Recipe for Greatness
Recipe for Greatness
Growing Grubby: The Evolution of The UK's Number 1 Plant-Based Recipe Kit
Martin Holden-White takes us through his journey of founding Grubby, the UK's first 100% plant-based recipe kit company that has delivered over 2 million meals since launching in 2019.
• Starting in kitchens at 16 years old before studying hospitality
• Originally conceptualizing Grubby as a smart fridge vending machine for offices
• Pivoting the entire business model during COVID lockdown to home delivery
• Delivering free meals to NHS workers as a testing ground for their operations
• Building a distinctive brand identity with deliberate "special wrongness"
• Prioritizing sustainability through biodegradable packaging and bike couriers
• Taking a measured approach to growth compared to competitors who raised 10x more funding
• Achieving profitability in three of the last five months through operational efficiency
• Expanding into a marketplace featuring exclusive plant-based products
• Opening up into ready meals as their next business development
Check out our cookbook published with Penguin, available on Amazon and in bookstores across the UK. The recipes have been refined through five years of customer feedback, making them simple, accessible weeknight dinners using easy-to-find ingredients.
3, 2, 1, 0, and liftoff Liftoff, no. Hello and welcome to the Recipe for Greatness podcast. I'm your host, Joe Greenwood, and in this podcast we interview the founders behind some of the best food and drink brands in the UK. Today on the podcast we have Martin Holden-White, the founder of Grubby, the UK's first 100% plant-based recipe kit. Since launching in 2019, Martin has grown Grubby from a scrappy start-up delivering meal kits by bike in London to a nationwide business fulfilling over 12,000 orders a month and recently passing the milestone of 2 million meals delivered. Martin's background blends hands-on food experience, working in kitchens from the age of 16, with commercial insights from his time in contract catering. His journey with Grubby includes a full pivot during the COVID-19 lockdown, multiple funding rounds and a relentless focus on building a mission-driven, sustainable business that makes plant-based cooking easy, exciting and accessible. Martin, welcome to the podcast.
Martin Holden-White:Hey, jay, thanks for having me on.
Jay Greenwood:So I wanted to jump in and ask you about you as a child and sort of deciding what your future career would be, because you worked in kitchens as a teenager, you studied hospitality. Can you take us back to early moments that maybe drew you to kind of that career path?
Martin Holden-White:Yeah, sure, well, I think first thing was it was a school work experience basically, um, I'm not even sure whether they still do those, but it was a week's work experience.
Martin Holden-White:Um, I was 16 and didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do.
Martin Holden-White:But yeah, for some reason I sort of saw the opportunity, um, on one of the, the posts about working at a local restaurant, um, and it was a french kitchen, really busy, sort of wild wild west environment, um, and uh, yeah, sort of rocked up there for a week and uh, got sort of thrown into things cooking lots of different stuff, um, and, yes, just really enjoyed the sort of hustle and bustle of it and the creativity and, you know, different types of people and from different backgrounds and, yeah, just sort of I guess got drawn to the, to the food sector from there.
Martin Holden-White:And, yeah, after school I left and went to university and studied business and hospitality as a result of that and I guess, yeah, I'd sort of had like a, an interest in business broadly and entrepreneurship generally. Not really sure what it meant at that stage, but you know, knew it was like an exciting thing that um, you know, I sort of potentially wanted to get involved with um and yeah, that's sort of how I guess I got sort of sucked into the food industry and then you worked in contract catering.
Jay Greenwood:Um, why did you see an opportunity there for your career? And I guess, maybe looking back, how pivotal and influential was that time working contract catering to set you up for success with, probably, later on?
Martin Holden-White:yeah, definitely, I mean it was a big, big factor. Um, so, yeah, did the hospitality degree. And I actually worked on a cruise ship randomly in my placement year, which I was on board the Queen Elizabeth with Cunard for a year, which was like working around all the different departments there was like 52 different nationalities within the crew it was and uh, they're super interesting working environment. Um, and then when I, when I got back, um, yeah, I applied in my final year for for a job at baxter story, who were a sort of large corporate contract agent business that had restaurants and um, cafes and fine dining within corporate environments as well as kind of universities and stuff, um, and I joined their grad scheme to start with and got a job after that as a sales guy for them. Um, so that evolved sort of figuring out basically for a new piece of business or an existing piece of business, what the whole catering offer was going to look like, you know in any given building, whether that be amazon's head office or you know a university, and uh, yeah, it just allowed, allowed me to sort of get an understanding of the business as a whole, because you're sort of trying to pull all the different pieces together so menus, chefs, finances, how the whole model worked, how it's going to get staffed, um, and we were literally having to put this together on paper and on spreadsheets, um and and in you know written format about what the whole offer was going to look like. So it really sort of gave me a really good overview of the business as a whole, um, and definitely taught me to like scrap a lot, because when you're in sales you really have to scrap and be pretty, pretty relentless, um at times. So, yeah, definitely learned like a huge amount in those those five years.
