British food brands that went abroad

Iconic British snack brand KP has been sold to a German company, it's been announced. The 160-year-old brand is part of snacking royalty here in the UK. Sister brands read like a who's who of snack classics, including McCoy’s crisps and Hula Hoops.

The salted peanuts brand's British owner, United Biscuits, has sold KP to German outfit Intersnack for £500 million.

Sadly KP is far from the first British brand to head abroad. Here’s a rundown of other iconic British foods now in foreign ownership.

It’s been a favourite of hungry ploughmen and snotty-nosed schoolboys for donkey’s years, but Branston Pickle (a peculiarly British condiment) has been sold to the Japanese. We don’t mean Japanese shoppers have taken a fancy to the sharp tang and crunchy consistency. No, Japanese vinegar manufacturer Mizkan Group has gobbled up the British brand in a £92.5 million deal. Mizkan has no plans to mess with the much-loved recipe, so consumers shouldn’t notice any difference. But it’s perhaps a sad day for our food industry when such a typically British brand is no longer produced by a British company.

• The UK's most iconic food brands

Sarson's and Haywards

Branston isn’t even the first British acquisition by the Mizkan Group. Earlier this year the company bought vinegar maker Sarson's and pickles firm Haywards for £41 million. Sarson's distinctive pear-shaped bottle has been a chip shop staple for decades. The country’s bestselling vinegar was first produced in 1794, and the company claims that nine out of 10 portions of chips are sprinkled with Sarson's.

Haywards is another historic British brand, dating to 1868. It makes pickled onions, red cabbage, piccalilli and gherkins. Like Branston, for the time being at least the products will remain unchanged.

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HP Sauce

HP Sauce - the tangy British brown sauce of choice - was invented by a Nottingham grocer in 1895 and sold for £150 to a Birmingham vinegar maker. It quickly became an iconic British brand, with its label proudly displaying the House of Commons, from which the sauce takes its name. It hasn’t been produced by a British-owned company for many years, but until 2007, HP Sauce was at least made in England. Then parent company Heinz moved production to Holland, closing the UK factory and causing an almighty fuss. The storm has recently been reignited thanks to an ill-judged marketing campaign by Heinz glorifying HP’s British history.

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Weetabix

Weetabix was a family-owned firm, based in Northamptonshire, until 2004, when it was bought by investors Lion Capital. Then, earlier this year, the Chinese food company Bright Food bought a 60% stake in the business and effectively made Weetabix Chinese-owned. It’s China’s biggest overseas food acquisition to date, but may be a taste of things to come. And how British was Weetabix? Actually, not as British as you might think. The wholegrain wheat breakfast biscuits were actually invented in Australia.

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Cadbury

Cadbury is a huge British success story, a producer of much-loved chocolate that started as a small backstreet operation in early Victorian Birmingham and grew to become the second largest confectionery business in the world. Cadbury is a symbol of British industrial success. Or at least it was, right up until the point when the company was sold to the American food manufacturer Kraft in 2010. Kraft had launched a hostile takeover bid the previous year that was rebuffed, but eventually bought the company for around £11 billion.

During the struggle for control of the company, Cadbury became something of a cause celebre, and its sale was seen not just as the end of a great British company but also as a symbol of a wider British manufacturing malaise.

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John West

You don’t see shoals of happy tuna fish leaping about the Irish sea, but that small inconvenience didn’t stop John West of Liverpool becoming synonymous with the tasty tinned fish. The brand was created 140 years ago by Scotsman, John West, who sold the name and the business to two Liverpudlians in 1892.

John West hasn’t been in British hands for a while. In 1997 it was bought by Heinz, and in 2010 it was sold to Thai Union Frozen Products, the world’s biggest producer of canned tuna.

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New Covent Garden Soup

Foreign investors don’t just like to gobble up historic British brands. New British brands, it seems, are just as vulnerable to their voracious appetites. New Covent Garden Soup was set up by two north London entrepreneurs in 1986, and the company helped usher in what might be described as a soup revolution, popularising exotic new flavours such as carrot and coriander and Moroccan chickpea.

But since 1986 the company has flown further and further from its London roots, having changed hands four times. In a slightly depressing sign of the times, its most recent deal has seen it move to Hain Celestial, a US producer of vegetarian and organic ready meals (including the Linda McCartney brand) from Singapore Airport Terminal Services (a name redolent of fine home-cooked flavours if ever there was one) in a £145 million deal.

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And in August, Hain Celestial acquired another well-known British food firm - Hartley’s jam.

It’s hard to know whether these foreign takeovers will help to secure the future of these iconic British brands or lead to their slow demise. What is certain is that decisions over their future will no longer be taken in London, Birmingham or Manchester.

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