The Man Behind The Idea

Award-winning global food tech FMCG & food entrepreneur, brand & and product innovator, food start-up & and venture architect and part-time academic with over 25 years of management and leadership experience. Over the years have created over half a billion pounds of value by just “getting stuff done”

EXPERIENCE IN 60 SECONDS
Grew and sold my first restaurant venture at 26, spent 20 years at leading global Advertising, Brand, Digital, and food innovation firms in leadership roles, and managed over $100m in revenue> .unleashed a Brand Innovation process “Rapid Entrepreneurial Innovation” to help food companies rapidly create & test, on-trend, F2M ideas, with the quickest up and running in 8 days at the start of Covid 19 a total of 8 start-ups under my belt ventured 6 food brands and created over 50 food and hospitality products, brands and services. Am a professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina, now a cookery book writer, and on my 3rd baking book!

the  “Tastes Good, Does Good” business model came about after I started working with ReLondon - a partnership of the Mayor of London and London’s boroughs – on how to reduce waste and create a more sustainable business model. Kids Love Baking has always been bubbling away in the back of my mind. I knew I wanted to make baking more affordable to everyone and I wanted to recreate the same excitement I got as a kid with those magazines you bought and over 2 months you made something. The joy of getting your pocket money, rushing to the shop, picking up a copy, running home and starting to make the wing of plane or door of car. I wanted to do the same but for baking, but without the cost of the magazine, and I wanted a way for kids to make the buying decision, the right food choice and bake what they want. That is simple when you are dealing with a plastic car or plane, not so easy when you’re dealing with food.

At that point I started looking at the role technology had to play in all of this, outside of just building an ecommerce site, it needed to house our baking content, location services to search for a pickup point or the location of a local baking club or register to become a collection point. Tracking the inbound delivery to the collection point, but also alerting the customers to tell them it is arrived and ready for collection.  If we were going to enable kids to shop it had to allow parents to set up a kids’ user account. But only surface products based on product type, ingredient and allergen choice, nutritional value, cost. From there and how many little Tommy could buy a week/ month? or could he be rewarded for going tasks around the house. For our food bank partners who could give boxes to those families who needed cant afford to buy a box and ensure no kid is excluded and every kid was given the opportunity to learn how to bake and gain a lifelong skill as I did building those bloody airplane wings, which kept falling off!. But I did learn all about aerodynamics and lift, which I put to beneficial use when I trained as a pilot many years later.

It was the output from the time spent and the audit that ReLondon provided that helped me to refine the ideas and produce the delivery model, our overall technology roadmap and freshly baked grants, so I could create a truly sustainable business and revenue share model that will help build a future where nobody goes hungry.

COULD WE ALL HAVE OUR CAKE & EAT?

Of all the businesses I have worked on this one has proved to be the most challenging, after all it's not everyday you sit there and think how "I can develop a business that’s address several huge social issues and be catalyst for change". At the same time develop a fun way that enables kids to start making better food choices and gain new skills. Whist ensuring the business never deviates from its purpose and always puts people first, before profits and shareholders. Let’s be honest notions of “changing the world” and might sound great but a seasoned VC is going to look right past “does good and want to know when and how much profit will you make? Hence, they are more concerned with whether the idea high revenue potential over redressing the issue of food inequality

CAKE SMOTHERED IN GOOD WITH A SPRINKLING OF PROFIT

The “doing good” bit needed to be visionary and have the commerciality needed make enough profit that would enable the business to raise funds grow and scale globally, well if you look below that chart shows you how much 5 nations gave their kids £24.04BN a year ( we decreased it by 10% & took off highest earning households) and on average kids spend 21% on hobbies, education activity &  games £5.04BN, but our margin is lower about 11% net add that the 5% equity in our incubated starts-up, more importantly all the good it would do around the world to ensure no one goes hungry including the VC's