A family that arrived with £5 and a kitchen full of samosas.

Patak’s began as a family kitchen business in north London, but its roots run through East Africa. Laxmishanker Pathak — the company calls him L.G. Pathak — left Gujarat for Mombasa, Kenya, in 1938, where his eldest brother made sweets and samosas, English Wikipedia says, citing his wife’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph. In 1945 he married Shanta, born in Zanzibar. During the Mau Mau uprising the family left Kenya and sailed to England on the SS Uganda in 1956, arriving, the Telegraph obituary recorded, with £5. The company’s own account says they landed in a freezing November.

Work was hard to find. Shanta wondered whether the sweets and snacks the family had made in Kenya could sell in Britain, and began cooking in the family’s small kitchen in Kentish Town; the company says queues formed outside the door and that their son Kirit, then about ten, delivered orders across London. The Guardian reported in 2007 that the business was founded in 1957, that Laxmishanker began with samosas made in the family kitchen, and that he saved enough to buy a first shop. The company places that shop behind Euston Station; English Wikipedia, citing The Guardian’s 2010 obituary of Shanta Pathak, puts it in Drummond Street and adds a second shop in Bayswater in 1961.

The turning point, in the company’s telling, came when the Pathaks over-ordered vegetables and Laxmishanker decided to pickle the surplus. Combined with freshly ground spices preserved in oil, the same method gave them spice pastes that let a home cook make a curry with the taste of India. Along the way the family dropped the “h” from Pathak for the brand name: The Guardian said it was to make the name easier for English customers to pronounce, and the company says it sometimes confused people.

Making pickles in a London flat brought complaints. In 1962, English Wikipedia says, citing the Telegraph obituary, neighbours objected to the noise and smells, the council gave the family three months, and production moved to a converted mill in Brackley, Northamptonshire. The business later moved north to Lancashire, the Scotsman’s obituary of Shanta Pathak recorded.

Pastes, pickles, sauces and three quarters of Britain’s curry houses.

The second generation turned a pickle business into a household brand. Kirit Pathak had started as an errand boy at six, The Guardian reported, and left school at 17 to work full time in the business; the company says he took over from his father, and that his wife Meena Pathak, who developed many of the recipes, came up with the idea of ready-made cooking sauces for people with little time to cook from scratch. The Canadian Patak’s site describes Meena as the brand’s creative director and recipe custodian.

By 2007, The Guardian reported, Patak’s made curry pastes, pappadums, chapattis and cooking sauces, sold them through the major supermarket chains and exported to around 40 countries. It was also a trade supplier on a remarkable scale: the paper said Patak’s supplied about 75% of Britain’s 8,000 Indian restaurants. The company was best known, the same report said, for its pickles and chutneys. Sales reached £66 million in the year to September 2006, with international business accounting for about a quarter.

Production settled in Leigh, near Wigan, where The Guardian located the factory in 2007. Wigan Archives, which keeps Patak’s packaging in its museum collection, records that Cherie Blair officially opened the Leigh factory and company headquarters in 2002, producing curry pastes, sauces and spices. Leigh remains the brand’s head office, English Wikipedia says, and the company today puts its workforce at more than 700 people worldwide.

The packs have long leaned on colour as a cue for heat and flavour. In 2017 Patak’s launched single-use Paste Pots in Madras, Tikka Masala and Korma, first at Morrisons, with packaging by the design agency Hornall Anderson. Packaging Europe reported that the designers used swirls of purple, orange and cream inspired by the colours of Indian festivals, together with a paisley pattern, and chose graphic illustration over food photography to suggest the burst of flavour from the pot.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make the seasonings, stocks, tomatoes and sauces that sit behind a meal, and they come from Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States: Maggi, Knorr, Mutti, Cirio, Patak’s, Lee Kum Kee and Old El Paso. Brands in this part of the store cupboard in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf on another continent.

A sauce or stock brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a jar, a cube, a tin, a name and the kitchen it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family sale to Associated British Foods.

The Pathak family sold the business in May 2007 to Associated British Foods, the group whose brands then ranged from Silver Spoon sugar and Twinings tea to Ovaltine. The Guardian reported on 29 May 2007 that no price was disclosed and that analysts put it at more than £100 million; The Daily Telegraph reported the next day that the family had sold for £200 million. ABF’s finance director John Bason told The Guardian the group had been courting the family for more than five years. Kirit Pathak became chairman of a combined Patak’s and Blue Dragon business, Meena Pathak became a director, and their children were expected to stay on. The family kept the rights to the Patak brand in India, where it had a small operation of its own.

In April 2008 ABF brought Patak’s, its pan-Asian brand Blue Dragon and its ethnic wholesale business under one new unit, AB World Foods, Just Food reported. That company still owns the brand: the British Patak’s website is published by AB World Foods Ltd. Wigan Archives, meanwhile, keeps a Patak’s Madras spice paste pack in a museum collection devoted to the history of curry in the borough.

The family’s name is still on the label and in the story the brand tells about itself. The company’s website carries a memorial to Kirit Pathak as founder, chairman and life president, and its history is written in the first person, as a family looking through old photographs. It tells of the Kentish Town kitchen, the shop near Euston and the over-ordered vegetables that became the first pickles, and it credits Meena Pathak with the sauces that took the brand from the curry-house kitchen into home cooking.

For a design guide, Patak’s shows how a family story and a strong colour code can carry a brand from a London kitchen to a national factory. Compare Diaspora Co, which sells single-origin Indian spices, and Lee Kum Kee, the Hong Kong sauce maker still run by its founding family. For this guide we use chilli red, turmeric and a festival purple with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Patak’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.