Felice Lippert

Felice Marks Lippert, businesswoman: born New York 1929; married 1953 Albert Lippert (died 1998; two sons); died Manhasset, New York 22 February 2003.

Almost exactly 40 years ago, Al and Felice Lippert, a New York couple with a bundle of energy but also a shared weight problem, invited a woman who was teaching a dieting class to a meeting of a few friends in the Lippert kitchen.

That first encounter of the Lipperts and the diet specialist Jean Nidetch, in 1963, led directly to the foundation of Weight Watchers, a worldwide slimming industry which today operates in 30 countries, offering products, services and advice to help millions of people lose unwanted pounds.

The first session went splendidly. Nidetch left the Lipperts a nutritional programme which her new friends followed scrupulously. Within a week, Felice had lost four pounds and her husband seven. Between them they would shed 100 pounds, and a massive, quintessentially American, business success story began.

Felice Lippert's kitchen became the 1960s equivalent of the computer whiz kid's garage. The Lipperts and Marty and Jean Nidetch, realising they had a winning idea on their hands, sat around the table in the evenings, working out a strategy. They came up with a name, Weight Watchers, and rented an office above a cinema in suburban New York.

At the first meeting, 22 people turned up, paying $2 each. A second meeting a week later attracted 66 people, and shortly afterwards the Lippert/Nidetch team patented their formula and began to sell franchises. The Nidetchs provided the expertise, and the Lipperts the business acumen. By 1968, Weight Watchers was operating 91 franchises in 43 states, and that year went public.

The arrangement was a stroke of genius. Although the Lipperts charged only a small price for the franchises, they insisted on 10 per cent of annual gross profits. Thus a franchise sold for only $2,000 might soon be earning the couple $100,000 a year.

Thereafter, in an increasingly affluent – and corpulent – industrial world, Weight Watchers was a formula that could not fail. It offered a full range of incentives and services, based around a Points Weight-Loss system, in which every food is assigned a points value. Dieters are not told what to eat, but encouraged to stay within a daily points range, based on their current weight.

Soon, Weight Watchers was offering a range of books, magazines and syndicated television programmes – even summer camps for overweight children. But at the centre of its business remained the concept of the meeting, where members would discuss their triumphs and failures together.

In 1978 the concern, which claimed to be adding 20 million new members a year, was sold to the food group Heinz for $72m. Tony O'Reilly, Heinz's chief executive, is said to have wrapped up the deal in a few conversations, without lawyers and accountants. In 1999 Weight Watchers was sold by Heinz to a European investment company.

In the company's days as a family venture, Felice Lippert was vice-president of Weight Watchers International. She later became chairwoman of the Weight Watchers Foundation, and owner of the company's franchise in South Africa, which she and her husband bought in the 1990s.

Rupert Cornwell