Alick Glass, founder of Glass Associates Limited and industry representative, was recognised for outstanding services to the fresh produce sector when he won the Florette Lifetime Achievement Award at Re:fresh on Thursday.

Glass has had a 54-year, illustrious career in the industry and, at 72, is still going strong, running the multi-million pound Glass Associates Limited which he established in 1991 to focus on the North American apple business. Glass Associates and its Black Oval Growers subsidiary is currently Europe’s largest handler of Washington Apples, under Glass’s full-time direction.

Glass began work for Harry Glass Ltd and was with the company when it expanded to include operations in the port of Leith, Glasgow and Liverpool. Glass Glover Group plc became only the third UK fresh produce company to go public with a listing on the London Stock Exchange.

Glass had, by this time, relocated to London and had identified the enormous potential of fresh produce sales through a supermarket sector that was fragmented and still in its infancy. From his Langley Court office in old Covent Garden market, supported by his father Harry and brother Gerald in Scotland, he built Glass Glover into one of Europe’s largest fresh produce organisations, and one of the largest panellists of the international Fruit Marketing Boards: New Zealand, Cape, Outspan, Jaffa and Agrexco.

Glass Glover had also formed Fresha Fruit et Cie, in Carpentras, to consolidate its major share of the French apple business. While in the UK the group ranked second in tomato production centred in Garrion Bridge in the Clyde Valley, and at the Drax Power Station in Yorkshire, and was also involved in brassica production in the Thames Valley and in Spain.

Glass has represented the industry as chairman or committee member in negotiations with the ministry of agriculture, at House of Lords Select Committee meetings, and in Brussels. He was a founder member of the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Information Bureau and of CIMO (now part of Eucofel) and, in more recent times, it was Glass who led the fight for the removal of fresh produce from the Community retaliatory sanction list against US imports.

Following the privatisation of Glass Glover Group via a £55m management buy-out in 1988, Glass, acting as consultant to Mersey Docks and Harbour Company, masterminded and invested in the development of the Sheerness Produce Terminal and its inland Spade Lane facility.

As we understand it, he attributes his successful fruit trade career to two excellent teachers, his father Harry and his brother Gerald, and the idea of retirement hasn’t even crossed his mind.