When the Princess of Wales met Richard Walker in one of his Iceland shops recently she told him he looked “very fit”. The cheeky chappy grocer – who pops up alarmingly often these days on everything from the Today programme to Good Morning Britain – purred with pleasure at HRH’s compliment. He’s still buzzing about Kate now: “I mean, the work she is doing on early years is amazing,” he says. “I’m a massive royalist, they are brilliant for brand Britain. I’m gutted not to be around for the Coronation but I’ll be in the Himalayas, climbing Mount Everest.”
Walker, 42, first went to the world’s highest mountain 10 years ago, with his father, Iceland’s founder Sir Malcolm. They only made it as far as the North Col. “We were the kind of people who should never have been allowed near it,” he jokes. “But it’s definitely unfinished business.” Their original mission raised £1 million for Alzheimer’s research. It is a cause close to their hearts; Richard’s mother Rhianyddd, the woman who came up with the name of the family’s frozen food supermarket chain and worked alongside her husband to establish it, died in 2021.
She was diagnosed at 61 with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Richard was only 28 at the time and her slow deterioration and death “is a massive motivator” in his life. Next week he sets off for Everest with the climber Kenton Cool to raise another £1 million, this time to fund a Rare Dementia Support Centre, the first of its kind, to help sufferers and their families.
“Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease,” Walker says, grimly. “Charities will show elderly husbands and wives walking hand in hand through a field. That’s not the reality. The reality is horrific. Your sense of self is stripped away. By the end you are incontinent, bed-bound, you don’t recognise anyone. You can’t talk, you can’t eat, you can’t drink. That’s the reality. There’s no dignity in it. Watching mum… We have to make the most of what time we have. We have only one life, we need to live it to the full.” Walker is certainly following his own advice. At 42 he is a man in a hurry.
In his 20s, rather than immediately joining the family business (Britain’s nineth biggest supermarket), he built up a multi-million pound property company. “It was important to me to plough my own furrow to prove to other people and to myself that I can succeed on my own account. It was never written in the stars that I would join the business. But once I was in my 30s, I did approach Dad and say, ‘Look, I’ve been thinking about it…’” His father, who built up the frozen food empire after starting with one shop in Oswestry, Shropshire in 1970, told him: “Don’t bother – collect rent, it’s much easier in the end.” But Richard was determined. “I worked in the shops and at head office. It’s been an honour, a privilege, a caper.”
Isn’t it all a bit Succession? Working for your dad, having to prove yourself? He laughs. “I suppose it is like a low-rent version of Succession. You know, I bumped into Brian Cox [the actor who plays Logan Roy, the patriarch in the eponymous TV series] the other day on the train. I bounded up to him. I told him that my life is like Succession. He was a bit bemused but very charming!” So is his own father like Roy? Several times during our chat Walker describes the Iceland patriarch as “a gruff Yorkshire man who doesn’t heap praise”. What does he make of his son’s plan to become a Tory MP? Richard chuckles, waving a large glass of white wine into the Zoom screen. It is 4.30pm on Friday and he is in a restaurant having lunch. “My dad thinks I’m mad to want to be a politician, just like everyone else! But I think he is proud…” More laughter.
But behind the trademark bonhomie, Walker is deadly serious about politics. Although he starts out by insisting he can’t say much “because of the process, I’m not on a shortlist, I don’t have a seat. I’m about to go to Everest”. He then admits he’d “like to represent somewhere near where I am from – Cheshire”. And that he “was out canvassing yesterday with my daughter on the doorsteps for the local elections. I thought it would be a life experience for her – not the truest-bluest area… people are finding things tough. But the Government are doing the right thing in focusing on delivery.”
Unlike many multi-millionaire businessmen with playboy looks and a penchant for surfing and mountain climbing, Walker is deeply engaged with the travails of Britain’s poor. They are, his “core audience on every high street”. Walker grew up with the family business, stacking shelves, working in the call centre fielding complaints. As he chats about £1 deals and the popularity of Tuesdays when he gives pensioners 10% off their shopping, he sounds way more in touch with ordinary folks than most of the Westminster bubble.
