Industry | Hotels Holiday centres Entertainment centres Public houses Casinos |
---|---|
Founded | 1934 |
Defunct | 1997 |
Fate | Merged with Guinness |
Successor | Diageo |
Headquarters | London, England |
Key people | Sir Stanley Grinstead (chairman) Allen Sheppard, Baron Sheppard of Didgemere (CEO) |
Number of employees | 115,000 |
Grand Metropolitan plc was a leisure, manufacturing and property conglomerate headquartered in England. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index until it merged with Guinness plc to form Diageo in 1997.
The business began in 1934 as a hotel business called MRMA Ltd (abbreviated from Mount Royal Metropolitan Association). [1] Grand Hotels (Mayfair) Ltd, a business founded after World War II by Maxwell Joseph, merged with MRMA in 1957 [2] and the combined business expanded rapidly under Joseph's leadership. [3] It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1961 [1] and changed its name to Grand Metropolitan Hotels Ltd in 1962. [1]
It diversified into catering acquiring Bateman Catering in 1967 [1] and then Midland Catering in 1968. [1] It then bought Express Dairies in 1969, [4] the Berni Inn chain, [4] and the Mecca bingo halls in 1970. [1]
Next came its move into brewing, when in 1972 it bought Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co. and Watney Mann. The latter's subsidiary International Distillers & Vintners owned Justerini & Brooks, Baileys Irish Cream, Gilbey's gin, Piat wine and Croft sherry and port brands, as well as the European and Commonwealth rights to Smirnoff vodka. [1] It changed its name to Grand Metropolitan in 1973. [1]
The business failed to acquire the Coral bookmakers from Joe Coral in 1980 to expand its betting and gaming operations, [5] but did succeed in acquiring Liggett Group, a US tobacco and drinks business. [1] In 1981 it bought Warner Holidays and Intercontinental Hotels Corporation. [1]
In 1986 the Company sold the Liggett Group to Bennett S. LeBow. [6]
It acquired Heublein wines and spirits from RJR Nabisco in 1987, which made it one of the largest producers of wines and spirits in the world, and gave the company ownership of the Smirnoff brand. [7] Also in 1987 the Company withdrew from catering when it disposed of its catering division by way of a management buyout so creating Compass Group. [8] In February 1988 386 pubs in London, the Home Counties and East Anglia were sold to Brent Walker; 210 pubs in the north and Midlands went to Heron International and 105 pubs in the South East went to Gibbs Mew (a Wiltshire brewer subsequently bought by Enterprise Inns). [9] Intercontinental Hotels were sold to Japanese based Saison Group. [10]
These disposals funded the expansion of its core betting operations by buying William Hill. [11] It also entered the fast food industry by buying the Pillsbury Company and with it the Burger King chain in 1988. [12] It also bought the Wimpy chain that year and merged it with Burger King. [13] It continued to sell non-core business, including in 1990 the brewers Samuel Webster's and in 1991 Ushers of Trowbridge. [14]
In March 1991 the remaining breweries were sold to Courage (subsequently sold by Foster's to Scottish & Newcastle) in a deal that pooled 8,450 pubs as the jointly owned Inntrepreneur Estates Company. Inntrepreneur had to have 4,350 tied pubs by the time the Beer Orders took effect, which led to many being sold and fewer being let on free-of-tie leases. [15] In September 1993, 1,654 Chef & Brewer pubs were sold to Scottish & Newcastle (subsequently bought by Heineken). 1,750 pubs were sold in 1995 for £254M to Nomura as Phoenix Inns in one of the first securitisation deals, and in May 1996 a further 1,410 pubs were transferred to Spring Inns with a view to a similar sale. In the end Inntrepreneur and Spring were both sold to Nomura for £1.2bn in September 1997 to clear the way for the Guinness deal. This left Nomura with 4,400 pubs [16] They created the Unique Pub Co for the 2,600 pubs that had signed the controversial SupplyLine agreement; the remaining 1,100 Voyager pubs [17] were free-of-tie, earmarked for disposal or were the 400 locked in legal disputes over SupplyLine. [18] Disposals and the acquisition of Inn Partnership (1,241 tenanted pubs) from Greenall Whitley in 1998 [19] and 988 smaller Bass pubs in 2001. [20] The remains of the Grand Metropolitan pub estate became part of Enterprise Inns when an Enterprise-led consortium bought 3,219 tenanted Unique pubs and 940 leased and managed Voyager pubs from Nomura in a £2bn deal in 2002. [21]
Grand Metropolitan merged with Guinness plc in 1997 to form Diageo. [22]
Smirnoff is a brand of vodka owned and produced by the British company Diageo. The Smirnoff brand began with a vodka distillery founded in Moscow by Pyotr Arsenievich Smirnov (1831–1898). It is distributed in 130 countries, and manufactured locally in some, as in Illinois in the United States.
