The 94-year-old South African recluse who clinched a $29.1B deal for his food wholesale empire

A 94-year-old South African recluse has sold his food empire for $29.1 billion – growing his business from a single Brooklyn warehouse 50 years ago into a restaurant-supply behemoth.Sysco, the nation’s largest food distributor, on Monday announced it will acquire Nathan “Natie” Kirsh’s Jetro Restaurant Depot – a food supplier with 166 stores across 25 states that generated $16 billion in revenue last year.According to Forbes, Kirsh owns a roughly 70% stake in the company, which helped pioneer the “cash-and-carry” model – allowing small restaurant owners to visit its warehouses and pick up food supplies at any time.Jetro has argued its business model enables it to win over customers with low prices, since it avoids delivery and distribution costs.“We literally have no competition,” Kirsh told a class at the London Business School in 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal.Kirsh is an unlikely figure in the latest multibillion-dollar megamerger, living a relatively quiet life in the country of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, as he amassed his $7.3 billion fortune, according to a Forbes estimate.He was born in 1932 in South Africa to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, getting his start in business by helping run his family’s malt factory in the city of Potchefstroom.In 1958, Kirsh launched his own milling business in Swaziland, securing an agreement with the local government that gave him a monopoly on purchasing and importing corn, according to the Financial Mail, a South African business publication.He entered the distribution business in 1970 with the acquisition of Moshal Gevisser, which he used to supply goods to black shop owners in towns where Apartheid laws banned white business owners from operating.By the mid-1970s, Kirsch decided he wanted to move abroad, later saying he “had really negative views on the future of South Africa” at the time.And during a visit to New York, Kirsh felt he saw an opportunity to improve the city’...