Martin Holden-White:Um and uh, ultimately that was the original business concept behind grubby.
Martin Holden-White:So the the the start of grubby was was like a smart fridge, um, effectively like a vending machine for recipe kits, um, and I started to, I started to put it into tender documents at back to stories as a, as an idea, um, which, um, in sort of dreamland of sales, you think anybody could do anything um, and that that wasn't what our business did, so it didn't really work very well.
Martin Holden-White:So I basically said that um like, yeah, I wanted to do it myself, so I quit and get there go. Um, so, um, you know there's obviously a little bit behind that decision but, to be honest, like I didn't really have a clue if it was possible or or worthwhile, um, you know, I suppose I've had a relatively stable job for a couple of years and, um, you know, had a little bit of savings, um to give it, give it a shot. So I can only just describe it really as like a a niggling feeling of like this is a good idea. I need to give this a go, otherwise I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life.
Jay Greenwood:So that was sort of the the process yeah, I was going to ask you about it because you're you're in, like you're having this sort of thoughts. You're in your flat in East London, you're playing around recipes. Was there any framework you thought about? So you mentioned Lucy there. Like you know, you just felt that sort of like niggle that you wanted to give it a go. Do any frameworks you did to approach the sort of right I'm going to give myself x amount of time to do this, or was it just like I think this is a great idea?
Martin Holden-White:I'm going to give it a go yeah, it's a good question, I suppose, like I thought, I suppose I was in my head thinking, right, I'll, I'll give this a year, um, to see how far I can get um. And in the end, how it worked out was that in that year I took on a part-time role at another contra caching business, just doing like a day a week, um, to just get a bit of cash. And that. And the guy that founded that business said to me that you know I could work for him, I could use his kitchen to work on my development, but you know I could have the majority of the week to do my own thing. He'd invest a little bit of money in the idea, which he did, and he took an initial stake in the idea at that point when it was basically nothing and, yeah, that worked quite well. That sort of you know. I think I'd encourage other founders to do something similar to you know, when you're chipping away at the idea at the early stages, if you could just bring a little bit of money in and work for somebody part time or something like that, you know it's a good way of, I guess, hedging your bets a little bit and not leaving yourself in a massive financial hole, you know. I mean I put all my savings at that point into the business, which wasn't a lot, but it was enough to get it going. I basically developed all the recipes in my flat.
Martin Holden-White:I had no idea really about plant-based cooking per se. I'm not trained as a chef, but I'd worked in kitchens quite a bit. Kitchens quite a bit, um, but the whole concept was, like you know, plant-based is incredibly difficult, or I found it incredibly difficult to to make it taste good, make it simple. But I wanted to reduce my meat intake and it was like well, how is this so difficult? Um, for me, if it's difficult for me, it's going to be difficult for a lot of other people. Um, and that was sort of where my head got to on okay, this has to be plant based, not just vegetarian. You know, that's the thing that's going to become more of a thing over the next few years. So that's that's where it sort of stems from.
Jay Greenwood:And I want to go back to the original idea of Grubby, because you mentioned it sort of launched in offices. How did you approach these offices to let them give you the opportunity Because there must be offices all the time to get, get you know, oh, I've got this idea, can I come and use it? How did you convince?
Martin Holden-White:them that, you know, this was the idea that they should consider, with great difficulty. I mean, as, as you know, like, uh, office managers and stuff, notoriously hard to get through to, um, and convincing them is difficult, I suppose with the, uh, the vending piece it was, I tried to make it a basically a complete no-brainer um. So, uh, it was a great perk that people could come and try and, to begin with, um, it was effectively like a glorified shelving unit with an iset or taped to the side of it. Um, and uh, you know, I was basically saying to, to the people that I was talking to, um, that, uh, you know they, they could basically give their teams, uh, almost free meals or part subsidized. So, say, the bags were 10 pound each. They could subsidize each one by a fiver, which wasn't, you know, wasn't that much and they weren't going to sell like crazy amounts.
