A 94-year-old South African recluse has sold his food empire for $29.1 billion – growing his business from a single Brooklyn warehouse 50 years ago into a restaurant-supply behemoth.
Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, on Monday announced it will acquire Nathan “Natie” Kirsh’s Jetro Restaurant Depot – a food supplier with 166 stores across 25 states that generated $16 billion in revenue last year.
According to Forbes, Kirsh owns a roughly 70% stake in the company, which helped pioneer the “cash-and-carry” model – allowing small restaurant owners to visit its warehouses and pick up food supplies at any time.
Jetro has argued its business model enables it to win over customers with low prices, since it avoids delivery and distribution costs.
“We literally have no competition,” Kirsh told a class at the London Business School in 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Kirsh is an unlikely figure in the latest multibillion-dollar megamerger, living a relatively quiet life in the country of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, as he amassed his $7.3 billion fortune, according to a Forbes estimate.
He was born in 1932 in South Africa to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, getting his start in business by helping run his family’s malt factory in the city of Potchefstroom.
In 1958, Kirsh launched his own milling business in Swaziland, securing an agreement with the local government that gave him a monopoly on purchasing and importing corn, according to the Financial Mail, a South African business publication.
He entered the distribution business in 1970 with the acquisition of Moshal Gevisser, which he used to supply goods to black shop owners in towns where Apartheid laws banned white business owners from operating.
By the mid-1970s, Kirsch decided he wanted to move abroad, later saying he “had really negative views on the future of South Africa” at the time.
And during a visit to New York, Kirsh felt he saw an opportunity to improve the city’s distribution model.
“I went to see how these little stores in New York got their supplies, and I really thought it was very rudimentary and not very efficient,” he told the business class in 2011, per the WSJ.
In 1976, Kirsh founded Jetro Cash & Carry in a Brooklyn warehouse, using the same cash-and-carry model he had fine-tuned in South Africa.
He acquired Restaurant Depot in 1994, and operated the two companies as sister brands under Jetro Holdings – creating one of the largest networks of food warehouse suppliers in the country.
Richard Kirschner now leads Jetro as chief executive and president, and former longtime CEO Stanley Fleishman has stayed on as executive chairman.
Along with Jetro Holdings, Kirsh amassed much of his wealth through an extensive real-estate investment portfolio, including Tower 42, one of the tallest skyscrapers in London, and Australia-based Abacus Property Group.
Though he is one of Africa’s wealthiest billionaires, Kirsh has managed to keep his life relatively private – making few public appearances over the years while he lives in Eswatini. He also holds residency status in the US and UK.
Kirsh has focused most of his philanthropic donations on his hometown – funding more than 12,000 people in Eswatini with starter capital for small businesses, according to local reports.
He has also donated roughly $8.7 million to his alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and $10 million to the Jerusalem Arts Campus in 2016.
The entrepreneur is married to Frances Herr and has three children, according to local news outlets.
His daughter, Linda Mirels, serves as president of the UJA-Federation of New York, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism.