“It’s tough out there for people,” he says. “I see it in our stores. When we launched our vouchers for pensioners to get £30 worth of free shopping last year it overwhelmed our call centre, there was someone calling every 30 seconds. One old lady was so desperate for the food she rang 300 times. I know the dire straits people are in. We’re dedicated to freezing prices, excuse the pun. We’ve got pensioners riding around on the bus all day to keep warm. “That is my motivation for going into politics,” he says. “Our stores are like a barometer of Britain, really. We’ve got 1000 shops, we’ve got five million customers, 30,000 staff, we see and feel and hear a lot of the issues, day in, day out. And I can do a lot with the platform I have, but I want to be a player not just a commentator.
"I really believe in levelling up. My shops are levelling up in action, I’m creating jobs, I’m on all those high streets. I feel the frustration, the crumbling town hall, no bus services, what happens to civic pride. I want to reconnect these geographies with opportunity. That is real levelling up – not spending billions on HS2 which will destroy a hundred ancient woodlands, but changing the playing field to free things up for enterprise.”
What job does he most want in politics? Home secretary (he is very pro the Government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda)? Secretary of state for the environment (Walker is a former head of Surfers for Sewage and wrote a book called The Green Grocer about making business more sustainable)? Chancellor of the exchequer? Prime minister? He gives me his trademark cheeky grin. “All of the above!”
But is this really a good time to become a Conservative MP? The party is 20 points behind in the polls. Can they win the next election? “Absolutely!” he says. He delivers a paean of praise for Rishi Sunak. “He’s a businessman, he gets the real world. He’s had a career outside politics. He’s super hardworking. He’s very diligent. He’s all over the detail. Surrounds himself with great people. And he’s not in it for the money. He wants to make the world a better place. He is exactly the right guy for the job.” Does that sum up his own motivations too? “Definitely. I’ve been enormously lucky. Fortunate. But I see the issues. I want to serve and give back.”
But isn’t there a tension here? I mean, Walker is a self-confessed environmentalist. Next week is Earth Day. Westminster will be awash with Extinction Rebellion protesters. He has admitted in the past to being a hypocrite – after all if we are truly to prevent global warming we need to consume less, not go to Iceland and fill our boots.
He shakes his head sadly. “It is a constant trade-off between business and the environment. It is a tightrope that we walk. There is no such thing as a sustainable business. At Iceland the freezers run on 100 per cent renewable energy from wind and solar, we’ve eliminated use of palm oil from all our products, we’re trying to reduce our use of plastic. We need to de-peg the price of energy from the gas price if it comes from wind or sun. We need to deal with the water companies – stopping illegal runoffs and overspill. That is a job for government.”
Walker says his business hero is Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. “I love their slogan: don’t buy this jacket. He’s right. Mindless consumerism, over-consumerism, is destroying the planet. But that is where government can help us to get the balance. No economy can alleviate poverty without growth.”
He is in the food industry but is also a staunch Brexiteer and free-trader. Would he allow American chlorinated chicken or hormone-injected beef into Iceland? “Absolutely not. There would be no demand for it, it’s not what our consumers want. But I do believe in global trade, which was why I voted to leave. We can forge fantastic trade agreements around the world. Our food standards are some of the highest in the world. That’s something we need to be very proud of. We’ve got a competitive food retail market, but highly regulated standards as well. That’s an export opportunity.” But wouldn’t some of his struggling families buy cheaper meat? “There’s enough good-priced food to go round and I say that as someone who is serving people who only have £25 a week to spend; we’re managing to help them do that without hormone-injected beef just fine.”
What if he was Minister for Trade and the deal depended on allowing these products access to UK markets? “That’s a lot of hypotheticals,” he says smoothly. I push him again. “I’d find a solution. I’m a good negotiator.” What about the flack Iceland got for taking government business relief during Covid and using the money to buy back control of the business rather than repaying it? “The other supermarkets put people on furlough and laid people off. We opened more stores and grew jobs. We’re more than vindicated in terms of tax we’ve paid and the jobs we’ve created. We’ve been in business for 53 years, we haven’t taken a dividend for a decade.”
That is fine bombast but Iceland has a £550 million loan which has to be refinanced in 2025. There has been talk of hedge funds circling, of the company being in trouble over rising energy costs, and doubts over whether that money can be repaid. Again he is bullish. “I am supremely confident we’ll refinance the debt. I have a plan A, B, C and D for that. It is definitely going to happen. We’ve now locked in energy contracts on 10-year deals. We’re expanding our stores and the recent trend for frozen food outperforming fresh is a boost to us.”
