From Corner Café
to JSE Giant
As told to
Carié Maas
TAFELBERG
Introduction
It might be impish to place the origins of an intrinsically South African company on a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. But then the main character in the creation of this company, and many of the pioneers who followed in his footsteps, never lacked a mischievous sense of humour and adventure.
Historians claim that since classical antiquity there has been something special about the soil of Lemnos. Archaeologists from the University of Glasgow in Scotland even studied the composition of “Lemnian Earth” – clay the islanders shaped into pellets, stamped with the head of Artemis, and used for medicinal purposes until post-medieval times. They concluded that scientific analysis in isolation, without taking the totality of the environment into account, would present only part of a complex story.
Lemnos is where the family of the Famous Brands founder hailed from, and where his nephews also came from when he badly needed help in expanding the business.
It is alluring to lend a mythical beginning to something that started small and grew to a size never imagined. But is it accurate to attribute the extraordinary commercial success of the company to something in the soil?
The individuals involved in this tale insist that, rather than mythical potions or predestiny, it took a few very simple ingredients to make their treasure grow.
This book will explore these “simple” ingredients. It will look at the people and processes that helped one man’s inspired idea take root in various outlets and forms; that helped the original company evolve into a listed entity and, after a few years of mediocre growth, mature into the achiever it has become today.
Famous Brands boasts some 2 000 outlets in more than 16 countries, it employs around 1 500 people and has created jobs for many thousands more. The listing price of R1 has reached highs of more than R95 a share which equates to a market capitalisation of more than R9 billion. Financial results such as headline earnings growth of more than 21 per cent over the past six years and the projected potential growth landed the company first prize in the Financial Mail Top Companies Awards in June 2012. Forbes.com named it one of the 10 most innovative companies in Africa in the same year, and the Sunday Times Top 100 Companies survey rated it fifth with compound growth of 38,74 per cent per year over five years.
But Famous Brands wasn’t built in a day, and the many growth spurts were tempered by setbacks. The story of the company’s trials and achievements can be told in three phases: that of the genius and vision of an independent thinker and his eldest son, who couldn’t carry the baton further; that of his nephews and youngest son who revived the embers in the wake of a family disaster; and that of a family wise enough to step back at the right time for professional management.
It is the story of George and Georgie Halamandres; of John Halamandres and brothers Peter, Fanis, Perry and Babis Halamandaris; and also that of current chief executive Kevin Hedderwick and the troops he inherited and assembled. It’s also the story of the many individual entrepreneurs and franchisees that they helped, and who in turn helped them build a food Hercules South Africa can be proud of.
Founding Father
1927 to 1974
CHAPTER 1
An unceremonious start
Imagine you’re 16 years old, you have just returned from your father’s funeral and the next moment a set of keys is placed in your hand. It’s not a symbolic gesture; it’s an order from your mother to go and open your father’s restaurant, and run it for the rest of the day. Things have irreversibly changed. You will no longer go to school. You will run the family restaurant in downtown Johannesburg.
The restaurant, the Good Hope Café, was in Main Street, opposite where the Carlton Hotel would be built in 1973. At this time, in the late 1920s, it served breakfast, lunch and dinner, had a varied menu, and had become very popular. Back then all restaurants were called “cafés”, and the heart of Johannesburg was still frequented by the well-heeled. A meal cost you sixpence (5c).
The restaurant was established by Malama and Spiros Halamandres, who came to South Africa from the Greek island of Lemnos at the end of the Anglo Boer War in 1902. The authorities in Athens had not yet started keeping record of people emigrating from Greece.
The Greek diaspora had begun in ancient times, and continued through the Middle Ages to modern times. After the Greek War of Independence (1821 – 1832) and the Treaty of Constantinople some families returned to the homeland. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, economic factors drove many away to a host of countries, including the United States of America, Australia and South Africa. Why the couple’s surname was rewritten as Halamandres in the Roman script, and not Halamandaris, is open to speculation. Did an immigration official make the mistake when they first came to South Africa, or the bank clerk who opened their account? Whatever happened, being Greek and accustomed to the Greek alphabet, they didn’t immediately realise the mistake.
Malama and Spiros lived in Germiston and had five children. Their eldest son, George, was born in 1911.
His father’s premature death from a heart attack in 1927, when George was at the tender age of 16, proved to be the abrupt kick-start to his business journey, which would culminate in him founding the food and beverage giant Famous Brands.
It fell to George to put his four brothers through school, and then, at Malama’s insistence, through medical school. “My grandmother, who was only two bricks and a tickey tall, was quite a forceful woman and her sons were petrified of her until the day of her death,” says John Halamandres, George’s youngest son.
The food business was a tough one, she decided, and the four younger brothers, Otto, Costa, Alf and Nicky, were not to join the family business, but rather be sent to a top medical training establishment – regardless of how many meals had to be sold to accomplish it. They were all trained at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, known today as King’s Health Partners.
Costa, the second brother, became a gynaecologist in Johannesburg. Alf, a general practitioner, moved to Toronto, Canada, and hyphenated the surname to Halam-Andres to anglicise the pronunciation. Otto became a maxillofacial surgeon in Durban. Nicky, the eccentric youngest son, gave up his studies in his residency year and never worked. He got married in London, but divorced very quickly and returned to South Africa, where Malama and George looked after him.
Sadly, Nicky died of health complications related to obesity. None of the doctors in the family tasted the success that would eventually come George’s way. “Maybe the Halamandres family has an addictive gene, because my father’s siblings all gambled their success away,” says John.
“The fact that my father had to leave school to help his mother in the business was something he never let his brothers forget,” says John. “My grandmother must have helped him a lot in the Good Hope Café, but he liked to take credit for its success. It cost him a lot of blood, sweat and tears, he used to say.”
In 1939, when he was 28, George Halamandres married Kaliope Poulos, who was 20. Poppy, as she was called, was also born in South Africa, and their home language was English. Their first son, George Jr, or Georgie as he was called, was born a year after the marriage.
In 1951, when Georgie was 11 years old, his family decided to emigrate to California.
According to his nephew Peter Caradas, George sold the Good Hope Café to a cousin before he left for America. Malama and George kept ownership of the buildings the restaurant occupied, and Malama later lived above the premises until her death in 1973. John says that George didn’t work in America and wanted to remain retired. Peter remembers that some foreign-exchange issue made George decide to return to South Africa.
But not before he saw a lot of development and innovation in the American food industry. He was in America just as the brothers McDonald