Martin Holden-White:But it allowed them to take care of their employees after work and give them healthy dinners, like beyond the working environment, for not a lot. So it was really not costing them much and it meant that the teams that were buying it were getting a meal in the evening for really, really cheap. So that was like the original kind of sales pitch and the office managers quite liked it because it was like a new thing that they'd not been able to do before, so just basically got into like a few offices. But I was just before covid and, um, you know, I have no idea if it would have been successful or not, because like three months after starting that, um, the whole office world locked down and the whole idea was, you know, completely blown out of the water.
Jay Greenwood:Really I was going to ask you because, like, do you see Covid as a blessing or curse, obviously, for giving all the sort of health stuff behind it? But from a purely business perspective do you think like, how do you think about? Do you think you're glad it happened and now you're on this route, or yeah, I mean, it's a weird one.
Martin Holden-White:At the time it felt like an absolute disaster. I landed back with my parents in the Midlands I'd actually had a 100k seed investment at that point, but really close to when lockdown happened, which is part of the supper club or it was called the supper club, um, it's now called helm, I think, uh, which is like a sort of network of, of serial sort of entrepreneurs, um, who can also invest in businesses and they have like an annual dragon's den pitch that I went to um and so a guy invested at that point it was like the original angel investor, rob hamilton, um, and, uh, yeah, that was fortunate. It was a fortunate thing, um, because if we hadn't have had that investment at that point, then I think things would have been pretty different and I was a very pivotal, pivotal moment, but still, you know, right back in mitch foot of my parents thinking, well, this is a disaster, what I'm gonna do next? Um, I had no idea how long it was gonna last, um, but in that first lockdown chipped away at like a shopify website for a few weeks, um, a friend who was supposed to go traveling for a year that I've been working with at the previous contract caterer. Uh, he came back a week later and was quite tech savvy and, uh, I called him up and saw how I was traveling. He's like, terrible, I'm back in the uk, um.
Martin Holden-White:But yeah, and I said, well, that's cool, but you want to help me build a website? Um, so, um, we, we chipped away in that first sort of summer, like summer, feeling uh lockdown, and uh built the website pretty rapidly. I was going out to london every week, um, and delivering meals to the nhs, because we had a friend who had a contact there, um, and we just delivered free meals, like as a part of us just giving campaign, and that got the wheels turning a little bit. You know, taught us how to pack a recipe kit, um, and uh, and yeah, that's sort of where it all started, and was the plan always to sort of pivot, I guess, using that?
Jay Greenwood:word to the meal kits deliver at home. Or was it the NHS sort of moment where you sort of did that crowdfunding and sort of run that model that you were like, right, this is actually it, this is what we think? And I guess, was there any feedback you were getting or interaction with the customers that made you like double down on thinking actually, yeah, this definitely is it. With the customers.
Martin Holden-White:That made you like double down, thinking, actually, yeah, this definitely is it, yeah, definitely. I probably didn't know at the time when we did the ahs thing. It was like it was a real learning experience and sort of taught us that the idea could work and it was like a really great, like acid test because, um, it was free for us, it was great pr, it was charitable um, we weren't making money out of it, but it it just. Like you know, we were beavering away in this little little um sort of industrial unit in tharkin, well, packing these kits, ordering the veg, running around supermarkets trying to get last minute ingredients. Um, most of the stuff we bought was, you know, literally from local supermarkets at that point, and we were portioning everything ourselves, uh, teaspooning spices into little containers, all of that stuff, um, and yeah, we learned loads, like absolutely loads, in those first few weeks. Um, and uh, yeah, it was definitely.
Martin Holden-White:Yeah, that was a bit of a blessing that we managed to have that, because they weren't sort of real customers in many ways and they gave us feedback. We just put a little business card, each one with a little QR code, to be like give us feedback. It'd be super appreciated and they were getting it for free. So a lot of people did because it was a nice thing to do. So, yeah, it was really really useful. And you know, I think the I guess the lesson from that for the people is like the sooner you can get your products into people's hands in the cheapest way, even when it's not finished and you don't think it's perfect, literally get it out there, because that's the problem. I still have that when we work on new stuff. It's just like getting stuff out there tech wise or whatever it is sooner than you think is better, because otherwise you can be working on things for too long and things slow down yeah, I was.
