Bill Toner MBE is a British chef and caterer. He serves as the Chief Executive of CH & Co, a position held since 2015. He oversaw the sale of CH & Co to Compass Group in 2024 for $600m. He is the former head of the American catering giant, Aramark. The Sunday Times considers him the founding father of the UK's celebrity chef movement and nicknames him Chef Svengali because of his influence. Toner has worked with Gary Rhodes and Gordon Ramsay. He received an MBE for Services to the Hospitality Sector in the 2025 New Year's Honours list.

Early life

Toner was born in

West Lothian West Lothian (; ) is one of the 32 council areas of Scotland, bordering (in a clockwise direction) the City of Edinburgh council area, Scottish Borders, South Lanarkshire, North Lanarkshire and Falkirk (council area), Falkirk. The modern counci ...

, Scotland and is the middle child of five. His father and brothers were coal miners. Toner took his first part-time catering role at the age of fourteen, working as a kitchen hand in the Bridge Castle Hotel in

Bathgate Bathgate ( or , ) is a town in West Lothian, Scotland, west of Livingston, Scotland, Livingston and adjacent to the M8 motorway (Scotland), M8 motorway. Nearby towns are Linlithgow, Livingston, and West Calder. A number of villages fall under ...

, West Lothian. He left home and school at the age of sixteen to work and live there permanently. At eighteen, he returned to Telford College,

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

, after two years of full-time work.

Career

He briefly worked in several restaurants in France, including as a chef de partie for Hotels Frontelle. He planned to move to South Africa, but instead, he took a job as a caterer at Sodexho as a catering manager in a bank director's dining room at the

Royal Bank of Scotland The Royal Bank of Scotland Public Limited Company () is a major retail banking, retail and commercial bank in Scotland. It is one of the retail banking subsidiaries of NatWest Group, together with NatWest and Ulster Bank. The Royal Bank of Sco ...

. Eighteen years later, he became Gardner Merchant's managing director, overseeing 30,000 staff and increasing the company's annual turnover from £160 million to £600m. He persuaded

Gary Rhodes Gary Rhodes (22 April 1960 – 26 November 2019) was an English restaurateur and television chef, known for his love of English cuisine and ingredients and for his distinctive spiked hair style. He fronted shows such as ''MasterChef'', '' Mas ...

to work with Sodexho and helped Rhodes to launch a string of restaurants, including City Rhodes. He left Sodexho in 1999 to become the chief executive at Aramark UK.

References

{{reflist Scottish chefs Living people Year of birth missing (living people)