Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
My guest today is Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE, Founder of The Black Farmer range of food products. Born in Jamaica, Wilfred came to the UK when his parents, part of the Windrush generation, moved here in the 1950s. Raised in inner city Birmingham with school punishing him and his dyslexia, Wilfred found an oasis in the tending of his family’s allotment, growing vegetables to supplement their low income. In that allotment he made himself a promise, one day he’d have his own farm. Wilfred kept focus on that dream, as he got a dishonourable discharge from the Army as he fought expectations to produce and direct for the BBC despite having no academic qualifications and, as he left the safety of that BBC position, to set up a food and drinks marketing agency. Wilfred – you guessed correctly – got his farm and in 2005 he launched The Black Farmer, a brand of gluten free foods which has now grown into a food, drink and lifestyle business. Wilfred joins me imminently to talk about all of this and his passion to bring diversity to the food and farming industries. And the music in today’s Jazz Shapers comes from Donny Hathaway, Dianne Reeves, Kokoroko and here’s Mavis Staples and Levon Helm with You Got To Move.
Mavis Staples there and Levon Helm with You Got To Move. Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE is my Business Shaper, looking me straight in the eye as I say that, it’s fantastic to have you here.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Well, thank you very much for inviting me on your programme.
Elliot Moss
And it’s actually our last programme of the year and indeed the series and what a brilliant way to go out. I mentioned, Wilfred, when I introduced you, about a dream. Are you a dreamer, Wilfred? Is that why we’re having this conversation?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
I am. And I’m glad you started off with that because we live in a society where having a dream tends to be underestimated. One of the things I love about the Americans is that they really understand the importance of having a dream and I tend to go and do a lot of talks around the country and one of the things I always emphasise to people, it only starts if you have the audacity to dream and dream big. If you’re from society’s dustbin heap, as it were that I’m from, you have to be able to dream that you could get out of this, you have to dream that whatever it takes, you will actually be able to sort of fulfil your dream because by dreaming it, by dreaming it, you put it out there and the universe delivers. All too often, people have these aspirations and they keep it hidden, they keep it inside, they’re a bit embarrassed to go and talk about it but it’s essential because you will find your guardian angels if you put it out there. You will not find those guardian angels if you keep it to yourself.
Elliot Moss
But Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones the kid, when did the kid decide he was going to be audacious? When did the kid decide he was going to be a dreamer? How did you, a flamboyant man now, become this person I’m looking at?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Well, I’m from a family of eleven and I would like you to imagine this. I was born in Jamaica and I came to this country when I was four years old and you could imagine what a shock that would have been to my system because in those days, people like my parents came over here first, my sister and I were brought up by relatives so I then came and met two strangers, I would have then seen snow for the first time and so it would have been a major sort of culture shock coming to this country and from a family of eleven, so eleven of us living in a two-up, two-down terraced house, we were very, very poor, I can remember really feeling hungry quite a lot of the time. One of the things that I always remember is my mother trying to cook one chicken, one chicken now to feed eleven people, and it ain’t the sort of chickens you now buy from the supermarkets were all tender, it took days to try and… by pot roasting it to tenderise it. So, as a young boy, life was pretty miserable, there was nothing really I can look back with any affection and the only time that I felt a sense of peace and wonder, is on my father’s allotment. Because we were so poor, my father had an allotment and it was my responsibility as the oldest boy to look after this allotment and this allotment became my oasis. It became the place where I could dream and dream big. It wasn’t in an environment where you are constantly having to look over your shoulder, just in case somebody’s going to attack you for no reason. So, that sense of being at one, being able to be one’s authentic self on this allotment, really then galvanised me to say right, I like this feeling so much that one day, I’m going to own my own farm to be in an environment like this so I could feel free.
