My friend Tim Clarke, who has died aged 74, can be credited with helping popularise the Italian sauce pesto in Britain. Tim had learned to make pesto – traditionally olive oil, pine nuts, garlic and basil leaves – as a 19-year-old steward working aboard an Italian cruise ship in the Mediterranean.
In 1985 he and his second wife, Rina, started Zest Foods at their home in Cornwall. In 1987 they won a Lloyds Bank small business of the year award and shortly afterwards the Clarkes moved the business to mid-Wales, to Newtown in Powys.
What had begun as a dinner party favourite grew into a kitchen table business and then developed, under the Clarkes’ marketing, into a national brand available in supermarkets, food shops and delicatessens throughout the UK and abroad.
With the aid of the Mid-Wales Development Board, Zest Foods, with its factory in Newtown, grew into a multimillion-pound business supplying not just pesto but a range of food sauces to airlines and caterers as well as retailers. Zest was sold in 1996.
Tim was born in Colombo, in what was Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, to Ivor and Joan Clarke, who were tea planters. He was educated at King’s College school, Wimbledon, in south-west London. On leaving school, Tim worked in insurance. In 1964 he joined Old Motor magazine in London, as a writer and photographer.
Pesto wasn’t Tim’s first foray into food production: on returning to the UK in 1972 after several adventurous years in the US working in motorsports journalism and promotion, he and his first wife, Catherine (nee Currin), whom he had married in New York in 1969, converted barns in Cornwall into a dairy where they made cheese and yoghurt for sale in local markets.
Before setting up Zest Foods, Tim worked as father of the chapel for the National Graphical Association at a printing business in St Austell. There he felt he picked up valuable lessons in people management that he was to put into practice in running his own business.
In 2004 Tim was a founding director of the Mid-Wales Manufacturing Group as an ideas and discussion forum for local businesses, which he later chaired. At the same time he became a visiting lecturer to Welsh schools on entrepreneurship, under the Dynamo Project organised by Careers Wales.
Tim and Catherine divorced in 1976, and three years later Tim married Rina Thomas, a schoolteacher, who later served as mayor of Newtown.
The success of Zest Foods allowed Tim and Rina to design and build a sustainable and energy-efficient house several hundred feet up in the Welsh hills, with unbroken views to Snowdon 60 miles away. Such was its individual appeal that the house was featured in a Channel Four Wales documentary in 2004.
Tim is survived by Rina and their three children, Lowri, Rhys and Siwan; by Trystan, his son from his first marriage; three grandchildren; and a brother, Michael, and sister, Phillippa.
