Bill Toner

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, 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, 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, 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 in Edinburgh. 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 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.