Elliot Moss
And just before we go into a bit of Donny Hathaway, I get that and the other thing that as I read about you and the story of the business, which is so we’re going to call it The Black Farmer. I’m Black, I’m a farmer, we’re going to call it The Black Farmer, everyone goes that’s a terrible idea and you went, “It is a terrible idea and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Exactly, so, you’ll see perhaps during this talk that everything about me is about being audacious and that you only bring about change if you’re prepared to be audacious. If you’re waiting for permission, you will never bring about change and all too often, especially in the age that we live in where everybody does everything based on evidence, data, research, no moves are made unless the data and the research says it and you will never, ever change anything if you are actually operating on the research and data and before you go to this next track, I just want to give you an example of this because when I decided to create this brand, I wanted it to be a quintessentially British brand, that’s a starting point, I thought normally because you are Black, people think well this is an ethnic brand and therefore it’s going to be ethnic. I said no, I want to do something that’s going to make a statement that I’m Black but I’m British and I’m into sort of farming so that’s why I thought I would do a sausage and now people spend millions trying to come up with a brand name and I scratched my head thinking well what the hell am I going to call it and it came to me because all of my next-door neighbours used to call me The Black Farmer and I thought god, that is a really good brand name, not only is it a fantastic brand name, no one else out there could nick the idea and it has an edge, it’s an edge where people are not too sure about whether it’s the right thing to say, whether it’s politically correct or not but even I was slightly a bit wary so I thought you know what, I will go and do all the classic stuff, I will go and get it researched and all the research came back and says do not call it The Black Farmer because will be offended, it will be upset, it’s going to cause a controversy. But it taught me a really important lesson in life and anybody listening to this, this is one of the things I’d like you to take away with you from this, research will tell you what people were thinking yesterday, research will tell you what people are thinking today but research cannot tell you what people are thinking tomorrow. That’s why you have to have the conviction of your own ideas. If you are trying to bring about change, you can’t wait for everybody to be ready, you can’t wait for permission, you have to have the conviction that you are going to go forward and everyone else would follow. All too often, people are waiting for permission, they are waiting for everything to be ready. You are always behind the curve if you are waiting. Any entrepreneur will tell you that. You have to be bold enough to step forward.
Elliot Moss
Don’t forget those words over the next few weeks, as you plan your 2023 and beyond. Look forwards, don’t look back.
The Black Farmer is with me, that’s Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE, I should add, and we’ve been talking about audacity and we’ve been talking about courage, I guess. Does it come naturally to you after all these years that you’re just going to approach the world this way? Is the courage now, was it always in the DNA? Because there’s one thing feeling those lovely feelings when you were young and there’s another thing then starting to achieve and the stories about you getting the job at the BBC, I mean this is a person that has, you have grafted, Wilfred, you know for all the, the amazing words, there’s real substance underneath all this. Every day you wake up and you go, yeah, that’s me or are there days when you’re questioning whether that courage is still there?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
No, it is good. What we all need in life is to have some success to give us courage to keep going forward. But you are right, in the early days, you have no evidence of what you are planning to do, it is going to work and it’s a good question to say well, what is that drives someone that has no substance, no qualifications, no contacts, what is that drives you to keep going? And one of the things I always say to people, there is an advantage to being brought up in society’s dustbin heap and the advantage is that you don’t fear anything, there’s only one way to go, you either, you go out or you know what the floor looks like and I just think that for me was a big driver, the fact that actually there is nothing to lose. Poverty is a great trainer to help you keep persevering.
Elliot Moss
But that’s really my question, you see, because there was nothing to lose then. Now it’s a bit different.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Well you see that’s really interesting because you are right, now that as you become more successful, it becomes difficult in another way and my philosophy is this, it’s that the moment you stand still in life, the moment you think you are comfortable, life will pass you by. I’m 65 years old now and one of the things I’m always excited by are new things. That is a constant reminder, boy, do not actually get lazy here. One of my fantastic people that I admire is the jobs when they say, “stay hungry” and I absolutely believe that as human beings, in order to achieve the best we can out of our lives, it’s to have that feeling of staying hungry, not feeling satisfied because being satisfied is ultimately destructive.
Elliot Moss
But the dustbin that you talk about, right, this fact, where you say you came from, you obviously you’ve moved on, you’ve obviously now financially much more comfortable, you are comfortable in your own skin, you’re an adult, you’ve got success, people know you. So that hunger is for new things but what else, Wilfred?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
There is still very much part of me that is that young boy trying to escape the ghetto. Still very, very much…
Elliot Moss
Still chasing you.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
…still reminding me not to get comfortable, not to take things for granted. Now, that has its strengths and its weaknesses. So the strength is that I never take anything for granted, I’m always into new things and one of the things that people, well there’s the big question of life is people in search of happiness. What is happiness? And I think you know, as human beings, in order to make use of our lives, it’s about actually how far are we able to push ourselves? So when I look back… if I die tomorrow for example, I’d be able to look back at my life and think boy, you did well, you know the gift of life was good and therefore you made use of it rather than made a waste of it. That is the thing that I have to constantly ask myself on a daily basis, you know, if it all went tomorrow, could I look back and say you’ve done really well here and I sit back and I think, you know, you’re pretty, you’ve done pretty well boy and there’s still more, there’s still more that you could do.
