Family strenghts
As a boy, Ronnie Massarella would stand holding a candle while his father built a wooden ice-cream float. Old black and white photographs of that float now adorn the walls of Thurcroft Hall, the grand 16th century South Yorkshire home of Ronnie Massarella and the headquarters of his company, the Massarella Catering Group.
Pioneer of UK in-store and shopping mall catering, Massarella now heads a £40m concern, with 106 outlets and more than 2,000 employees. "When I look back, I have to pinch myself," Massarella says. "I've got four sons in the business. We're doing a damn good job and no one taught us, we did it ourselves!"
The descendant of an Italian immigrant family that settled in rural South Yorkshire, Massarella's life has been shaped by selling ice-cream and horses. But he went into the family business reluctantly.
"I had visions of better things," he says, smiling. "I always had ambitions to get into catering." His chance didn't come until the 1970s, when he was married. He then bought back a small part of the original family business, which had been sold to J Lyons.
Included in the deal were a few park cafés and seaside tearooms, and ownership of these fuelled his catering ambition. The memory of an earlier trip to a horse show in Switzerland had stayed in his mind. "I saw all these beautiful restaurants and coffee shops and came home with some weird and wonderful ideas."
But it was his connections with the showjumping fraternity that gave him the opportunities to realise his ambition. He was given the task of taking his cousin's horse, Mr Softee, to the Olympic Games in Mexico City, where he won a bronze medal. Asked to take over the management of the British showjumping team half-way through, he was made Chef d'Equipe the following year, a position he still holds.
On a subsequent trip, he stopped off in the great shopping mecca of New York and liked what he saw. "I visited a number of restaurants in stores," he recalls, "and I came back with what I thought was a brilliant idea."
When he returned home, eager to tell his wife, there was a young girl sitting in the kitchen, wanting to buy a horse. Her uncle owned a large Sheffield department store. So it was, in 1977, that Atkinson's became the site of the first Massarella in-store unit.
An even bigger piece of luck was Massarella's introduction to Sir Hugh Fraser, whose wife was a member of the British showjumping team. Within a year of Massarella's return from the USA, there were units in House of Fraser stores in Blackpool and Newcastle. Before long, the company was contracting to take over more of the stores' catering facilities.
"Our strength was our family business," says Massarella. "My four sons, my wife, the odd cousin…we served good, wholesome food and when we opened a unit, we did it ourselves. We were hands-on and always came up with what we promised."
Yet another visit to the USA spawned the move into shopping malls. There are now Massarella coffee shops and restaurants in 13 shopping centres, ranging from Barnsley to Southampton.
For the future, the company is keeping its eye on the renaissance of the city centre and is making quiet inroads into contract catering. But remaining a family company is a top priority, at least while he is at the helm.
He remembers the advice he was given a few years ago when the idea of flotation was discussed. "You are quite capable of going public," he was told. "But looking at the way you enjoy your business - if I were you, I'd stay as you are."
