Royal jelly founder is back after being stung by City sting

THE dining-room table is full of paper, the well-carpeted floors are littered with boxes and cartons. A handful of hard-working men and women are shouting orders, booking them in, and wrapping up boxes of capsules.

Irene Stein, the entrepreneur whose royal jelly business once attracted the visit of an admiring Lady Thatcher to the company's offices in Finchley, is back. Or at least, she is on her way back.

Mrs Stein discovered the virtues of royal jelly, the food of the queen bee, in 1974. By the late 1980s she was in charge of a company, Regina Health Products, that employed around 100 people and had a turnover approaching £6m.

But as the decade came to a close she was ousted from the company she had founded as its results failed to live up to City expectations.

Mrs Stein had floated the company on the stock market in 1986 thinking that the issue of shares to the public would help to fund the medical testing her products needed. In the event, she says, the listing actually helped scupper both this strategy and her career.

Now she is back, selling royal jelly capsules again from her home in Hadley Wood, north London. She says they can help to ease arthritic pain, improve the condition of ME sufferers and even aid slimmers. She now sells direct to consumers via mail order. A recent newspaper article resulted in 8,000 inquiries, she says.

Mrs Stein expects to reach a turnover of £500,000 this year but has no plans to go public again, even if she was able. "I do not see how companies can float and still remain in control of their strategy," she says.

Her cynicism is natural. Her downfall came a few days after a stormy meeting at the company's stockbrokers, Jacobson Townsley.

Things had not been going well. Profits were falling behind expectations; the company's products had been criticised on a BBC consumer affairs programme, Watchdog; and Lloyds Bank had just refused to increase a loan facility to the company.

"I remember the stockbrokers saying that Gerald Simler, the finance director I had known for years, should leave after he told them that we would not be making the £1m profit they were expecting that year. I thought that was unnecessary and I told them so. But by the following week, I was thrown out by the other directors." One of these was Mr Simler.

Stories emerged that it was her reluctance to cut costs that led to her downfall. She disputes this. "I never planned to take the company public, or to build an empire. It was a plan put forward by Reginald Burr, the chairman of Millwall Football Club, who acted as our financial adviser and who all but fixed up the flotation.

"I thought that the extra funding would be valuable, in that it might help me to fulfil my plans to get the products backed medically, but in fact all the City wanted was to drive more sales through retail outlets. It was just the wrong strategy, especially at the end of the 1980s when the retail trade was in the doldrums."

Mrs Stein's removal from Regina Health Products has meant that she has had virtually no contact at all with Mr Simler, a man she had known from her days growing up in Willesden, north London.

"It was all very sad. I think what made the company in the early days was the bond between the four directors," she says now.

Mr Simler, contacted at his accountancy practice, Lewis Simler, said that he did not want to talk about the episode.

"So many things happened, and it was a long time ago. There's nothing that I want to resurrect now."