Building a challenger brand – Will Little from Little’s Coffee Company and Roastworks

Coffee entrepreneur Will Little shares insights on building a challenger consumer brand, dealing with supermarkets and working with family members. 

He discusses his experiences running two businesses: flavoured instant coffee specialist Little’s Coffee Company – founded by his parents 35 years ago – and speciality coffee roasters Roastworks. So why not grab your favourite brew and listen to his entertaining story from inside the coffee revolution?

Transcript

Mark Greaves:

Today our guest is Will Little, managing director of Little's Coffee and co-founder of Roastworks Coffee Company. I'm Mark Greaves from PKF Francis Clark, and I'll be your host. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get updates and notifications on when the latest episodes are available.

Hi, Will, how are you today?

Will Little:

Hello, Mark. Yeah, I'm good. I'm doing pretty good.

Mark Greaves:

Very impressed with the background and the sales job on the coffee behind you. So, perhaps we could start, let's start with Little's Coffee. What does the business do?

Will Little:

Yeah. Well, so Little's is a coffee challenger brand. It's a family business, which I've been running for quite a while. I'm sure we'll get onto that. But essentially we're here to disrupt the coffee shelf really, in the supermarket, and show people that you can have that coffee shop experience at home and that there's something more interesting to offer than some of the big brands. Which they don't do a particularly inspiring job usually. So, really here to turn up the flavour, turn up the quality, and do the best for our planet really in coffee.

Mark Greaves:

One of the things we have discussed on previous podcasts is that simple mission statement that motivates everyone and you promote rule breakers, risk-takers, coffee makers, which I really like is that short statement. How did you come up with that? What does that mean to you?

Will Little:

Yeah, that was an interesting one because it was an internal thing, which then has become external over time. It was something that came up in the rebrand we did a couple of years ago with the agency that did the work called Mad River down at Bournemouth. They're fantastic. They came up with so many things that were just floating around, and that one just stuck. I think it just summed up that challenger brand behavior that we've always believed in and we've always adopted. I don't know, it just stuck.

It's actually plastered on the side of the office in a really big stencil. The amount of times we reference it, we're trying to make a decision on something and I say to the guys, we point to it, "Just remember, is it breaking rules? Is it taking risks? And are we making good coffee?" It's a bit of a North Star for us, but it wasn't intended to be that, it just ended up that way, I think.

Mark Greaves:

I think the best businesses do come across that ... Rather than write a 48-page business plan, which everyone has to memorize and be able to quote from, and it gets updated on a biannual basis via a week long mission to mountains to try and refresh stuff. That simple thing just cuts through really well. Let's step back for a moment. Little's originally started in Finland, was it?

Will Little:

Yeah, it did. Yeah. So, we've got a bit of a story. I'll give you one of the more condensed or most condensed versions, because 35 years of family history can go on for a bit.

So essentially, my parents started the business. So, my mum's Finnish, my dad's American, and they started the business in Finland where we lived. What happened was we would try to escape the disgusting Finnish winters and go and stay with some of my American side of the family. And I had a great uncle that lived in California in a place called Palo Alto, which is now made famous by Mark Zuckerberg, because it's just south of Silicon Valley. It was kind of in Silicon Valley. Anyway, but at the time, it was a very modest neighborhood and my great uncle lived there.

And in the early to mid-80s when my parents were going over there with two young kids, they were just being really inspired by the food scene that was emerging in the Bay Area at the time. There was this foodie renaissance happening, the kind of farmer's market revolution and all that sort of stuff, and my parents were really inspired by that. In Palo Alto, in the town, there was a guy who was a coffee roaster, but he was making flavoured coffee. So, what he was doing was, one of his products was coffee beans infused with natural flavour extracts like amaretto and vanilla and things like that, and chocolate. My parents thought it was a really, really cool idea, and the first time they'd ever seen flavoured coffee.

Obviously, Finland, as some of you guys might know, we drink more coffee than anyone else in the world, so highest coffee consumption per capita. My parents thought, "Well, it'd be quite cool to create this coffee business like we'd seen in the States." And they did, and the business was born. This was 1987, something like that. And then, yeah, the idea grew. They emulated what they'd seen in the States, roasting blends and single origin coffees, but also with a real focus on flavoured coffee. And then, to cut a fairly long story short, we moved to the UK in 1995, really to broaden our horizons. And we're an English-speaking family anyway, really, and thought it'd be nice to go and move to another country. I don't know. I wasn't really part of that process. My parents made the decision. But I was 11 and we moved to sunny Kingsteignton.

