How did you start working in the industry and how did your career progress after that?

My family’s fruit trade origins are unconventional. In the 1890s, my paternal grandparents landed penniless in Edinburgh as refugees from Russian pogroms against the Jewish community in Lithuania. As a matter of fact, they had paid an unscrupulous sea captain to take them from the Baltic Coast to the US and for the first few weeks, that’s where they thought they were!

Some years after that, to use as a cradle for one of her nine children, my grandmother begged or borrowed a wooden banana box - perversely they were known in the trade as coffins - and under the straw she apparently found some loose bananas that she sold to a neighbour. Over a century later, the Glass family is still selling fruit.

But the story really begins with my father, Harry. He was the true entrepreneur, rising from the humblest circumstances to be recognised as a trader par excellence. He left school at the age of 13, worked in The Co-op until he progressed to hawking fruit around the border villages of Kelso and Moffat, and then through market gardening and flower and fruit retailing to secondary and primary wholesaling. By the time I joined the business in 1954, he and my brother Gerald were already running a substantial business from premises in Cockburn Street, around the corner from the Edinburgh Fruit Market.

Prejudice is not a recent phenomenon and, in those days, the establishment sought to deny our second-generation immigrant family access to the market itself. But when British Rail was formed from the merger of LMS and LNER, they vacated the offices theyhad occupied above the market’s trading pitches, and my fatherseized the opportunity to rent them. He had no use for the offices, but at the Market Street entrance door to the steep stairway that led to them, he placed a nameplate - Harry Glass Ltd Fruit Market, Edinburgh -and I was promptly despatched to man the smallest fruit showroom in the world.

This measured no more than 12sqft, but that was space enough to show a few samples and to take orders from passing retailers. That was the starting point of my career. I look back on these days with nostalgia and can honestly say that despite inflation and the fact that our business grew into a multi-million-pound enterprise, the turnover per square foot generated from that doorway exceeded anything I was able to subsequently achieve!

Through the 1950s, the firm expanded with the acquisition of Young Glover’s import business in Leith. In the 1960s, organic growth and further acquisitions of fruit auctioneers and importers in Glasgow and Liverpool were followed by the London Stock Market flotation of the re-named Glass Glover Group in 1962.

My father and Gerald continued to develop the core businesses in the North, and I relocated to offices in Langley Court, Covent Garden, with a small, dynamic team concentrating on Cypriot and Egyptian potatoes, French and North American apples, and our role as leading panellists for Cape, Outspan, New Zealand, Jaffa and Agrexco. We were serving no fewer than 22 supermarket organisations throughout the UK. How times have changed!

To what do you attribute your commercial success?

My success, as you call it, is to have been able to move with the times in an industry that I love, enjoying the camaraderie of colleagues, clients and competitors, all with a common interest in our fascinating trade. I attribute that to two amazing teachers - my father and my brother - who gave me a strong and secure foundation on which to build a rewarding career and, with a few exceptions, to the integrity and loyalty of a succession of dedicated colleagues who gave unswerving support to my companies and to me.And of course, I attribute it to luck - an essential ingredient in any success story. I was lucky enough to be in the right place at a time of unprecedented change and to identify the opportunity that offered. I was also lucky to have married Ruth - you need an accommodating and understanding partner when the fruit trade is your mistress.

What are the biggest changes you have seen to the produce industry in the last 40 years?

My career span is now 55 years, and today’s business is unrecognisable from the 1950s and 1960s, when the fruit auctioneers in London, Liverpool and Glasgow still dominated our trade. They were replaced in the 1970s and early 1980s by the major Marketing Board panellists, wholesalers like Geest, Mack, Saphir and Glass Glover, with significant investment in sophisticated logistics infrastructures to service the burgeoning supermarket sector.

Improved communication and shipping systems facilitated access to a fuller range of products, and the only impediments to free trade were the banana quota system and the apple and pear licence regime, which was soon to be dismantled.

In supply/demand terms, however, it could be said that in the late 1980s the pendulum was allowed to swing too far towards a few cannibalistic retail chains that swallowed their smaller rivals. The trend continued in the 1990s, with the industry’s protective ministries blind to the disruptive effect of allowing convenience stores to suffer the same fate. History will no doubt trace the origins of inadequate net producer returns to that distortion in the balance of power, accompanied by the dismantling of centralised single-desk marketing systems that had served their growers well for decades.

On the plus side, the major retail chains have encouraged a greater awareness of the need for cost control and it is under their influence that product quality standards and food safety practices have been revolutionised, although specifications continue to be disproportionately skewed in favour of cosmetics rather than flavour. It is heartening to note that, despite the dramatic reduction in independent retail outlet numbers, some strength is returning to our wholesale markets, now that they are no longer prepared to be used as a dumping ground for inferior product.

Glass is a well-known name in produce - how important are family firms to the fruit and vegetable industry?

I am a huge admirer of the McCann family (Fyffes and Total Produce). We have watched with awe the extraordinary achievements of Neil McCann and his sons. Mathew and Donald Mack were my father’s contemporaries and the achievements of Christopher Mack (Fresca group) are a credit to the foundations they laid. And the Bartletts are a fine example of how a family firm of growers can become a household name - a tremendous organisation, far removed from the tiny potato business in Airdrie that I recall supplying when the Bartlett family first arrived from Ireland in the late 1950s.

There are also many examples of family continuity in the wholesale markets and in foodservice. These may be exceptions in this technological age, but there must still be scope for entrepreneurial family firms to emerge, especially perhaps among immigrant communities.

I currently conduct my trading activities through Glass Associates Limited with the support of my son Richard, a lawyer, and my journalist daughter Suzanne, whose recent bright idea may see the emergence of yet another Glass family produce-related enterprise in the near future.Will we never learn?

Outside your own business, you have been involved in a lot of developments in the industry. What have been the highlights of this work?

I can record some successes and many failures, representing our industry in discussions with UK and EU government bodies.

Despite our best efforts, including presentations to Select Committees of the House of Lords, we failed to convince the government of Edward Heath that changes to Common Agricultural Policy were imperative ahead of the UK’s accession to the community.We failed to obtain sufficient internal and external funding for the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Information Bureau, which was our industry’s first and most effective promotional body.

We did, however, succeed in maintaining an open door for imports, reducing or removing irrelevant protective tariffs and in more recent times, removing fresh fruit from the EU retaliatory lists that threatened to impose insurmountable penal duties on produce from the US.

What do you think will be the next big trends to affect fresh produce?

Range simplification. I believe we are in danger of confusing the public with too many new varieties of certain products that are hard to distinguish from each other. And I hope we will address the fact that it is counter-productive to allow lowest retail price aspirations to continue to deliver uneconomic net returns to the growers on whom we all depend.

What has been your proudest moment in your career?

Now that’s an easy question to answer! It occurred as recently as May 2009 when a resumé of my career was read to 400 guests at the Re:fresh Awards and I was called up to receive our industry’s highesthonour -a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In those brief moments, a lifetime of trading in fresh fruit flashed before my eyes. I could see the faces of friends and colleagues to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude. It was an unexpected and thrilling event. To be acknowledged in that way by my peers was a humbling experience. I doubt if I have another 55 years ahead of me, but however long I may be spared to continue, I will count that as my finest hour.

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