In the late 1980s, Bruce White followed several generations of his family into the Market for one reason – he wanted to earn enough money to become a racing driver. He soon sped to that goal, but alongside his successful racing career, Bruce has also built an eponymous business that for the last three and a half decades has been one of the premier outlets for mushrooms in the South East of England.

When they first entered Covent Garden Market in the 1860s, the White family were established growers with a 650-acre farm in Iver and a farmhouse located almost exactly where the M25 and the M4 now cross. They grew mountains of vegetables and smaller volumes of fruit and became a mainstay in the Growers’ Pavilion in the old market.

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“In those days, to have a plot in the Growers’ Pavilion was a big thing,” says Bruce, the fifth generation to run the business in its various iterations. The first was ES White, run by Bruce’s great great grandfather, Edward, the original farmer of the clan. When his son William George took over, the firm became WG White, working from the same farm and on the same plot at Covent Garden. Bruce’s grandfather George was the next to take the reins and retained the WG White name, but he never worked in the market – preferring to employ people to sell for him.

Bruce takes up the story: “When my dad, Bill, took over the farm, he did work on the market, as WG White & Son. He was given the farm very young and in the 1960s when you had a farm that size, you were a big hitter. He was given everything and lived a playboy lifestyle, it’s fair to say. He would go to a nightclub nearly every night in a dinner jacket, then rock up to work at the market. He went on cruises when only the aristocracy did that, he raced cars and basically lived an amazing life. He wasn’t a bad person at all, but unfortunately, he wasn’t a particularly good businessman, spent more than he earned and the farm went bust in 1967.

“The real pity was that had I been born six months earlier than I was, the farm would have automatically been passed down to me as I was last in the line. But I wasn’t and we had to sell the farm, which was a terrible shame. Dad had enough money left to buy a house and thankfully, the one thing he kept business-wise was the plot on the Growers’ Pavilion.”

Bill decided to focus on mushrooms, as it was a year-round product, there were lots of small growers all over the UK and relatively few specialist mushroom traders at that time. “He did OK and was determined not to make the same mistakes with money a second time around,” remembers Bruce. “He built the business and kept it at a low level, moved into the Growers’ Pavilion at the new market in 1974 and worked alongside the growers, as well as hagglers like Bobby Kent and Johnny Connell.”

Driving force

Bruce was born in 1968 and had developed his own passion for motor sports by the time he left school at 16. “All I wanted to do was race cars, or at the very least design them,” he says. “I became a draftsman but quickly decided there was no money in that. I was also playing a good standard of rugby when my dad said why don’t you come and work for me and raise yourself some money to follow your passion?

“I was 17 and I came up to the market and saw a lot of people making very good money, so thought 'this might suit'. I didn’t like the hours, particularly trying to fit in rugby training and matches for Marlow and Bucks around them. I’d drive the lorry to training, go and load mushrooms up from several farms (all by hand!) and then go straight to work for 1.30am.

“Me and dad were very close, but working together was a disaster. He wanted an easy life – to be in the pub at 5.30 in the morning, but I wanted to earn as much money as I could. We argued a lot. Side Salads was just starting up on the Growers and I was very friendly with a guy called John Sawday, who set that firm up with Bill Lowe. John offered me a role as junior salesman, on £360 a week with a Golf GTi company car – well, that was good enough for me, so I left the family firm. My dad retired and shut down WG White.

“That would have been 1987. Side Salads was massive in iceberg lettuce and I was doing the mushrooms. The mushroom growing industry was moving to Ireland at the time and there were three big firms, two of whom Barney Greenhill had tied up in the market and one of which was Kernan Mushrooms. They wanted to get into London, so started supplying me. It was phenomenal product, much better than the English and the right price and I was selling pallets and pallets of it. I suppose inevitably, after about 18 months I thought ‘I should be doing this for myself’. I still had the itch to race cars and I still couldn’t afford it.”

So, it was time for the White name to return to the Market’s tenant list after a brief hiatus. A unit was available on the Growers’ Pavilion, but Bruce had just bought a flat and didn’t have the £4,000 he needed to take it on and start the business up.