Mark Greaves:

Odd description.

Will Little:

They could have moved anywhere, but there you go. So, they moved to Kingsteignton and got a unit in Heathfield, which is all in Devon, for anyone listening that isn't local to this part of the world. But anyway, and I did a lot of growing up there.

The business struggled because really my parents' idea of whole bean coffee and ground coffee just wasn't catching on, because at the time, instant coffee was something like 90% of the market and the coffee shop revolution hadn't kicked off yet. There was no Costa. There was no Starbucks in the UK. So anyway, so my parents big idea of, "Oh, let's move country and grow the business and have this prosperous thing going on," just didn't really materialize.

So anyway, so that's when they started looking into instant coffee and looking at how they could infiltrate that market, how they could improve things. They launched a range of flavoured instant coffees in early 2000s. It tasted great. It just didn't look great. They didn't know what they were doing with the branding and packaging and stuff, which is fair enough. My dad's kind of an engineer really at heart. Yeah.

And then, to cut another very long story short, I fled the nest, pursued my own career in the creative industry, and then fell in love with coffee while I was in London, and then joined the business in 2010. So, I've been here since then, 14 years ago, and it's been a blast, man.

Mark Greaves:

So, being brought up in that environment, did that make you a coffee fan, a coffee snob or anti-coffee?

Will Little:

Exactly the latter, really. I don't think anyone wants to do what their parents do. I wonder if Dave Grohl's daughter really ... No, I suppose she wants to be a rockstar. But I just think you never think what your parents do is cool. And now, obviously, coffee's cool and everyone's jumping on the bandwagon. But back then, I would just used to get so annoyed when we would go around to friends' houses or something, and my dad would just endlessly talk about coffee. I do that now, I'm that guy, but when I was a kid I was just, "Shut up." I just had no interest in it at all. I just wanted to be a graphic designer. I wanted to be a designer, that was my thing, and that's what I pursued. So yeah, but then, I guess the genes run deep, right?

Mark Greaves:

Well, was it a timing thing, in that the coffee scene, it did start to kick off in a big way and you were in London there for the start of that kind of explosion in London? Did that influence things?

Will Little:

It's exactly that. So, as fate would have it, where my office was, I worked for in the little design studio on Tower Bridge Road, and around the corner there's a roastery for a company called Monmouth Coffee Company. They also had a cafe in Borough Market, where I'd go every Friday to get lunch or whatever, because I was poor and I couldn't afford to do it every day. But anyway, so if the wind blew the right way, this coffee roasting smell from the roastery would actually waft in through the office window and it made me feel really nostalgic. It happened fairly frequently actually.

And then, obviously going to Borough Market, one day I just decided to walk into the Monmouth cafe and see what it was all about really. This was at the very beginning of that third wave flat white revolution, coffee revolution, whatever you want to call it. I remember walking in there and there's a guy brewing single-cup V60 pour-overs, and it was all quite familiar because the taste of the coffee was that light roast, single origin thing that my parents had always advocated.

I remember, he brewed me a Ethiopia Yirgacheffe, washed Ethiopian coffee, but it wasn't my dad making it or my mum making it, it was a cool guy with a beard and tattoos. And that's when the penny dropped. I was like, "Oh wow, this is coffee. I like this coffee." And I had had coffee up until then. I'd had Costa, I didn't really enjoy it, and a few other things, I hadn't really enjoyed that. But when I first had that Monmouth Ethiopian that that cool guy brewed me, I was like, I was hooked. And it was just someone had to show me the way, I guess. So, absolutely, that kind of explosion of things in London at the time was definitely a huge part of it.

Mark Greaves:

We've talked to other family businesses and there's always a contrast between usually the son, occasionally the daughter who goes away from the business to actually try and spread their wings and learn their own lessons in life, before they come back in and actually can then bring something different into the business. Such as your graphic design, you talked about brands passionately there. I take it you were able to bring stuff back into the business.