Diageo plc is a British multinational alcoholic beverage company, with its headquarters in London, England. It operates from 132 sites around the world. It is a major distributor of Scotch whisky and other spirits. Distilleries owned by Diageo produce 40% of all Scotch whisky with over 24 brands, such as Johnnie Walker, J&B and Old Parr.
St. James's Gate Brewery is a brewery founded in 1759 in Dublin, Ireland, by Arthur Guinness. The company is now a part of Diageo, a company formed from the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan in 1997. The main product of the brewery is Draught Guinness.
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Premier Inn Limited is a British limited service hotel chain and the UK's largest hotel brand, with more than 800 hotels, with over 72,000 rooms. It operates hotels in a variety of locations including city centres, suburbs and airports, competing with the likes of Travelodge and Ibis hotels. The company was established by Whitbread as Travel Inn in 1987, to compete with Travelodge. Whitbread bought Premier Lodge in July 2004 and merged it with Travel Inn to form the current business under the name Premier Travel Inn, which was then shortened to the current name in October 2007. Premier Inn accounts for 70% of Whitbread's earnings.
De Vere is a hotels and leisure business, which until the 1990s was a brewing company known as Greenall's. It used to be listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
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Peter's Food Service is a Bedwas, Wales based baker and supplier of pies, pasties, slices, sausage rolls and factored products into retail, food service, catering and hospitality outlets across the United Kingdom. Today it is one of the largest employers in Wales, and one of the largest cold meat distributors in the United Kingdom.
The predecessor to what is now the international fast food restaurant chain Burger King was founded on July 23, 1954, in Jacksonville, Florida, as Instant Burger King. Inspired by the McDonald brothers' original store location in San Bernardino, California, the founders and owners, Keith J. Cramer and his stepfather Matthew Burns, began searching for a concept. After purchasing the rights to two pieces of equipment called "Insta" machines, the two opened their first stores around a cooking device known as the Insta-Broiler. The Insta-Broiler oven proved so successful at cooking burgers, they required all of their franchises to carry the device. After the original company began to falter in 1959, it was purchased by its Miami, Florida, franchisees James McLamore and David R. Edgerton. The two initiated a corporate restructuring of the chain; the first step being to rename the company, Burger King. The duo ran the company as an independent entity for eight years, eventually expanding to over 250 locations in the United States, when they sold it to the Pillsbury Company in 1967.
The Chef & Brewer collection is a collection of over 150 licensed countryside pub restaurants in the United Kingdom, owned by Greene King. They provide pub food, specials and cask ales.
Paul Steven Walsh is an English businessman who is the executive chairman of the McLaren Group. He was the chief executive of Diageo, the world's largest whisky company, for twelve years between 2000 and 2013.
Guinness is a stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin, Ireland, in 1759. It is now owned by the British-based multinational alcoholic beverage maker Diageo. It is one of the most successful alcohol brands worldwide, brewed in almost 50 countries, and available in over 120. Sales in 2011 amounted to 850,000,000 litres. In spite of declining consumption since 2001, it is the best-selling alcoholic drink in Ireland where Guinness & Co. Brewery makes almost €2 billion worth of beer annually.
Heublein Inc. was an American producer and distributor of alcoholic beverages and food throughout the 20th century. During the 1960s and 1970s its stock was regarded as one of the most stable financial investments, earning it inclusion in the Nifty Fifty.
Principal Hotel Company is a British hotel and conference venue operator headquartered in Harrogate, England.
Devenish Brewery, also known as J. A. Devenish & Co. Ltd, was a brewery in Weymouth, Dorset, England, that was founded in 1821 by William Devenish. It primarily operated from Weymouth's Hope Square, but also had a facility at Redruth, Cornwall. Devenish was sold to Greenalls in 1993.