“I had a meeting in a service station on the M4 with Brian Cartwright, the marketing director of Kernan’s, to make sure they would support a 22-year-old start up,” recalls Bruce. “He really put his neck on the line for me. There were two banks in the village I lived in and I went to the first with a business plan and asked for a £4,000 overdraft. The manager said ‘one question – how much are you putting in?’ to which I naively replied ‘nothing’. He told me that had I been investing, he would have matched it, so I rewrote the business plan, went to the other bank and said I needed £8,000 and that I was putting £4,000 in. They said yes (I never did put a penny in!).

Festive leg up

“I opened on November 1st, 1990 as Bruce White Ltd and one of my mentors was Stevie Turner, a lovely man who had a fantastic business. He used to do a lot of Christmas trees, but had just lost a salesman and asked me in my first week if I wanted to do the trees. He said ‘they’re hard work, get in early, get out early, only do the expensive ones and don’t give them away’. I was new, so I did it, started the third week of November and just hit it for two and a half weeks and followed his advice. It was all cash in those days (we don’t do any now) and when I got out early, as advised, I sat in my flat with £30,000 in cash all over the lounge floor. I worked everything out and realised I’d earned ten grand in my first three weeks' trading, which was unbelievable. So after just over a month in business, I paid the overdraft off, bought my first racing car – a Renault 5 – and started racing!

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“I did OK with the Renault 5, then got asked to race other categories. I started racing Caterhams, which was a big stepping stone up to GT Cars, and won the British championship in 1997. I raced a Porsche in British GT for a bit and raced Radicals for a few years. It was mostly in the UK, but also around Europe and I loved it. I spent a lot of time at Silverstone and Brands Hatch. I still played rugby, but the work and racing made it harder to train and the standard dropped a bit, so I gave up. A massive mistake really and when I went back to playing later on, it was never quite the same.”

In the early days of the business, It was simply Bruce and a porter, before he took Cliffie on. “He was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet,” says Bruce. “We worked so well together, before he sadly passed away at 52. It was great fun up here, we had such a laugh and I thought the Growers’ Pavilion was the greatest place on the planet to work. The main market was ultra-competitive, but we weren’t like that. If iceberg was a fiver, then everyone was a fiver, no more no less. There were some very big companies here then, but all our customers were small and we used to beat the market a lot of the time as we’d be in early.”

Bruce White Ltd grew, but there was never an emphasis on rapid expansion. “A bit like my dad before me, I never really wanted to get too big – there were a few companies going bust at the time, but I was earning decent money and I never wanted to be in a position where I’d knock people.

“I was just doing mushrooms at first, then got involved in salads. Kernan’s got taken over by Monaghan’s, where Barney Greenhill had the exclusive stranglehold. He sold more mushrooms than anyone here, but Brian Cartwright became the marketing director at Monaghan’s and he decided that they would supply both of us. Barney wasn’t too chuffed, but I was doing a good job and in the end, I kept that business longer than Greenhill's did."

Mushroom growing continued to evolve. “A lot of the British growers had gone and although the Irish were doing a good job, we’d started to look to Belgium and Holland, before around the turn of the century, Poland was the talk,” explains Bruce. “That was before Poland joined the EU and I was the first here to get involved.

The Polish product was good and while the market value was still being set by the other countries, it was cheaper from Poland, so for 2-3 years, we had a really good living out of it. I still believe we have the two or three best Polish suppliers and being in at the start has really helped us there. We definitely have the best - and they only supply us in London.”

A new partner

Wayne Patrick, pictured above left, has been Bruce’s business partner for the last seven years, had worked for Greenhill’s and then The French Garden. “We’d been friends for a long time, even though we were essentially competing as the two biggest fish in the mushroom business in this market,” says Bruce. “We never trod on each other’s toes and we’d often help each other out at the end of a week, so we were completely clear of stock. We’d talked about working together for some time, before in the end I said ‘it’s simple, if you can come in and double the size of the business, you can have half of it’. I knew I’d be no worse off and we’d be really strong together. That’s exactly what he did; we knew that to be really competitive, we needed to be buying trucks of mushrooms as the smaller firms were starting to struggle. You don’t earn good money by buying a pallet here and a pallet there.