Will Little:

Absolutely. And that was it really, because I thought I learned a load of skills, I guess, and I could see where my parents needed help. They'd built the factory, they'd come up with the recipes, they had the product, but they needed help with making it look good and making it something sellable. And I thought that I could help with that.

And my wife, who wasn't my wife at the time, my girlfriend, but now my wife, she was a fashion designer. So, we had this, were both coming at it from this like, we kind of know how to promote things and make things visually cool. And I think that was the angle. And yeah, I think that was the right thing to do. Little did we know when we moved back, it was a bit more complex than just, "Let's just make it look nice and sell loads."

Mark Greaves:

Yeah, I think there's a whole concept called branding here, which we'll come on to because you have got that kind of independent ethos in. But you come back in at that stage and then gradually you take over and you're now managing director. How did that family transition, how did you cope with that and what are the mechanics behind it?

Will Little:

Yeah. I mean, so I've been managing director for quite a few years, actually. I think my dad relinquished that title, I can't remember when, many, many moons ago now. But yeah, I mean, it's always difficult moving a family business from one generation to another. It doesn't matter how much will there is between the family members to do it, there's always going to be friction. And I think it comes in funny shapes and forms as well. So, for us, it's like my parents have always been really chill with a lot of decisions that we've made. So, if I said to them, "Hey, guys, I want to spend 50 grand on a rebrand." They'll be like, "Yeah, that's fine." I'd be like, "Oh, okay, do you want to know anything about it?" They're like, "Nah, it's cool."

But for my dad, the engineering side of it, the infrastructure side of it is the thing that he was really passionate about. So, if I wanted to change a conveyor on the filling line to make it a bit safer, there'd be this big argument about why his conveyor's better than the new conveyor sort of thing. So, there was a bit of that, and I think there were definitely some very, very challenging times. I think it's all water under the bridge now, so you kind of look at it in hindsight and it wasn't that big a deal, but there were definitely some really sketchy moments where we thought that relationship between myself and especially my dad was kind of almost irreparable. But we've got around that now and we have a better relationship than ever. But it can definitely be a real challenge working with parents, and I'm sure it was a challenge for them working with their son as well, and daughter-in-law.

Mark Greaves:

Could you acknowledge both ways at that stage? Again-

Will Little:

I do now. I do now. At the time-

Mark Greaves:

At the time, you were right, you were definitely right.

Will Little:

Yeah. I still am, by the way.

Mark Greaves:

We've seen that transition before and I think there is something, the first generation taking over and sometimes the second, if you don't have difficulty doing it, actually that's not a good sign. Once you get into the fourth or fifth generation, then things should be much smoother. There should be a system. There should be what you want for the next generation. But that first takeover, if it's easy, quite often that's not a good signal. You need to come in and make your presence felt.

Will Little:

Yeah, I think so. I mean, at the time, I kind of wished it hadn't been quite so turbulent. But yeah, I guess it's one of those things where you are usually walking into someone's life work, right? And as much as, like I say, there's will to move it on and to do the right thing, I think you're dealing with the older generation who have been doing it a certain way for lot of years, right? And then the young buck comes in with fresh ideas and that could be quite unsettling.

And I think the other problem, I think, with many parents that hand their business over to their kids is the thought of retirement is actually quite scary. And I didn't appreciate that, and I still kind of struggle with that a little bit, because when you're younger, you're like, "I want to retire when I'm 40." It's like, well, I'm 40 now, I haven't retired, it's not going to happen. But I think my parents were quite worried about that. You start worrying is your cognitive ability going to drop? And all that. So, I think, for them it was quite scary to think about that as well. So yeah, for sure.

I mean, I know what you mean. I always feel a bit nauseous when you've got those sort of family businesses where everyone's best friends and like, "My best friend's my dad." I'm like, "Get out. Just shut up." It's not reality. And I don't know if those people are lying or if there's a percentage of that actually occurring, but it's not something I've ever witnessed in person. Yeah, a bit of friction, it's almost a good thing up to a certain extent. It means you're moving things forward, I think that's what probably the point is, Mark.

Mark Greaves:

Well, there's the old thing about forming teams in terms of forming, norming, storming, performing, it's that storming phrase which actually kicks things off and takes it.

Okay, so coming to the business stuff. Obviously, you became involved, you've got a slightly different background. Then you moved the brand on, moved on from the white label stuff into own brand and into quite high-level retailers at that stage. How did you manage that transition as you came through?

