Every one of Pret a Manger’s 12,000 employees is to be gifted a £1,000 payout to thank them for their hard work as the popular sandwich shop chain is sold to a family of secretive German billionaires for £1.5bn.
Lidia-Alexandra Sipos, a team leader at a Pret shop in central London, was too busy making lattes and helping prepare chicken and avocado sandwiches on Tuesday morning to have noticed a tweet from Pret’s chief executive Clive Schlee revealing the windfall.
Today is a big day for @Pret. As we welcome JAB, we’ll be thanking the people who really matter by giving each of our 12,000 employees £1,000 when the deal completes
— Clive Schlee (@Cliveschlee) May 29, 2018
Schlee had tweeted that Pret had been sold by its British private equity owners Bridgepoint to JAB Holdings, a Luxembourg-based investment fund belonging to Germany’s hugely wealthy Reimann family. Brothers Wolfgang, Stefan, Renate and Matthias, descendants of the founder of what would become consumer goods giant Reckitt Benckiser, are estimated by Forbes magazine to be worth just over $4bn (£3bn) each.
“Today is a big day for @Pret,” Schlee said. “As we welcome JAB, we’ll be thanking the people who really matter by giving each of our 12,000 employees £1,000 when the deal completes.”
Sipos had no idea that the company she has worked for since 2016 had been sold. Neither had any of her colleagues, who when told were excited at the prospect of coming into a windfall, but didn’t expect much about their day-to-day lives to change as Pret’s ownership switches from an office block in Marylebone to one near Luxembourg airport.
Based in the tax haven of Luxembourg, JAB Holdings is controlled by four members of the hugely wealthy and secretive Reimann family: Wolfgang, Stefan, Renate and Matthias. The Reimann's are among the wealthiest dynasties in Europe with a fortune of more than €16bn (£14bn).
The anonymous-sounding name JAB comes from the initials of Johann Adam Benckiser, who as one of the family’s forebears founded a chemical firm in 1823 that would become Reckitt Benckiser.
The investment vehicle still owns the second-largest stake in Reckitt, and the consumer giant’s former chief executive Bart Becht – who broke British corporate records in 2010 with a pay package worth £90m – is chairman of JAB. The company also has shares in Coty, the beauty company behind the brands Calvin Klein and Wella.
The four brothers bought out the shares of the other five children of Albert Reimann Jr who owned all of JAB until he died in 1984 leaving ech of his nine adopted children an 11.1% stake. Albert Reimann Jr was the the great-grandson of Ludwig Reimann who married one of Johann Adam Benckiser's daughters and ended up owning the business.
With three senior partners at the helm, the company has been on a buying spree in recent years. JAB splashed out $18.7bn on fizzy drinks company Dr Pepper Snapple earlier this year and paid out $13.9bn in 2015 for Keurig Green Mountain, one of the biggest coffee firms in the US.
Adding Pret will help JAB compete further with Starbucks and Nestlé, while moving the vehicle away from luxury brands such as Jimmy Choo, which it sold last year for $1.2bn. It also reportedly plans to sell Bally, another luxury goods firm in which it has a controlling stake.
“I had no idea at all, no one did, we’re all so busy in the morning,” Sipos said. “To be honest, I have no idea who owns the company, and don’t expect anything to change for us.”
Sipos, who started work at Pret two weeks after arriving in the UK from Romania in 2016, refused to believe that Pret’s staff would really receive the £1,000 each until shown Schlee’s tweet. She then said she would save most of her £1,000 windfall – after buying a gift for her mother. “She helped me so much to get here, and I want to give her something special to say thank-you,” Sipos said.
“Pret really does look after you,” she said. “I quit in December to try and get an office management job, but I study two days a week and it’s hard to get a job that lets you do that.
“So Pret helped me come back in February, and I can study management at college on Tuesdays and Thursday,” she said. “And it pays better than receptionist work.” Sipos said she gets paid £9.70 an hour with a £1-an-hour bonus if the store passes regular mystery shopper tests.
Her colleague Fatu, who is from Guinea in west Africa and has worked at Pret for five years, was also incredulous that staff would receive the £1,000 bonus. “What? Why? Why would you give us £1,000 each?”
Schlee later expanded on his earlier tweet to confirm that the £1,000 bonus would be paid to all employees who are on the payroll during the week the deal completes, adding: “It’s serendipity for those who have just joined.”
Even employees joining Pret between now and when the deal is official late in the summer will collect the £1,000. It should help with recruitment, which Schlee has complained has become tough since Brexit. The chain, which draws a large proportion of staff from the European Union, told parliament last year that just one in 50 job applicants were British because Britons did not view its shops as a “desirable place to work”.
The sale will also mark a lucrative payday for Bridgepoint, which bought the chain for £364m in 2008. William Jackson, chairman of Pret and managing director of Bridgepoint , said the chain “has a unique culture and is a great British success story”. Jackson said he would continue to pick up Pret’s porridge pots for breakfast and his favourite hoisin duck wraps for lunch.
The chain opened with a single shop, near Victoria station, in central London in July 1986. It was started by entrepreneur Julian Metcalfe and his university friend Sinclair Beecham. They bought the brand out of the liquidation of Pret’s first incarnation in Hampstead a few years earlier.
There are now 530 Pret shops in the UK, 92 in the US, 26 in Hong Kong, 24 in France, two in Dubai and Denmark, and one in each Singapore and the Netherlands.
Metcalfe shared in a £50m payday when a third of the business was sold to McDonald’s in 2001. It is thought that Metcalfe sold almost all his remaining stake in Pret in 2008 when it was bought by Bridgepoint. The company declined to comment on Metcalfe’s current involvement.
Metcalfe went on to create Metcalfe’s skinny popcorn, which was sold to crisps giant Kettle Foods in 2016, and Asian-inspired restaurant chain Itsu, in which Pret’s boss Schlee is a big private investor.
The Reimann’s JAB has been on a global acquisition spree, buying up coffee, tea and snacks brands including Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Douwe Egberts and Tassimo coffee, American bakery giant Panera Bread and Dr Pepper Snapple. It also owns speciality brands including San Francisco’s Peet’s Coffee and Might Leaf Tea, Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea and Oregon’s Stumptown Coffee.