Jay Greenwood:Um, can I ask you because one thing I really admire about the story is just like it's quite scrappy, like when I've been doing all the research, you know it's like doing even just the office stuff, you delivering all that stuff when you're getting around the recipes, packing all yourself. How has it been sort of transitioning to a more operational side of stuff, and when was that moment where you suddenly realized, right, scrappy is good, be good. It's got us to this point. We need to move to a more operationalized business.
Martin Holden-White:Yeah, definitely I mean, we scrapped for quite a while like, yeah, I mean the office side of things. I was getting like cats to the offices filled with kids, um, I was using somebody else's van, that she was doing deliveries anyway, and I was just jumping in with her to take me to the offices, things like that. And then when we did the first recipe kits to actual customers, we, um, we had one of us on a bike, one of us in the car with the you know um order sheet taped to the dashboard. You know it was all of that stuff and we, we did islington start with, and then we did hackney in islington and just built out the postcodes very, very slowly. We then worked with Pedal Me, who are like a cycle courier.
Martin Holden-White:That was like the first step, I suppose, to sort of try and outsource a little bit um and uh. That sort of worked okay, albeit when it rained. We were still using bags at that stage because we delivered to the offices in these paper bags, um, and then we realized that actually paper bags aren't great, um, when it rains. So, um, yeah, so that was the beginning. But no, then we, then we, we had a fortunate conversation with one of our veg suppliers what's farm at the time, who were doing some overflow packing work for hello fresh. Uh, because obviously those businesses really caught the covid wave, um, and they just had so much work that they were just outsourcing it to whoever they possibly could and then went down to what's farm the next week and we set up a deal with them where we would buy the veg from them and we would also pack in their distribution center.
Martin Holden-White:Um, and that was, like you know, a godsend because we was packing. We were packing probably about 150 boxes, I reckon, um, at that point, um, and that was just like it doesn't sound much, but it was a nightmare. Um, and you know, when you've got like three bags in each box and 10, 15 ingredients in every bag, it was just not sustainable doing ourselves. Um, so, yeah, that was, that was our first step to outsourcing. And then from there, we got couriers on board, we built a tech stack ourselves, we scrapped Shopify. We, you know, we did that side of things from the beginning because our model was a bit more complicated than sort of Shopify and Recharge could sort of handle, I suppose. So, yeah, that was sort of handle, I suppose.
Jay Greenwood:Um, so yeah, that was, that was all how it evolved, how close it like in this sort of journey bit was. It was grubby to sort of failing. So I read it where you said that, um you, the grant came through and you just cried because you just couldn't believe it. How close was it all to just coming down.
Martin Holden-White:Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I really vividly remember that moment. Um, like so, so clearly, like exactly the position I was in when I opened that email, um, and just like reading it and like yeah it was. You just said your grant application has been successful, but you didn't say the amount. And I then had to click the link and uh, and we'd applied for basically 100 grand. Uh and uh went through on a link it was like 99 497 or something like that and uh, I was like oh my god, amazing um and um.
Martin Holden-White:So that was. That was really massive um, and we, I think we, I think we're not you're not really supposed to do this, but I think we had more invoices outstanding at that point than we had cash in the bank, um, so, you know, we were basically bust then by technicality, um, so you probably could have hung on for a few more weeks, um, not paying people and stuff, but, yeah, that's not not really not really ideal at all. So, yeah, it was a huge moment. And then from there, because orders were growing really nicely, we had a good rhythm.
Martin Holden-White:We were knocking doors all around the areas, like every other day that we weren't packing, we were just delivering flyers, you know, um, asking people to sign up with ipads and um, yeah, we were basically kind of like doubling the orders each week, um, and just really really took like unbelievable care over those first, like you know, first set of customers and, um, yeah, it's like several customers in that first batch that are still customers now and they've had sort of, you know, 200 plus orders, um, and a couple of them invested in the crowdfunding campaign that we did, um, so, yeah, like those early stages, just like taking the most care you possibly can over those customers was really really key for sure and I want to talk about brand.