Will Little:

Well, we didn't actually sell to any supermarkets for the first several years after I came back to Devon. There was a regional Waitrose listing kicking about, but it was very small, I think 37 stores or something. And we didn't really know how to scale that.

So, our history has been ... I sometimes get challenged on, why is the business not bigger than it is? Why has it taken you 14 years to get to 4 million? And it's like, well, because it's taken a lot of time to work out how to do what we need to do. I call it getting match fit. Right? So, if you don't have a trainer but you know you have to play in the Premier League, you just have to work out yourself and you make so many mistakes and it takes a lot of time. If someone's showing you the way, you can do it a lot quicker, but we didn't.

So, it took a long time and I just knew that ... I slowly started to work out that actually we need to build a consumer brand here. That's really what's at the heart of this, is building a consumer brand that consumers identify with and it resonates with them and builds that kind of mental availability. So, I mean, even that, we've been through three iterations of branding since I've been here. I designed one of them, branding agency's done two of them, and that's not been a straight road either. So, what we've landed on now that if you look at Little's today, this is two years old now, this iteration. This is the first time I've had, in quotes, "the clothes," that I think the business needs or the brand needs. And I think that's not been easy either.

Mark Greaves:

I'm not sure about your timescale. I don't think there is a defined timescale. And certainly, in sustainability terms, the more mistakes you can make while you are smaller, the better. Go out ... I don't really like the take risks, fail fast type mentality, but if you can fail when you are smaller and make those mistakes and learn from them, which lots of businesses don't, then when you get to your 4 million or your 7 million, whatever the next cutoff is where they argue about the evolution of a business, the better you are set up for it because you've been through the pain, you have more faith in your brand at that stage. So, what does your brand mean to the marketplace? What are you trying to communicate by your brand?

Will Little:

Well, I think it stems from the fact that if you walk down a coffee aisle in a supermarket, even a bougie supermarket, it's pretty boring. And you've got to remember that instant coffee is still 55, 60% of it. So, of all the coffee sold in supermarkets, 55 or 60% of it is instant, which is wild.

So, there are some glimmers of hope in the coffee category if you look at maybe some of the challenger brands coming through like ground coffee and whole beans and the prevalence of specialty coffee, which is exciting. But the instant coffee shelf, by and large, is one of the most boring shelves in the supermarket, and we're here to change that.

So, that's really what it's about is, I hate instant coffee, but I love instant coffee. I hate it because it's rubbish, but that's what I love about it also because there's opportunity to actually change it up. There's so much potential to make it taste better, which what we've done, and there's so much opportunity to get consumers to buy into a brand that's doing a better job on sustainability, doing a better job on taste, and actually a brand that is aspirational. No one's done that in instant coffee. Yet, it's a billion-pound category. There's a billion quid's worth of instant coffee sales to go after.

I just think it's a huge opportunity. And I think, yeah, it's about mixing things up, giving consumers an opportunity to buy something better with a product category they love, because the convenience of instant coffee is amazing, the cost per cup is amazing, but the brands out there that are delivering instant coffee are just horrible. They're rubbish.

Mark Greaves:

Quite a lot of the brands rely on personalities and that type of stuff. Is there an ideal personality that if you had an unlimited checkbook, that you'd actually try and employ to promote your brand?

Will Little:

As in, an actual person?

Mark Greaves:

Yes.

Will Little:

That's a really good question.

Mark Greaves:

The George Clooney Nespresso-type stuff.

Will Little:

Yeah. So, I always think it'd be really good to hack George Clooney, just offer him a bigger paycheck than Nespresso can and just be like, hey, that's pretty disruptive, right?

Well, that's a really good question. I mean, I don't know, without thinking about it and coming up with some sort of really clever answer, I do think though that that's a really interesting idea because you see brands like I just saw the new Liquid Death advert with Ozzy Osbourne and you just think, "Man, these guys are starting to punch now." They're not just going for ... Their strategy was to use people from the counterculture, so they'd have musicians and maybe extreme sports people and maybe adult film stars and stuff like that. But now it's like Ozzy Osbourne is a brand ambassador in the adverts.

