The Skinny Food Co sells low-calorie products such as ketchup, beef jerky, low-carb rice and ‘100% Pure Cookie Dough Skinny Peanut Butter’. It sells online through its website and via the likes of Morrisons, Spar, B&M, and Holland & Barrett. Wayne Starkey and James Whiting co-founded the Nottingham-based company in 2018 with £3,000. The pair were inspired by diabetic family members and wanted to provide healthier, less calorie-dense alternatives to well-known foods. The Skinny Food Co stocks more than 500 products and generated sales of £17.2m last year.
‘How we’re building a £200m business’
WAYNE STARKEY & JAMES WHITING
FOUNDERS - THE SKINNY FOOD CO
More Unemployables
Charlie Bigham: From Start Up To Household Brand
Charlie Bigham started cooking up his business at home. It all started on his kitchen table 25 years ago. Sitting at his kitchen table, he began to combine ingredients to create dishes that he hoped to sell to local food shops and delis. Today, he employs more than 500 people. We talk to Britain’s comfort-food king Charlie Bigham and extract nine lessons from his extraordinary entrepreneurial journey…
Charlie Bigham
Founder - Charlie Bigham's
“We started out with one cow”
Business origin stories are often intriguing and inspiring, but that of free-range meat-box supplier field&flower is even better – it’s sublime. Because co-founders James Mansfield and James Flower launched their £13m food business in 2012 not with a glitzy website or fancy app, but with a single cow. The two James’s (we’ll stick to surnames from now on for clarity) met at agricultural college, but this wasn’t your typical farmer-farmer friendship. Mansfield is a South London lad who somehow ended up studying agriculture:
James Mansfield James Flower
Co-founders - field&flower
“It feels like we cheated the system – entrepreneurship is meant to be risky”
Charlie Green doesn’t believe he ever took a risk while co-creating his £500m business, The Office Group. “We just did what made sense,” he says. And he has some simple advice for anyone thinking of following in his footsteps. Starting with ‘Step one: use a proven business model’…
Charlie Green
Co-founder - The Office Group
Being an entrepreneur is all about breaking the boundaries of what’s possible
Rem3dy Health creates personalised solutions across preventative and curative health under two brands Nourish3d (personalised nutrition) and Scripted (personalised medicine). Nourish3d, which was recently awarded the King’s Award for Enterprise in the Innovation Category, has developed a customised nutrient gummy…
Melissa Snover
Founder - Nourish3d
THE MOMENTS THAT MADE ME AN ENTREPRENEUR: FROM PLAYGROUD RACISM TO BAD BOSSES
23 Years Ago The future co-founder of Universal Partners FX gallops to school with a rucksack crammed with Haribo. He’s ten years old, and Dhaval Patel’s classmates mob him in the playground and give him their pocket money for the sweets. Each Monday, Dhaval buys a bag of sweets with his allowance, sells it, then buys two bags on […]
Dhaval Patel
Chairman and Co-founder, Universal Partners FX
Fancy-dress costumes, robots and £1bn
This is a story about robots, a six-year-old company worth £1bn, and a costume-wearing CEO. This incredible ‘unicorn’ business is on a mission to disrupt how surgery is done around the world. So, how did this unicorn with more than 500 staff come about? Read their amazing story here…
Martin Frost CBE
Founder - CMR Surgical