Jay Greenwood:You build brand. That's like feels really fun, and you've done some awesome things, like the spotify playlist, the design for recipe cards. How intentional was that? How have you approached some brand building?
Martin Holden-White:yeah, and so I mean that was like right at the beginning. But just before we sort of went live with um, with the DTC side of things it was actually when we were still in the office stage um, that I was. I was recommended the these, these brand guys that had worked on a couple of things minor figures was probably their biggest claim to fame. They do all of minor figures branding and you know knew they were very, very good at what they did, so managed to get a conversation with them, got a sort of cheapish deal, I think. I think I think I paid five grand for the, for the original concept, which at the time to me was like that's so much money for like just naming and, you know, coming up with the with the concept behind the brand, like you know, worked with them on it, told them wanted to be really playful, something that really stood out, grabbed people's attention. It wasn't like just another kind of yeah, dare I say, like another vegan sort of female friendly brand that you know. Um, you wanted to be different and like really stand out.
Martin Holden-White:Um, and the name grubby was was really all about like fresh veg straight from the ground, that the kitchen experience is like naturally quite messy, um and, but the branding itself is really really clean. So like it's sort of deliberately supposed to be kind of like the opposite. And yeah, like they talked about this sort of special wrongness of the name, we still get people on Facebook ads being like why have you called the business Grubby? Do you not know what the word means? Which is always quite entertaining. But yeah, that was sort of how it came about. Yeah, that was sort of how it came about and we've always sort of tried to be like very deliberately, sort of restrained with our branding and like not putting too much clutter or too much text or letting the image and the limited amount of text we do use like really work very, very hard. So that's sort of the branding in a nutshell.
Jay Greenwood:I'd say and how did this sort of idea of this, the recipe, come around? Tell me about the recipe. How did that come around? So what's like, what's like the goal and the purpose of this for you?
Martin Holden-White:so I mean the whole business, like, the mission's always been to just make plant-based cooking and eating um really really simple and straightforward, um, in a way that people just feel really good about, and we never wanted it to be like there's lots of preconceptions about vegan food, you know, being um like hard to cook, um, it not being like that tasty, um, and like we wanted to like break these myths and, like you know, even like things like it not filling you up, um, you know, we always felt like, even even when I'd had other recipe kits, it was well, this doesn't, it's not like a massive portion um, so that, do you already want to engage with this? Like when I'm spending so much money on it? Um, so we wanted to like break down some of those myths. That was, that was what we've always tried to do, um, and we didn't want to just appeal to to vegans either.
Martin Holden-White:It's never been about that. It's always been about, you know, appealing to everybody. Like you know, I have a friend who are big carnivores but they still love grubby because it just allows them to like break up their week and get a bit more veg into their diet. So we've never been. We've always tried to be quite, yeah, not kind of hammering the vegan message too much and just allowing it to like talk for itself almost, and, yeah, not be too vocal in many ways. But it obviously is a great thing for the environment, for people's health and there's so many other benefits to, like you know, eating more plants. So we try and do it in a subtle way, I suppose.
Jay Greenwood:And you've grown steadily and as you've scaled, what are the hard calls you had to make between the mission and the margin? Can you share any moments where you've had to protect one at the expense of the other?
Martin Holden-White:Yeah, it's a good point. Um, I guess like, yeah, I mean there's lots of things with being a b core, being sustainable, trying to do good for people and the planet and everything. Um, it's challenging when you know, especially over the last few years, where funding has got hard, harder to come by, um, the economy is getting like tighter. People's you know wallets aren't as bad as they were. Um, and yeah, it's, it's challenging. I mean, probably there's some areas where it's the most challenging.
Martin Holden-White:Packaging is a big one. Um, you know, I think it's it's hard to to get that exactly right. Um, mainly because plastic does still do a very, very good job. Um, for lots of aspects when it comes to keeping food fresh, um, obviously, you know most of our packaging is um is recyclable or compostable. So our pods are biodegradable, that we put our spice blends into um as, like, one example. But it is hard to sort of offset that need of where do you price the product versus, like, what packaging do you use and how much people actually care about that? Um versus your feelings on what's best for the, for the business and for the planet. Like there is some difficult calls in there, but ultimately I guess we do just try and consider everything when we're making those decisions and not sort of ignore the fact that every little decision adds up over time.