So yeah, for sure. I think, for us, it's about we're still a really inclusive brand. I mean, we tend to focus on the younger consumer, because they're the ones that, I think, need that convenience in their lives more than the older consumer. And also, I think flavoured coffee is a young person's game as well. So, it'd be someone who's a fairly young woman, who's pretty kick-ass, but I can't think of anyone on the spot.

Mark Greaves:

Dua Lipa or something like that is-

Will Little:

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, because we're not trying to be exclusive either. It's not about high-class, Bentley-driving, we're not Cartier-wearing, that's not us. This is an everyday kind of thing, but it's still aspirational. But yeah, I'll think about that. I'll have a little think about it. I'll reach out to Dua and her team and see what happens.

Mark Greaves:

Well, I think with the AI nowadays you can probably hack George Clooney, however the lawsuit would probably follow very quickly at that moment.

Will Little:

Well, isn't his wife a fricking lawyer? So, yeah-

Mark Greaves:

I must admit, I had missed that. I imagine he's employed enough lawyers himself. You mentioned sustainability earlier, and just before we talked about ... We were talking before the podcast, you mentioned about B Corp and your recent submission. What does that mean to you?

Will Little:

Yeah. So, we just submitted our B Corp submission. We submitted the assessment just before I came on air. And hey, listen, we're not the first to the party. Everyone's got B Corp, right? But it's a journey we actually only started in January. So, this has happened extremely quickly for us because my wife, Caro, who's actually been managing the B Corp journey and what struck me, and I'm not trying to gloat here, but it showed us that the things that we've been preaching and the things we've been implementing and putting in place in terms of sustainability are actually real. Because I wouldn't say we breezed through it, I think it's taken some work, but we haven't had to implement anything new in the business. Everything we're doing already got us up to a score of 90 for the submission. Now, it's going to come down from that. You need 80 to pass. It's going to come down from 90, but we've submitted at 90.

So, the business is in good shape when it comes to the B Corp assessment, which shows that the things that we've been doing, using sustainability is a bit of a North Star for the business. It's actually paying off and it means that we're practicing what we preach, I guess. So, hopefully, it'll be a few months to go through and get the assessment done and get the accreditation. But yeah, I don't know, I've heard of companies, it's taken two years to get B Corp accreditation. So, the fact that we only started in January/February and we've just submitted, and I just think it's a testament to all the hard work the guys have done and the focus that we've put into sustainability.

Mark Greaves:

That certainly is fast. Two years is about average for a medium-sized business. But I picked up one phrase in there, in terms of it proves what you are doing already. You're not changing yourself to try and achieve it. You are looking at it to actually say and certify, "We are this." Rather than actually change stuff. And I think that if you've got the right purpose to start with, that makes it a slightly easier process. Well, I understand they're changing the rules this year to make it even harder to qualify once you get into next year, I think.

Will Little:

Yeah, a little bit. It's the payment mainly that's going up, actually. So, I think that's why people are rushing to get through. But I think I would argue that almost any business can obtain B Corp, and I think that it's kind of good that they can, but if you put enough things in place, you can get the score there.

That's not really the purpose of it, in my opinion. It's really for the businesses that actually, like I say, practice what they preach. It should be an accreditation that gives the businesses that sustainability above profit, gives something to a badge of honour, essentially. And again, there's lots of great business out there with B Corp and we're not the only ones, but I think it's still, we always make decisions based on what's the best quality outcome and what's the best sustainability outcome when it comes to products and anything we do pretty much.

Mark Greaves:

I think it's still relatively rare. I was looking just before we came on air. There's about 2,000 in the UK, which is not a massive number compared to the tens of thousands of trading businesses, shall we say, at that stage. So, it's getting better, but there's still lots of people on the journey, I think.

Okay. Let's come on to your other business Roastwork Coffee. You obviously had far too much spare time running one business as you thought, "Oh, I'll just start another one then." Why did you volunteer to go further into the madness? Shall I say.

Will Little:

Oh, I don't know what I was thinking. So, the guys get really annoyed when I say this, but I used to describe it as a hobby gone wrong because it wasn't that conscious a decision. I was maybe three or four years into running Little's and I just had this itch, right? You know the story I told earlier about Monmouth and the coffee that I fell in love with in London? I love Little's because I get to build a brand, and I'm really passionate about that. I'm really passionate about creating a consumer brand that's got this almost ... I want to build this kind of cult value around it. And I really, really, really love taking it to the shelves of the supermarkets and giving the big guys a bloody nose. I'm well into that.

