While the rest of the nation took to making banana bread and homemade cocktails during the Covid lockdowns, Beth Salem made granola. She’d long been fed up with the healthier, low-sugar recipes “that tasted a bit like cardboard” and decided to start making a version of her mum’s homemade granola instead.
“I spent a lot of time finessing the ingredients and taste-testing with my sons and my husband and then we cracked it and it was so good we just couldn’t stop eating it,” said Salem, 47. “I thought if I feel this way, I’m sure there’s other low-sugar granola customers that feel the same — let’s try and sell this.”
That recipe became the hero product for Goody Granola, containing oats, nuts and seeds, for which Salem has won a Great Taste Award. She’s since gone on to create nut-free and vegan versions, all three of which are sold via her website and stocked in 17 independent stores around the UK. She sold £20,000 worth of granola in 2023.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Salem is at full capacity, baking around the clock in her home kitchen in Richmond, southwest London, and is not making enough money to pay herself a salary. If she can’t find a way to increase production in a way that is sustainable, she will have to shut up shop, she says. The family is supported financially by Salem’s husband, Louis, who is a quantity surveyor and also has a small beer-brewing company.
“In order to keep Goody Granola going, I have to be able to earn more money. And the only way I can earn more money is if there are more packets being sold and I can’t take on any new opportunities because I can’t make any more,” Salem said.
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Since November last year she’s tried, without success, to find a factory in Britain to make the granola. “They’re either full to capacity, or there is the odd one which has space and their minimum order requirements are thousands and thousands of packets.” Her ideal would be to place a first order of around 300 packets.
Giles Brooks, a former executive at Innocent Drinks who has gone on to set up and invest in dozens of food and drink brands, said that finding a production partner in the UK can be challenging, especially if it’s a particularly “hot” part of the industry.
“Going back two or three years ago, if you were setting up a soft drinks brand and were trying to find a can manufacturer, good luck to you because you just couldn’t — there was no [spare] capacity in the whole of Europe,” said Brooks, 50. “The big guys like Coke and a lot of the beer brands were locking it all up so you couldn’t get a look in, whereas today, there is now excess supply and you can find a lot of canning manufacturers.”
If a founder is having no luck sourcing a manufacturer, as Salem has, he said there are industry and supply chain experts who will help for a fee or in exchange for equity. Brooks is working with Simon Frost — a former colleague from Innocent Drinks who now runs a consultancy helping growing brands with procurement — on one of his portfolio companies, Pip & Nut, the peanut butter brand. “He’s helping us on all procurement and supply chains, supporting the founder and helping to find a manufacturing site,” Brooks said.
When dealing with factories, he said it can be helpful to paint a picture of the problem the business is trying to solve. When he was working with Urban Fresh Foods, which makes popular children’s snacks under the Bear brand and was sold to Lotus Bakeries for £70 million in 2015, he said they “sold [the manufacturer] the vision about trying to get healthy food into kids.”
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It was well worth the partner’s time to take a punt on what was then a fledgling company, he added. “We started off being a pimple on their backside and ended up being one of the main brands on the production side. One of the biggest pieces of advice I give is make sure you’re selling your proposition and your vision as strongly as possible to these manufacturing partners, particularly if you’ve got a product that’s healthier. You may be up against bigger companies that have got bigger volume but aren’t necessarily addressing the health and wellness of the nation.”
Salem has already designed her own packaging, with the help of her 11-year-old twin boys, one of whom has autism, but Brook recommends letting a production partner handle as much of the “the burden” as they can in the early days.
“When you’re trying to launch a brand you’ve got to market it, sell it to people, develop the packaging, all that sort of stuff. One of the great things is if you can find a manufacturing partner who can work with you to source ingredients or do the packaging for you,” Brook said.
“Obviously, you sign off on design and things, but they can provide you with finished goods at a cost price that enables you to get it to the consumer at the right price and, importantly, gives the retailers the right margin.
“Make it easy for yourself at the beginning, then further down the line when you’ve got a technical or supply chain person in your business you can always pull it back out and take ownership of these things.”
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One of the 17 companies Brook has backed is Surreal, a high-protein, low-sugar cereal brand started by Kit Gammell and Jac Chetland, two of his former colleagues at coconut water brand Vita Coco. They started the business in 2022 with £30,000 savings and Surreal has grown strongly to £3.3 million sales last year, earning it recognition on the ones to watch list in The Sunday Times 100 ranking of Britain’s fastest growing private companies.
Surreal is now stocked in 4,000 stores across the country, including Sainsbury’s, Co-op, Selfridges and Whole Foods, and is also sold through the company’s website and Amazon.
Chetland, 34, said the start-up has been able to grow quickly because it had put in place “very good” processes to manage its supply chain: “We have very good systems and processes in place for the manufacturers, which means we can give accurate forecasts. We are really proud that, despite our size and the rate we’re growing, we’ve never been out of stock.”
Surreal employs ten staff and has raised £2 million in investment
Access to investors’ networks is one of the big advantages of raising capital, Chetland said. “We’ve been able to bring on board lots of investors who are bringing more than money to the business — they’re very much ‘value-add’ people like [Brook], who have built their own businesses and are now supporting young companies.”
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But Brook said raising funds isn’t the only way to access know-how in the food and drink sector.
“It’s a friendly place, so don’t be afraid to ask who you might think of as competitors for advice. Whether it’s finding manufacturing partners or top talent, I always go to people in the industry because people are willing to help and point you in the right direction,” he said. “Try and network as much as possible because it’s amazing how many doors can be opened for you.”