Elliot Moss
I love it. There’ll be people in cars and at breakfast tables going, “Have I done well with the gift of life?” Well, let’s hope the answer is yes because if it’s not Wilfred, they’ve got to get going.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Well there’s, I’ve got, I know you want to go to your music but one of the things I say to people is this, the only way you are able to see whether you are living your life to the maximum is by the number of failures that you’ve made. If you are living a life and you said well, I haven’t failed or I haven’t made a mistake, that is telling you that you are slumming it, that you are not living life, you’re too comfortable. So the gift of life is wasted on you because the only way you will actually grow and develop is by the mistakes, that’s telling you, you are pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. So you are sitting here, people, and you are listening and you feel very satisfied and you’re comfortable. Get up, get up, push yourself. Ask yourself when was the last time you made a mistake because that is telling you, you are living life.
Elliot Moss
Amen. More from my guest, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, he’s coming back in a couple of minutes.
All our former Business Shapers await you on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can of course hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE, he’s right here, right now. Founder of The Black Farmer range of food products. In a number of the things you said, Wilfred, inside of all the insight and the truths, there’s something about this juxtaposition between evidence based decisions and your gut and obviously you sell food, that’s what you make so there’s a kind of a, there’s for me there’s a basic connection there. Over the years, have there been moments when that’s been challenged, where actually you followed the evidence rather than the gut or is it always about Wilfred using his gut?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
I would always use my gut first rather than the evidence and the reason why gut is so important to me is because I’m dyslexic and when I was at school, I didn’t understand what was going on most of the time so, I left school at sixteen without any qualifications at all, I could hardly read and write and so, in order to survive the world out there, I had to use different skills in order to understand what was going on. So, understanding people, you know really getting under the surface of somebody might be saying something but actually, they mean something else, I became highly skilled at and so that gut really served me well and every opportunity that had, I would never have got that opportunity if it meant writing an essay, writing down what I was thinking, it’s all about being able to get in front of people and those people, believe or not, will be trusting their gut. So, I’ll give you an example of that. Another audacious thing that I did because I started up working as a chef and I wanted to elevate… I wanted to get a job in the BBC so that’s quite audacious and I did all the normal things like writing my CV, sending it off to people, you know, they probably would have chucked the CVs in the bin because there would have been hundreds of spelling mistakes and they would have looked at this and how in god’s name is this person even thinking that he could work for the BBC. So one of the things I hate is human resources because what they do is, they filter out people like me and I tell you how I got my job at the BBC, is that there’s BBC Pebble Mill studios at the time, big headquarters, and I would go up to the security guards who were letting people in and out of the buildings and I would say look, can I help you open these barriers and let people in and out and they thought young black kid, why not you know, they didn’t want to get out of their huts in the rain and I would be doing that for months doing that and then I then…
Elliot Moss
How old were you, Wilfred? Just so I can…
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
I would have been in my sort of twenties, you know, and I then from there met the cleaners, who were going in to clean the offices and I said look, can I come and clean the offices with you? And they let me in, so these are people sometimes regarded as the lowest of the low, you know giving this young kid a chance and then I met this guy and I still remember his name to today, his name was Jock Gallagher, pretty senior guy at the BBC and I said to him look, I’d really like to get a job in the BBC, I can do this and I can do that and so he took me up to his office and he talked to me for about an hour and he says look, you know, you’re not the type of person that we would employ at the BBC because you don’t have the education and you know you’ve got a bit of an attitude problem and he said, look….