However, there's a part of me that just loves that kind of artisanal process and wants to have an artisan business. And that's what Roastworks is really. I started it in 2015 with my wife, and it was just a bit of a mess around really. I bought a small roasting machine with some savings and I was roasting out of the back of the Little's unit and started just messing around with some local guys and roasting coffee, tasting coffee. And it's really when I opened my stupid old mouth in a supplier meeting, rather a buyer meeting, with Whole Foods, that things started to change and it became a real thing. Yeah, they were interested in it. And then, lo and behold, here we are nine years later, knee-deep in two businesses. Yeah, it's an absolutely ridiculous thing to do. I have absolutely no time at all. I've got two kids as well, so I don't know what I was thinking.

Mark Greaves:

Volunteer for more ... Okay. So, that's quite different kind of brand channels, all that type of stuff. Do you need to reset? Do you need to walk through a door and go, "Oh, I'm now in this mindset," et cetera? How do you balance that?

Will Little:

Yeah. And that's a good analogy actually. So, that's one of the reasons we kept the businesses separate because a lot of people ask me, "Why are they separate?" It's like, well, because they're very different.

So, to explain it, they're separate limited companies. I'm a shared director, so is my wife. My parents aren't involved in Roastworks, they're not shareholders. And they are in separate units next door to each other. So, if you ever came here to visit us, in one unit you've got Little's and all the production for that, and then next door you've got a roastery, which is the Roastworks unit. And it is important to almost walk through that kind of, "Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be Roastworks." Wow, there's a reference for anyone over the age of 30, right?

Mark Greaves:

We'll explain it in the link when we send you the podcast.

Will Little:

Shut up, granddad. Yeah, I think it is important almost ... And I do struggle with that sometimes because you're almost wearing two hats, right? Because the consumer's entirely different. The route to market can be similar. I think that's where the similarity is. But earlier on today, I explained it to someone like, "Forget they're both in coffee. Imagine you've got an insurance company on one side and a tractor tire sales place on the other side. That's basically how it is in terms of consumer split and the tone of voice and how you communicate and the brand and everything." They are both coffee and they both sell in supermarkets and online and whatever, bit of wholesale, but apart from that, there's no real similarity.

Mark Greaves:

I'm just thinking between the two of them. Does that mean you are slightly sharper on each business because you know about another business which is very different and what works there might not work here? Does that keep some sharpness between it?

Will Little:

Very good, Mark. Thank you. Yes, it does. I think it really is a strength because without Roastworks, Little's lacks a kind of a coffee prowess, the coffee industry prowess, because at the end of the day, Little's competitors are kind of ... They don't necessarily have to be coffee people. You're just creating a brand, right? But we are coffee people, so having Roastworks next door gives Little's some legitimacy in that sort of subject.

And on the flip side, Roastworks benefits from having a big sister called Little's because we know how to build a brand and how commercially to sell that brand. So, how to talk to consumers, how to put proper systems in place. So, Roastworks is constantly learning from Little's as well. So, there's definitely some mutual beneficial stuff going on there. And it allows me then to have a much broader reference point when it comes to the industry that we're in, than if I just had one of those businesses. So, I think it's definitely a positive.

Mark Greaves:

That's good. I want to quickly cover just something you mentioned about supermarkets then, and it's something I see in the growth of businesses when they get to such a size that they can get some shelf space at the supermarket, and the different reactions. If you were advising a smaller company that's coming through and they're potentially getting their first order into Tesco's or Waitrose or whatever, what would you say to that business about the positives and negatives, and good side and bad side?

Will Little:

Yeah. We've learned this the hard way many times and like I say, that's one of the reasons it took so long to get Little's to a point where we were doing that well. I would definitely seek to get some advice into the business, someone who's been there and done it. I think that the other thing I would say is, make sure that you understand what problem you solve for the consumer and for the retailer. So, that's why you hire very expensive national account managers and category managers into businesses when you grow, because they're able to put those category arguments together to really make the buyer at the supermarket understand what it is you're doing to make their shelf better, make their fixture better.