Martin Holden-White:So, yeah, there's other aspects, other aspects that, like you know, when it comes to delivery, we've delivered a lot of our, a lot of our boxes by bike. That's been a big thing for us since the start, and it was a real shame about zfi, actually, because they recently went to administration. They did a lot of our deliveries for us. But I've never got my head around why more people aren't using bike couriers. They're not. They're not more expensive and in cities they're faster and, um, they're very, very efficient. Um, so I do. I do not get why a lot more bigger businesses aren't engaging more sustainable deliveries. Um, really don't. I mean hived is a great example. We also use those. They're like fully electric, um, really growing very, very fast and they are getting a definitely bigger adoption from bigger brands now. Um, but I think there is more still to be done around bike couriers, because somebody's got to crack that.
Jay Greenwood:It's um, yeah, there's definitely an opportunity there and I mean as a compliment I said previously, you've you've grown steadily because you've avoided sort of the hyper growth that all costs. So what lessons have you learned from watching other plant-based startups sort of raise money and now go under, if there any sort of any insights you've taken that shaped your strategy?
Martin Holden-White:yeah for sure, like I mean it's um, there's been some fairly highly publicised recent casualties in the sector and we've been sort of fortunate in many ways to not have raised quite that amount of money. I mean there's different schools of thought but I mean, yeah, take sort of all plants as an example. We've raised about six million. They raised over 60 million. It definitely puts you in a very different category and mindset of what you're trying to build when you get that kind of money. And yeah, I think we were able to slow things down when the economy was sort of faltering, you know, and funding was becoming very, very difficult to come by.
Martin Holden-White:There was a real sort of six month turnaround of that where it went from being a lot easier to access capital to being just absolutely impossible, um, and I think we realized that quick enough and had raised little enough. That it meant that we didn't like we just managed to avoid at that point going bust. I mean, we weren't far off, to be honest, and it was that was the sort of second closest I think we've come and we managed to do a round from an investment round from existing investors, um, at a lower valuation. It was a down round at that point, um and. But from that point on, I like we just well.
Martin Holden-White:We had a very deep conversation with all of our investors, but also, like me, just to myself, it was like I'm not going to let this get to this point again. You know, I'm just going to work as hard as we can on making the business as efficient as possible and actually just being profitable. And we're not quite there yet. We've had like three of our last five months profitable, which is, you know, I feel like it's a good result from where we were. But you know, we're very, very close now and, yeah, we're getting to the point where the business is sort of sustainable in the long run, which is promising.
Jay Greenwood:And I want to talk about fundraising because we just spoke about it today. So eventually you've raised £6 million and a lot of founders like struggle with raising money sometimes. So I guess, looking in your journey, have you had the insights where maybe you've realised there's something that maybe that's not well. I guess it's counterintuitive or it's not obvious, and what you learn about how to get people to believe in you, any methods or tricks you've used that maybe aren't as obvious yeah, I mean, I think being in sales was, you know, for fundraising.
Martin Holden-White:That was probably one of the biggest bits where it really helped me, um, sort of building a story around a, around a pitch deck, being being one of them and making sure it like flows really well. Um, we'd always like storyboards, pitch decks, you know. Um whenever we wrote them, we'd just like two or three of us would just get around a whiteboard and just like write the story first and, like you know, literally put the key message on kind of each slide as to so it just like really really flowed as a, as a story, from start to finish, um and like trying to trying to capture you know why, like we were like better than anybody else and what, like our USPs were as effectively as you possibly could. But also, I think I don't know it's, it's hard. It's a fine balance between being too ambitious and being believable, but I think we probably always tried to go down the route of, you know, not going too crazy with level of ambition.
Martin Holden-White:I mean, some VCs like do want to see that and that's part of the problem, but maybe the investors that we got were of that sort of feeling that, yeah, the models that we built were believable and ultimately I think it has allowed us to get more follow-on funding, because pretty much all of the milestones we've set along the way um in like the sort of short to medium term we've actually met, um from like a revenue and growth perspective, as opposed to putting out numbers that are just like you know, so sort of pie in the sky like and not achievable. So I think it's built that like trust with our existing investors. It's maybe prevented us from getting big new investors, but it's definitely built trust with our existing investors.