Elliot Moss
But apart from that. And we’re talking, it’s now the ‘70s right. So being a Black twenty year old kid in the 1970s, is going to be tough.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
And you know, and this is how this man has to be admired really because he said to me, “Look, you know, I tell you what, I’ll give you a job as a runner for three months and to see what happens.” Now that man giving me that break, based on gut, then started off a long career in the BBC. That would never, ever have happened and I can remember they also had something they called the BBC Graduate Training Scheme that tons of people used to apply for and he sat down with me to fill in an application form for me to actually enter onto that scheme and I got on the scheme, I was the only person that had never been to University that got on that scheme. So, one of the things I say to people in life, is to find your guardian angels. Find those people who are going to go out of their way to make things happen for you and every single thing I’ve ever achieved, somebody has put themselves on the line for me. Somebody has trusted their gut in order to give this guy that on paper wouldn’t even get through the door and I think if people could trust their gut a lot more than actually the evidence, they would probably find they will do much better in life. One of the things I find quite interesting when you talk to recruiters, recruiters have said the biggest mistake people make when they are employing people, is they will go on people CV based and their CV will tell them what their experience is, what their qualifications are but what makes it not work out, is what their mindset is. So mindset is about attitude and gut and all that sort of stuff so, people when they’re recruiting, they’re not looking for mindset or they’ll get some sort of psychological sort of profiling to try and somehow sort of working out but if you could trust your gut. We’re going a lot about, talking a lot about gut because it’s so important to me because the one thing that we all recognise we need to trust our gut on, is when we fall in love, you know, when people fall in love, they’re not going on the evidence, they’re going about their gut feelings. Now, your gut sometimes gets it very, very wrong because actually those relationships don’t last or they get it very right but we live in a society where the most fundamental important things to us all, love, we accept our gut is going to lead the way rather than evidence based about actually, we think that these two are going to go together. So that’s what I find fascinating is that in our personal lives, we see gut as important, you come down to business, oh god no, no, no, you’ve got to then start looking at all the evidence and all the research. Oh, I think that actually, our personal lives are probably, could teach us a lot more than we actually think.
Elliot Moss
I’m just wondering right, as you were talking about guardian angels and the way you philosophise, you think about life a lot, it feels like business happens to pay the bills but business doesn’t fil the heart.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
You are exactly right.
Elliot Moss
For you.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
You are exactly right. There are some people who are in business to make lots of money.
Elliot Moss
That’s not you.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
That ain’t me.
Elliot Moss
If you’re the guardian angel, you’re the disciple, you’re the leader of the, there’s a movement in my head that is you’re the font of the movement. What’s it really about, Wilfred?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Well, I run something called The Hatchery because I get lots of people who come to me with great ideas and if I like them and I like the idea, I will then allow them to become a member of The Hatchery and then I will help to develop their business ideas. And I’ve got some pretty good successes at the moment. The first guy that came along, he came to me, his brand is called The Gym Kitchen. This is a Black guy from Peckham, he had this idea to create this brand and he came to me and says look, I want to do something around beef jerky and I says, no, no, no, look we won’t do beef jerky, let’s do something that has really good food credentials and we sorted it, we’ll start off with ready meals and then we’ll branch down into other things. Now that brand is about a £6 million brand, you know, after the space of three, four years, it’s in the likes of Tesco’s, it’s in Asda, it’s in Co-Op and this is start from nothing, that makes me feel good. There’s another brand, part of The Hatchery, called Smorgasbord and this is a guy, older, he was coming up to his fifties and he initially came to me for a job and I said, no, I won’t give you a job but I’ll create this brand with you called Smorgasbord because his experience was around anything to do with sort of Nordic cuisine and again, that brand is about a £5 million brand and you could buy that in Tesco’s, in Sainsbury’s, it’s those things that me feel good and I’m launching another brand called I Am Halal because I recognise that there is a very strong Muslim middleclass market that have not sort of been addressed and I’m launching that. That is what makes me wake up in the morning. There is no fun at all or I’m going to have in having a posh car or a posh house or a boat, it’s about actually what difference can I make to people’s lives, is the driver for me.
Elliot Moss
Final chat coming up with my guest today, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, and there’s also some music from Kokoroko, that’s in just a moment, you aren’t going anywhere, I’m sure.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones is my Business Shaper. We’ve talked about a lot of things, Wilfred, we talked about what drives you, we talked about audacity, we talked about courage and bravery and all sorts of stuff. There’s a big thing for me around you believing in change in all sorts of ways, whether it’s more diversity in the food business, whether it’s just generally more Black representation, whether it’s your role and your thinking about politics and the power of politics to change. Where’s that going to go over the next few years? What are you going to be doing to change the world to make it fairer, to make it more what you want it to be?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Well, where it’s going to go, you need to start from well, where did it begin? And it began that a feeling as a young child and not having much choice in life, it’s back to what I was telling you about being on society’s dustbin heap, is that you see yourself as this small person, there’s this major thing happening out there that you feel as though you can’t be part of it and you can’t be connected to it. So, my journey, which has been a tough journey, I don’t want everybody to have to go through that in order to feel that their lives are sort of fulfilled and therefore if there’s anything that I could do to help people on that journey, I would do my utmost because there is still obviously a very strong side of me that feels the pain and the disadvantage and the pressure of being that little nobody and wanting to try and make it easier on people. I think I would do that all of my life, in terms of for me to feel fulfilled as a person, I need to feel as though I am making a difference to people’s lives.