But the key thing, I would say, is every single retailer is different. They're not all the same. So, I think, a lot of the time if you are a brand that's only sold in farm shops and maybe some local outlets and then you look at supermarkets, it gets lumped into one category, "Oh, I don't want to sell to supermarkets." Well, hang on a second. Waitrose is very, very different to Tesco. I mean, it's like, again, like tractor tires and insurance. Right? It's like they're very, very different. And I would say, dealing with Tesco is a very, very different beast. And even Sainsbury's and Tesco are very different. Sainsbury's are in the middle somewhere. They're quite nice to deal with. They've got huge volumes, but they're quite nice to deal with.

Tesco are difficult, Tesco are difficult. You need to know that when you deal with Tesco, you're dealing with the market leader in the UK and they're not a market leader because they crossed their fingers. They're a market leader because they're ruthless. So, it's just knowing that really, and understanding that they all have different ways of dealing with smaller suppliers, and some of them might not be a very good fit for you.

Mark Greaves:

I think that's ideal. I think it's one of those where you don't see it as a solution for the business. It is a brick on the growth path. Yes, it can be quite valid, but as you say, you've got to know what you're getting into at that stage.

Okay. A couple of things I'd want to pick up on, and I'm going to pronounce this wrongly, one of your roasting machines, the Barth Menado.

Will Little:

Nailed it.

Mark Greaves:

Comes originally from Finland. Is that a coincidence, or?

Will Little:

Well, the machine was in Finland. It's a German built machine. It was built in Germany in 1958. It's a GW Barth Menado, you absolutely smashed out of the park with the pronunciation. It's a 60 kilo batch roaster. And it was in Finland when my parents ... So, my parents essentially bought a failing coffee roastery back in the '80s. That's how they started the business. After they came back from California that one year, someone was selling a roastery and it happened to have this German machine in it. So, that machine's been in our family for over 35 years, putting food on the family table. So, it's kind of a family heirloom as well as a bit of production equipment.

Mark Greaves:

Ideal. Good history on that. Okay, last question on here, and it's got to involve something like this. What's your favorite flavour of coffee and what's the strangest flavour you've ever seen?

Will Little:

Favorite flavour. So, I've got a couple. So, at the moment, we've got a new toffee nut flavour, relatively new, it's not new, but it's one of the more recent ones. And I really like that. I think it's a very popular flavour at the moment, but I really like the way that that flavour works in coffee, both as our Nespresso capsules and instant coffee. So, that's really good.

So, cardamom coffee is a funny one. It's not particularly common and popular in the UK, but we do have a cardamom bun flavour in the range. But cardamom and coffee have been best mates since the dawn of time. And in Middle Eastern countries there's a tradition to drink coffee with cardamom pods. So, I really like that. It's quite a Finnish flavour as well. Cardamom's used in bakery, like sweet goods and baked goods quite a lot in Finland. So, I really like cardamom.

Weirdest flavour? So, we've definitely tasted some odd stuff. I once tasted a prickly pear flavoured coffee. Our flavour suppliers have some weird and wonderful things. And because they're in Europe, they're continental, they come up with these flavour trends and I was like, "What is a prickly pear?" And they were like, "You know when you see like a cactus in Spain and it's got the little red thing on top?" And I was like, "Yeah." It was like, "Yeah, so you can eat that." And I was like, "Really?" And they were like, "Yeah, this is a flavour of it in a coffee." And I was like, "Yeah, that's not going to sell." So, that was probably the weirdest one. I didn't even know what I was supposed to be tasting, but it was kind of okay, kind of fruity, but yeah, probably not going to take off.

Mark Greaves:

Isn't prickly pear part of a line from a Disney film or something like that? Baloo the bear mentions it, I'm sure, at that moment.

Will Little:

Probably, yeah. And that connotation is even worse. Yeah. Angry bear flavour. Yeah.

Mark Greaves:

Ideal. Well, thank you for joining us today, Will, I've really enjoyed our conversation and thank you for sharing your story with our listeners. I hope they've enjoyed it as much as I have. And you've really given a really good flavour of that growth story, that branding journey that you've actually been through. So, thank you for that.

And thank you to our audience for listening to our latest episode of Business Noodles. We hope you've enjoyed the conversation. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to get updates and notifications when our latest episodes are available.