Fresh food inflation was 17 per cent in March, fuelling a surge in demand for cheaper frozen products. According to data analysts Kantar last week, sales of frozen chicken are up 5.9 per cent while frozen prepared foods, including ready meals, pizzas and chips, are up by 2.6 per cent with frozen food volumes holding steady even though, overall, shoppers are buying less. “Frozen food has come into its own with the cost of living crisis,” explains Walker. “Not only is it cheaper to begin with but there is far less food waste, it doesn’t get chucked in the bin when it goes off. My customers have no pennies to spare – they know that frozen food goes further.”
It’s not just the budget-conscious who are buying frozen either. “Frozen is more sustainable,” explains Walker with his eco hat on. “So-called ‘fresh’ food is often a con. Most fish sold as ‘fresh’ was frozen on the boat, just like ours, and is then defrosted before it goes out on the shop counter. So-called ‘fresh’ soups are frozen for storage and then defrosted before they go in the chiller, while the same is true of pizza or hot cross buns or turkeys. There’s no such thing as fresh food because in food manufacturing, you can’t produce the volume that you need fresh. It’s all frozen and then a reassembly job. They understand this in France. There, Picard is an upmarket frozen retailer and Parisians boast about buying food from them.”
So why has frozen food had such a downmarket image in the UK? “Generations of misdirected snobbery and a misunderstanding of supply chains and the process of getting food to shops," he says. But we haven’t helped – we’ve been unashamedly a cheap and cheerful provider of frozen ready-meals for years. We’ve accentuated that.” He says it is changing as “consumers are becoming more promiscuous, less loyal”. His luxury range is attracting middle-class customers from Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. What would happen to his job at Iceland if he became an MP? “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” he says.
I ask how the Everest training is going. “Well I’ve been hitting it hard but now I am tapering; drinking wine, fattening up, building some reserves for the climb. I’m generally fit – I surf, I go to the gym, do yoga, boxing, swimming, breathwork. Everest is a physical but also a mental challenge.” What has he found hardest? “Playing chess with my 11-year old daughter. She beats me,” he quips. What about in the mountains? There is a pause. He tells me how three weeks ago he went climbing in the Alps near Courcheval with Kenton, his Everest guide. “We were using ice axes, crampons, it was pretty extreme conditions, a white-out. We were roped together when Kenton called out. Just above us a big chunk of snow – 50 metres wide – had broken off and was coming straight for us. We got pulled about 30 metres down the mountain – avalanched – swimming on our backs, tumbling in the snow. You try and stay on the top. It was scary. I ended up buried up to my chest. Kenton had to dig me out. It shook me up.”
Is it worth it? He is a man who seems to have everything. A lovely wife – she calls during our chat – and two children. He’s built a company of his own and is running Iceland. He wants to be an MP. Why risk it all to climb into the 8,000-metre death zone for the first time? “Well, seeing mum die like that in front of my eyes made me realise that our time is limited. Life is short and life is for living. I’m not going to climb Everest at any cost. I’m not reckless. If Kenton says we’re turning back, I’ll turn back. This is his 17th time, so he knows what he is doing. It’s not like K2, which is objectively dangerous.”
I’ve read that Kenton charges £250,000 to take businessmen up Everest. “He’s a friend, so he’s not charging me anything like that,” Walker replies. “And I am covering all the costs of the expedition myself. All the money raised will go directly to the Rare Dementia Centre.” I ask again – why take the risk? “I’m always pushing myself. I’ve had a lot of privilege, a lot given to me. I need to strip that away, to feel vulnerable on the world’s biggest mountain. Comfort stops growth – you have to take yourself out of your comfort zone. Push the envelope. Be uncomfortable. Find out who you are. I want to take every good fortune I’ve got and run with it as hard as I can.” There is a pause. “Young-onset dementia can be hereditary, you know. My time might be limited, like my mum’s. Life is short. That is my great motivator.” Would he want to know if had inherited the gene? “No. I wouldn’t. But it is definitely why I am in such a hurry.”
To support Richard Walker’s fundraising for the Rare Dementia Centre donate here.
