Richard Gott relishes a strange connection between Worcestershire and Venezuela
Reprinted from the Guardian (London), December 11, 1976
At the turn of the century in Caracas, after an outside concert by the band, the European-oriented Venezuelan gentry would repair for a social cup of chocolate, then one of the country’s chief products, to ‘La India’, the Caracas equivalent of Sacher’s or Demmel’s in Vienna. Nowadays ‘La India’ is a company, not a coffee house, the Venezuelan subsidiary of the General Foods Corporation, a powerful United States transnational company. Its manager, Bill MacClarence, is a graduate of the Harvard Business School and has been with General Foods for 25 years.
Among the foods he produces for the discriminating palate of the Venezuelan middle class is Salsa Inglesa – English sauce. On the strangely familiar label it proclaims defiantly and unpronounceably in Spanish, ‘Worcestershire Sauce’. The label itself is familiar because it says ‘Lea and Perrins, the original and genuine’. The sauce in fact is made under licence in Venezuela by an American company that pays royalties to the British firm in Worcestershire, contributing doubtless to the ‘invisibles’ that keep Britain afloat.
Now if there is one thing that the countries of Latin America do not lack it is the wherewithal and the traditional skill to make an immense variety of sauces, chutneys and condiments. Hot and salty, sweet and savoury, the material is there – red peppers, green peppers, chili peppers, mangoes, plantain and ají. A cuisine cultivated, protected and enriched through the centuries by an oppressed but resourceful peasantry. So it comes as some surprise that there should be such a large demand in Venezuela for Lea and Perrins.
But look along the shelves of a suburban supermarket in Caracas and there is another bottle of Salsa Inglesa, ‘French’s Worcestershire Sauce’, made this time by a British company, Reckitt and Colman of Hull. It has a Venezuelan subsidiary, Atlantic Venezolana, which makes Worcestershire Sauce under licence from the H.T. French Company of Rochester in the United States – a British company manufacturing Worcestershire Sauce in Venezuela and paying royalties to an American company for the privilege of doing so. Atlantic Venezolana, perhaps to the delight of the Venezuelan housewife, also makes Brasso, Robinson’s Barley Water, and Cherry Blossom shoe polish.
Two companies making Worcestershire Sauce in Venezuela might seem one too many, but not of course to those who dislike monopolies and extol the virtues of competition. And competition there certainly is. Further along the supermarket shelf stands yet another brand, ‘McCormick’s Worcestershire Sauce’, made by McCormick de Venezuela, a subsidiary of the McCormick Company of Baltimore, manufactured under licence from nobody. The boss of McCormick de Venezuela, Manuel Mosteiro Pérez, is a Cuban exile who used to sell the company’s sauce and mayonnaise in Havana. The revolution put paid to that. The Cuban subsidiary was confiscated. Now he flogs the stuff all over Latin America.
Nor does the story end here. Also on sale is ‘Royal Worcestershire Sauce’ (perhaps to be eaten off Royal Worcester dishes), produced by a subsidiary of Standard Brands. The president of the Venezuelan company is Eduardo Pinilla Pocaterra. As the name implies, he has little land – but his family owns plenty of banks. He did a spell at the University of New York’s Graduate School of Business, where clearly he learned to put the Venezuelan taste for Worcestershire Sauce to profitable ends.
Heinz, ‘the one you love’, has also launched a Worcestershire Sauce onto the Venezuelan market. The boss of Alimentos Heinz de Venezuela, Louis Pacini, hails from Massachusetts, and used to be an operations officer in the US Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps in France and Austria in the 1950s. Now he just sells food.
So, five brands of Worcestershire Sauce are sold in Venezuela, mostly by American companies. A basic component of most of them, the soya bean, has to be imported. Venezuela can no longer feed itself and has a massive annual import bill for food. The companies that benefit are American: Kraft, Kellogg, Del Monte, Great Plains Wheat de Venezuela (cables: USWHEAT), National Biscuit and Quaker. They, and many more, are well established in Venezuela, though they don’t make Worcestershire Sauce.
What about Nelson Rockefeller, the American who seems to control much of Latin America? Well, he owns the supermarket. Or at least he did until Carlos Andrés Pérez, the Venezuelan president, decided to nationalise it. How about nationalising Lea and Perrins? It wouldn’t be difficult to give it a new name: Lea and Pérez.