“In seven years, we haven’t had one cross word; we’ve built the business up together. We did it all by the book, we’re now the biggest mushroom wholesaler in the UK. We’re the only wholesale firm that buys full trucks – we do about 120 pallets of mushrooms a week and all the cultivated mushrooms are Polish. It’s turned out to be a really good move.”

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The range and quality of the product the firm sells now is a far cry from where it all started, says Bruce: “We only sold open and closed mushrooms, then cup and button and the flats came in, but it’s only in the last 20 years that more volume of the more exotic mushrooms has come into play. Over the years, some of it has been us driving new product into the market and some of it has been buying to meet customer demand. We saw the changes here before a lot of the other markets would have as we’re the catering market and the restaurants wanted different stuff to the retailers. It’s still like that – wild mushrooms are really big for us, whereas they wouldn’t be in other markets.

“I’d say we were maybe 50:50 retail and catering when I started, but the customers have changed and the way they buy and pay has changed. The roles of the salesman and the buyer are completely different now. The seasons were so important – understanding where the gaps were and where it was possible to make hay as a salesman or speculate and buy forward as a buyer was key. Not that there’s a great science to this game, but that knowledge was so important. It was a brilliant time – there’s nothing like reading the market right and getting a good deal. Now the seasons generally overlap, the prices don’t fluctuate like they used to and most buyers log in and order what they need on that day. We’d often tell customers when product was going to go short in advance and advise them to buy ahead, but now if they want 32 boxes of button mushrooms, that’s what they want and it’s very hard to shift them. It’s become more of an order-taking job, which removes some of the fun. But that’s just how it is.”

Eighty per cent of the business is mushrooms and the rest is salads and veg. “Our own brand Bulldog Mushrooms has worked really well for us as it differentiates outstanding product, adds Bruce. “We’ve got who I think is the best cauliflower grower in the country as a supplier, but the packaging wasn’t doing the product any favours, so we paid to put it in the Bulldog boxes and it looks fantastic. We did the same with savoy cabbage. People still buy brands and if your product looks great, it makes a huge difference.”

Bruce’s working hours have changed significantly. “We used to start at 1.30am and the main market opened at 4am. We worked harder then than we do now, but we didn’t half play hard and everyone here lived that life. I’d always go out on a Friday night and then be playing rugby all weekend. I’d leave the rugby club at 9pm have a couple of hours kip and come in. Now I leave home at 8.30pm to get in for 10pm, although I only do three days a week in the market these days.”

Family life

Bruce is married to Catherine and they have two boys. “Catherine has been amazing. I can’t really believe how lucky I am,” he says. “I was already working here when we met and she’s been married for 30 years to a man who works these hours and has also spent a lot his spare time playing rugby or racing cars. Both of the boys were born on a Friday, both times I’ve gone to work that night and come home to take her to the hospital and both times, I was racing cars at Brands Hatch that weekend. Amazingly, both times I won and the first time, I clinched the British Championship that Sunday. I’ve got a lovely picture of me with Patrick and the trophy when he’s two days old! The same thing happened when Robert was born, it must be some kind of record.

“So, it has been a bit stressful at times, but she is so understanding. We’ve got a great marriage and family life, but she’s let me get on with things and that’s pretty cool really.”

There was never any push to bring Patrick or Robert into the family firm. “As soon as I stopped working with dad, we were fine again. He was an amazing bloke, my biggest supporter. But because of the experience working with him, I didn’t see my boys coming into the business, I just wanted them to do whatever they wanted to do. All I wanted was for them to be my best mates and they are. My eldest son is an accountant and my youngest is in digital marketing. I suppose it’s a shame in a small way as they could have been the sixth generation, but they are both happy and doing very well and that’s all that matters to me.”

The market life has suited Bruce though, he admits. “It’s a good business and it’s been very kind to me. I’m 56 and I’m still racing cars – in the last 10 years, I’ve raced historic Porsches and Lotuses. I still win the odd race, we won at Zandvoort recently and a big race at Spa in 2022. I get to race great cars at nice circuits and this business has allowed me to do that. I am so grateful.”