Simon Gault: No Half Measures - chef's tough times revealed in new book

Chef Simon Gault at the Auckland Food Show in 2019. Photo / Chris Loufte

He's known for his legendary skills in the kitchen and TV appearances, including as a judge on multiple seasons of MasterChef. But celebrity chef Simon Gault is also a savvy businessman and has faced tough times, as revealed in this extract from his new book with Herald journalist Kim Knight.

On my 50th birthday, my mate Nick Baylis gives me a compass. It's come out of a Spitfire, the infamous World War II fighter plane. It's an awesome gift, heavy with symbolism. This is it. This is where we're going. We're all backing ourselves. Except, right at this precise moment, we aren't going anywhere.

Instead, we are dumping around three tonnes of chicken, beef and vegetable stock concentrate. We are in the middle of a legal battle, and our new product is not going to make the supermarket shelves when we promised.

Gault's Stock is not just salty water. It's real vegetables and meat, cooked down to a concentrate. Stock is flavour. Pure and simple.

The night before I sat down to think about this chapter, I was cooking up a sauce for some pasta. Sautéed onion, a little bit of garlic and mushrooms. I cooked them down and added some wine (I should have added dry vermouth) and then the cream went in. Taste. What's missing? A little bit of stock would be good here. I take a pouch of my vegetable stock concentrate from the fridge and squeeze in about half a teaspoon. The flavour amps up immediately.

Asian cuisine has its 'master stock' that is the key to noodle and dumpling soups; French cuisine cooks down vegetables and herbs with bones, extracting the collagen that is so good for keeping our hair, nails and skin looking youthful (Note to self: drink more bone broth!).

Stock is the magic backbone of casseroles, soups — just about any savoury dish with a liquid component. Gault's Stock Concentrates goes to market in 2013, around six months after we launch a range of seasoning blends that includes Flavours of Italy, first devised for the famous Euro rotisserie chicken. People see my name on products in the supermarket and they think I'm a multimillionaire. If only they knew. Fail fast, fix fast.

Unfortunately, not everything can be fixed.

I start thinking about the stock when I'm a judge on MasterChef.

One of the show's major sponsors supplies Campbell's stock, a product that dominates the pre-boxed liquid stock market. It's not my favourite product, and I can't tell the contestants to make their own, because that will upset the sponsor. I figure the only way around this is for me to come up with an alternative.

It turns out that a French chef I worked with way back at Leith's in London now lives in New Zealand. I remember Daniel Chartier from the vegetable section at Leith's; in 2012, he's the business-development manager with Cuisine Resources NZ, a food production company specialising in the creation of natural food extracts. He pipes up: 'Maybe we can make a stock together?' He's a genius at making things in bulk, and so we go to work.

At about the same time, I'm cooking on the chef's table at Euro. I love doing this. Two chefs and eight diners watching. It's a far more intimate experience than sending a plate out from the regular kitchen pass; you get to really interact with customers and talk to people about what they're about to eat. They have a smile on their face before they even try the food, but the real success is when they taste the dish and it surpasses their expectations. You become part of the customer's journey that night.

Anyway, there's this pretty cool guy on the chef's table. He kind of has that Kevin Roberts feel about him, and he works in advertising. We have a couple of drinks after his 14-course dinner. I seize the opportunity. 'I've got this idea...'

Nick 'Baylo' Baylis is on board. We've got another guy doing the artwork, but that turns out to be a real business learning moment. He doesn't want to invest financially and we can't afford that. No risk, no gain. It's my first experience of really liking somebody, seeing their talent and saying goodbye. It's a lesson in being upfront from the word go — you're going to have to put some money in here.

We end up giving a business share to Eugene Hamilton, who has worked with me since the Bell House restaurant days. He's my right-hand man, and it seems like a generous 'thank you'. In hindsight, he'd probably say it's just been a noose around his neck. Perhaps we'd all say that.

We don't want to make a liquid stock in a box that you have to throw out a few days after opening. Our formulation extracts all the liquid from meat and vegetables to produce a concentrate. Customers aren't used to a product like this. They look at our squeezable pouches with screw-cap lids and think, 'That's not much stock.' We have to educate them on how to use the concentrate, which has no preservatives, no rubbish, no E-numbers. Just real stock, in a pouch — how can we help people get their heads around this?

When we pitch up to the supermarkets, it feels like we really connect with the guy from Countdown. He tells Nick, who works in advertising, 'I f***ing hate ad guys' — but he clearly likes chefs, because now it's all hands on deck.

We've got a product made in New Zealand and we've got the packaging coming in from China, the only place we can source it from. I'm a brand on a television reality show. Nick is conducting the orchestra now, and he's doing an amazing job. It's three days before we dispatch Gault's Stock to supermarkets across the country. Wait. Does that pouch look like it's leaking?

As Nick Baylis says: "We'd done an exclusive deal with Progressive Enterprises (now Woolworths) to supply its Countdown supermarkets. We were launching at one of their conferences.

"They had all their managers and people from around the country in Auckland and the stock was going to be a big deal. They decided, because of Simon's television role, to stage a kind of MasterChef competition.

"Simon, myself and Eugene were going to be cooking against teams from their other suppliers — Campbell's, Wattie's, Greggs, etcetera. Meanwhile, Simon was actually cooking the conference dinner, and we had this massive stand of the new stocks and seasonings. We really were the headline act.

"The stocks were all packed into boxes. I opened one to grab a pouch to cook with and I could see this stuff leaking out of the caps. 'Oh. That doesn't look good.' I opened another one and it was the same. 'Oh my God...'"

We investigate more closely. The tops of the screw-caps on the pouches are all starting to develop tiny splits. This is not good. We ring the people who filled them for us and they say it must be a cap failure.

We ring the people who made the caps and they say the fillers must have over-tightened them. My cousin Ian Gault is a litigation lawyer at Bell Gully, and now he's on the job. But the upshot is that all the product has to go in the rubbish bin. Our entire first batch is dumped.

This is a massive blow. You launch something like this and think you are going to make a fortune. You're going to save the world and give everyone this wonderful stuff and they'll use this on the television shows, for sure. But we have to start again. We are absolutely gutted.

My cousin keeps us from having to take anyone to court, but it's just one big compromise that costs us all a lot of money. Everybody comes to the party a little bit, but nobody refunds us for the dumped stock. We're facing a long delay and some tough conversations with Countdown.

The supermarket is very sympathetic, but when we finally do hit the shelves, it's slow. Any money we have for marketing is gone, we can't afford to do a television commercial — we can't afford any advertising at all.

We set up stands at various food shows and all we do is break even. If I went to a food show tomorrow, I guarantee nine out of 10 people would never have seen Gault's Stock, because they're so used to walking along and grabbing what they've always used.

People who do try it become unbelievably loyal, because it's a great product. It's got a long shelf-life, and it tastes good. I'm always stunned at how many people don't actually try a stock before they trustingly pour it into whatever they are cooking. Is it too salty? Does it need more salt? Taste, taste, taste!

Ten years after Nick gives me that compass, perhaps we are heading in the right direction. We finally start to see a very small amount of profit and, in 2021, we take some money back.

If you ask Eugene whether his share was a good gift, I'm not sure what he'd say — he's barely seen a cent, but he's had to turn up to help demonstrate the product at all those food shows! We've definitely got customer loyalty. Who knows, one day it might be the little something I can leave for my daughter, Hazel.

Simon's Gault's new book with award-winning Herald journalist Kim Knight. Photo / Supplied

Simon Gault: No Half Measures
With Kim Knight
Published by Bateman Books
RRP$49.99