Elliot Moss
And you toyed with politics.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Yes, I have and I’m still quite interested in politics and one of the challenges about politics is that it’s a team game and you know I wouldn’t regard myself as a team player, I think that one of the fantastic things about running your own company is that it’s a dictatorship, you know, I say to people you know…
Elliot Moss
Do what you like.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Yeah, yeah, I say look, this is not a, it’s not about a choice, I’m the one on the line here, your choice is whether you want to come along this journey or not and I think that politics is going to change, I think that that’s what I find fascinating about it because you don’t really, in this day and age, need MPs, the idea you have a person that’s going to represent the interests of a constituency, is crazy and I would, I would bet whether in my lifetime or in another thirty years or so, the idea that you are going to have someone doing that, is not going to be around, I think people are going to be able to sort of vote, with the age we live in, you know you could text your vote and things like that, it would be more like they have in sort of in Switzerland where it’s constant referenda. That’s what I think will be.
Elliot Moss
But if you were, if there was the Party of Wilfred, and Wilfred had a manifesto, what’s the first thing on the manifesto? What’s it going to say?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
The first thing on the manifesto is that you have to give people personal responsibility. Is that if you make people dependent, they’re not going to feel that they are able to do it themselves. One of the things that I pride myself in doing is pushing people outside their comfort zone. What people tend to do, is that they tend to accept the barrier that people present. That’s a mistake with me because I will push you far further than you think you could go and the amazement that comes from people when you push them farther than they think they could go and they’ve achieved the things, it helps them to move forward. So that’s what I think you could do with people, is to not accept their barrier, to say no, I see you could do more.
Elliot Moss
I love that and I love everything you’ve said, frankly, I’m really, really enjoying it and people will go oh you should be questioning him more on these things because he’s a crazy guy but I think that’s the point. Do you relax as well though? That’s my last question. Are there moments when Wilfred says you know what, that’s really important, you’ve got to push? You’ve got to be audacious but sometimes when the door is shut, yeah, do you actually sit down and go I need to take a break here.
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
I’ve launched a brand called Pause and the whole idea behind Pause is when you do need to sort of take a break and reflect and to recharge and to rejuvenate. It’s really essential. You need to take stock of your thinking and the direction that you want to go in and the greatest pause in my life is when about eight years ago, I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia because that could have gone for a pause into nothing, i.e. death and I can remember my consultant saying you know, you’ve got about three months to live and one of the things you do not want to have in your life, is acute myeloid leukaemia because most people don’t survive it and I was at the sort of wrong age of it. I was in hospital for a whole year and there’s no greater time of reflection and pause than to be able to look at your life, to see what you’ve achieved and then if you were given more time, what would you do with that time and believe or not, one of the great gifts I got from that period of time is, I had a stem cell transplant and one of the consequences of a stem cell transplant is something called graft versus host disease so, the audience can’t see this but if they were able to see me, they will see that my face has got vitiligo, people are usually very, very polite and they don’t ask about it but this vitiligo is a consequence of that stem cell transplant. Now for me, the reason why this vitiligo is a gift, because every day I look in the mirror, it’s a constant reminder that boy, you are lucky to be here because if you were born a different time, you’d be dead because the science was not around so, it’s just a fantastic reminder that do not take things for granted, make use of every day because actually, life is really, really precious and unfortunately, people don’t realise that unless they have the sort of experience that I’ve sort of talked about.
Elliot Moss
It’s been an absolute pleasure and a great way to conclude the series here on Jazz Shapers. Thank you and so many things to think about between now and when we are back in the New Year. Listen, have a lovely break over the December. Have a good pause. Take it easy on yourself, don’t be too comfortable, Wilfred, I know you won’t do that but just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE
Okay, now this is finishing off on our conversation about pausing. When I want to pause, I love listening to this tune here and it’s the Battle Hymn of the Republic by Herbie Mann.
Elliot Moss
That was Herbie Mann with the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones. He talked about being audacious. Everything in his life is characterised by that one thing. You’ve got to go for it. He talked about failing and if you’re not failing, you’re in your comfort zone, so everybody needs to go out and fail more. And really importantly and critically, he talked about the gift of life and never taking anything for granted. Wonderful stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, be well, have a lovely end of the year and we’ll see you in 2023.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.