Filed under: food and drink
12 storiesThe archive, indexed. Every story carries its tags at the foot of the page.
ASA bans Huel ad over claim one man ate nothing else
Four complaints were enough to pull a sponsored video featuring Huel's founder and its brand ambassador. The ruling sets out which substitution claims a consumer brand cannot make.
Protein-bite brand started at 60 reaches $2m and 13,000 shops
Theresa Burnley spent 16 years making other people's food. She started Circ in 2023 as a side project and now sells through Starbucks and Walmart.
Pippa Murray swapped a London flat for a shed and won £120,000
She entered a competition whose prize was rent-free accommodation in a garden shed. Eleven years on, Pip & Nut says 1.6 million British households buy its peanut butter every year.
HTeaO built $147m of iced tea sales on its water
An Amarillo family chain picked the most boring input in the drink and made it the brand. The lesson is in what they chose not to compete on.
A prawn, a pint and 137 closures: Cornwall's counter-image
Bluntrock Brewery in Rock has brewed a 4.2% lager with Padstow's Prawn on the Lawn. It arrives in the worst recorded stretch for British independent beer.
Two-person Italian snack brand reports $8,000 to $10,000 a month
Joe Fiorenzo and Sheela Prakash spent $50,000 of their own money, a dozen cold emails and three weeks in Puglia to put taralli crackers into American cupboards. Their first production run sold out in under a month.
Jeni Britton's fibre bars reach Starbucks in under two years
The Jeni's ice cream founder launched Floura online. Less than two years later the bars are going into Starbucks stores.
Sydney peanut butter reaches 490 Sprouts stores in nine months
Drizzy put natural peanut butter in a squeeze bottle in November. On Monday it went on shelf across virtually the whole Sprouts chain, having skipped Coles and Woolworths entirely.
Sisters raise £660,500 for dressing brand TOSS
Grace and Sophie Devlin have pulled in SFC Capital, SyndicateRoom's angel fund and a row of food founders. The money goes on awareness, shelf space and new formats.
Pickle sparkling water sells out and lands six-month Ocado exclusive
YEW Drink put brine, dill and cucumber in a can, ran out of it, and talked a national grocer into six exclusive months at £1.69.
Vivien Wong quit an £80,000 job to sell mochi to cinemas
Little Moons went viral on TikTok during the pandemic. Its co-founder says the company had already been running for a decade, and spent five of those years nowhere near a supermarket shelf.
Sacked in 2019, he sold $85,000 of bagels from his kitchen
Jeff Perera had never made a bagel before he lost his job. He estimates he has now baked more than 1.5 million, and the business he and his wife built has 35 locations.