry’s street fighters.
Sure, he doesn’t look like much. A squat, avuncular creature, his dainty mitts sometimes look as though they’re struggling to get a grip around his pint of IPA.
But contemporaries say he’s a scrappy bulldog in terrier’s clothing and I can believe it. How else could he have survived at the top of this spit ’n’ sawdust world for 14 years?
Keen golfer Anand said this week he was calling time on his stint at the Suffolk brewer, responsible for such foamy pleasures as Old Speckled Hen and Abbot Ale, and hands a respectable scorecard in to the clubhouse at the same time.
WHEN he took over in 2004, Greene King had 1,998 pubs. Today, it has over 2,800 while turnover has quadrupled to £2.2bn.
Although a clubbable cove, he’s not universally popular with the so-called ‘beerage’. He and his Wetherspoons rival Tim Martin are unlikely to be on each other’s Christmas card lists.
In 2009 he pulled ‘GK’ out of the British Beer and Pub Association, riling fellow members by claiming he could find better ways to spend the money. He rolled another hand-grenade into the saloon bar when he advocated minimum alcohol pricing, a turkeys-voting-forChristmas move which had fellow publicans frothing.
But then nothing is altogether straightforward about this dapper, Delhi-born marketing man. Despite his Sikh heritage, he enjoys a pint or three. He keeps his hair cut short. His wife, with whom he has four children, is French. He retains a fondness of zippy Porsches.
After moving to Walsall aged two, where he attended the same local school as Goodness Gracious Me comedian Meera Syal, Anand’s father, a surgeon, and mother, an anaesthetist, had hoped their son would follow them into medicine.
But Rooney had seen his uncle make a few bob over in the Middle East in engineering, so enrolled in a construction course at old Bristol Poly. A year’s work experience at Tarmac followed. Being a young Asian on a building site was ‘challenging’, he says. He quickly realised the building lark wasn’t for him.
After undertaking an MBA he joined United Biscuits where he developed a knack for marketing. ‘Toffees and butterscotch, Ford Sierra diesel and £15,000 a year,’ he says of it fondly. Various other marketing-type roles followed at Terry’s Confectionery and pudding maker Sara Lee. When he moved to Greene King in 2001 as head of brewing, he admitted he’d barely heard of the company and had certainly never been to Bury St Edmunds, where the company is based.
But he soon settled in to life near Cambridge, and when he was made chief executive in 2004 wasted no time in growing the business, leading a £254m takeover of Scots rivals Belhaven just a year later.
Acquisitions of Loch Fyne and Laurel Inns followed. His biggest deal, for Spirit Pubs in 2014 for £774m, was originally hailed as coup, but began to sour last year as the downturn in casual dining bit. With Rooney’s star seemingly waning and the company’s share price now tottering, his retirement this week came as no great shock. He’s been around so long, many in the catering business find it hard to imagine Greene King without Rooney. But its pub tills will continue to ring, its bubbling fermentation tanks will still churn. They’ve been brewing in Bury St Edmunds since the monks discovered liquid alchemy in the 9th century, and will carry on doing so until our thirst for the brown nectar finally subsides.
And that, as Larkin observed, will be England gone.