It's smell to sell for the guru of Gu

A true entrepreneur, James Averdieck fulfilled the old adage of selling snowballs to the Eskimos by supplying souffles to the French and chocolate to the Belgians - and that's in spite of the fact that Britons are traditionally better at eating great-tasting food than producing it.

Averdieck, who previously worked in sales for British dairy firm St Ivel, started chocolate dessert company Gu Puds 10 years ago from scratch with US$100,000 of capital, built it up and then sold it after seven years for US$50 million to British rivals Noble Desserts. He stepped down as managing director of Gu Puds in April last year.

Averdieck, 46, who was recently on a British Chamber of Commerce organised speaking tour of China lecturing would-be entrepreneurs in cities including Beijing, Xian, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, says there's no mystery. 'What I did well was to find a little parking space, a niche in the market, for dinner party desserts.'

No one had really done it before. 'I found a way of doing it in a really nice chic way.' He started with souffles. 'Crispy on top, then you dig down to hot chocolate lava underneath. Plays havoc with your taste buds.'

Almost every kind of wicked chocolate and fruit pudding followed. Now someone, somewhere, in Europe is reportedly scoffing a Gu dessert every two seconds.

So why chocolate desserts? One of the many things he learnt, and part of his success strategy, was to remember that chocolate is very aromatic. The sense of smell is stronger than taste and it lingers in the memory. 'The trouble is we are all trained to eat like wolves and think about what we'll do tomorrow or yesterday. We don't really think about our food, he says. 'But good chocolate is packed with chemicals and hydrocarbons.