The Vestey Group is a fourth generation business owned 100% by the Vestey family and headquartered in London.

The business was founded in 1897 by two brothers, William and Edmund Vestey, who identified the need for sourcing from overseas large quantities of quality, affordable food to feed the rapidly growing British population at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

William and Edmund had already spent a number of years working in the business of their father, Samuel, who was a wholesale and provision merchant in Liverpool. Their father had sent them to Chicago to source meat and dairy products for his business.

The business education received by the two brothers while working for their father in the United States of America proved invaluable, and having set up their own business, Union Cold Storage Company, in 1897, they continued to source products from the States as well as poultry, eggs and dairy products from Russia. The brothers, reasoning that there was a lack of chilled and frozen storage facilities, established a number of cold stores in Liverpool, Hull, London and Glasgow before expanding the business with storage facilities in Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostock, Riga, New York and Johannesburg.

In 1905 the brothers set up an egg processing plant in Hankin, China, the first of five such plants in China which became a principal source of supply of powdered eggs to the bakery trades in Great Britain, USA and continental Europe over a period of almost fifty years.

In order to control the transport of the egg products, in 1911 the brothers bought an old refrigerated ship from New Zealand to ship the products to Great Britain. This was the first of a fleet that finally grew to 9 dedicated ships to serve this trade, and so the Blue Star shipping line was formed. Blue Star went on to become one of the largest and best known refrigerated shipping lines in the world.

Between 1913 and 1920 the brothers acquired pastoral land and freezing works in Venezuela, Australia and Brazil and additional freezing works in New Zealand, Argentina and Madagascar in order to supply the British market with beef.

In addition to the cold stores, the business in Britain also acquired or set up a network of wholesale and retail outlets. In the heyday of the butcher shop, the business owned some 2,500 retail outlets.

Over the decades, the business has naturally evolved and today it comprises farming interests in Brazil and Venezuela, and food trading and wholesaling interests in South America, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.