Jay Greenwood:I want to talk about how sort of mission guides strategy. I want to talk about how sort of mission guides strategy, and we spoke about the cookbook and I want to talk now about the add-ons and the marketplace that you've introduced to the website. How do you think about, how does that sort of fit in in the framework of making strategy calls?
Martin Holden-White:Yeah, so yeah, I've actually got a copy of the cookbook here, which is on the marketplace as well, but, yeah, the marketplace as well. Um, but yeah, the marketplace, we, we, we work with so many great plant-based brands. Uh, and obviously part of you know, um, the the push towards profitability has been how we can increase average order value and get more out of our customers. Um, so, yeah, I mean it was that was an area where we felt we could do a lot more, where people could add stuff to their boxes. We, we hold a lot of this stock anyway. Um, so, yeah, we built out a section where people could start to add things to their boxes desserts, snacks, um, like a range of different things and uh, yeah, it's been really been been really effective.
Martin Holden-White:But I think what sort of the nicest part about that is, you know, the brands that we, that we use are getting really good exposure to an audience which you know are into that kind of thing, and, yeah, they can taste new products that they might not otherwise be able to try.
Martin Holden-White:I mean, fable is a great example. They're like a really clean, deck, mushroom based meat alternative and they don't actually sell in retail. They only put their products into restaurants, but they do us like a retail pack, so people can buy Fable from us and they can't really buy it barely anywhere else, and there's lots of examples of that really buy it, um barely anywhere else, um, and there's lots of examples of that, um, so we try and give you like the first to to get you know new, exciting products to market and um, yes, it's a cool sort of environment to do that from um. And then the late, the latest kind of addition to that is that we're um going to be um opening up into into ready meals as well, which will be manufactured by us, which is quite exciting oh, amazing, that's exciting.
Jay Greenwood:So I was. I was thinking about a question about whether, like, if you could go back to um you know you on the first day in the office, in the offices with the card reader, the ready-made shelves, what would you say? And I was just thinking that would you do anything differently, like, would you, what word of advice would you give yourself? Would you change the journey or would you keep as it's been?
Martin Holden-White:yeah, I guess. Yeah, it's a good question. I think at the beginning I was very inefficient and tried to do a lot of things myself and was probably in the early stages a bit of a control freak in that way and would I mean I wish I had chat GPT at that point, that's for sure. That would be one thing I'd definitely change. I worked just like so many weekends and things and just like flogging myself for about 18 months, two years, like it was really really relentless, and I probably did get to a point where I was just quite ineffective and not that productive as a result of it. So I'd maybe actually go back and say like OK, slow down, it's going to be all right, you know, you don't need to like overwhelm yourself like this. So yeah, perhaps a bit of that. I think there was definitely a sort of feeling of always feeling very, very guilty if I wasn't working.
Martin Holden-White:I mean, I still get that a little bit, but that feeling of because you're on your own and nobody else is telling you what to do, that you just have to keep going, keep pushing as hard as you can and maybe bringing people on a little bit sooner to sort of help you fill the gaps of like, where you don't have knowledge and you're actually not as good as you think you are.
Jay Greenwood:Amazing. And I want to finish on one final question where I want to talk about you developing, uh, through your leadership as your style, because we mentioned sort of that's very scrappy style. You're doing everything yourself, and now Grubby's a much, much bigger business. Now how have you had to develop, um, your sort of leadership style, and do you have any systems or anything in place to catch those blind spots or just how do you continue that progression?
Martin Holden-White:yeah, I mean definitely changed a lot over time in the teams. It's not a massive team, it's, you know, there's there's 14 of us um full-time and obviously we've got like the third party logistics business that we work with um, who aren't the team that do the packing, aren't directly employed by us, but we sort of manage them to an extent. Um, but yeah, like leadership style, I think one thing I've always tried to do is keep a real rhythm to the week, um, so this is a working week and um, for a long time we've always had like a weekly team meeting, um, it's sort of changed a bit over time but yeah, trying to sort of capture what's going well, um, being like really transparent about what's not going well, and that's not always that easy. I mean it was definitely incredibly difficult when I knew that we were running out of money, um, and and sort of protecting everybody else from that um, and so that that's probably the hardest part, say, as a founder is like when you, yeah, when you are having financial difficulties, the sort of not being able to share that, especially as a sole founder, when you don't have a co-founder, um, but apart from that, like more recently um, you know, particularly the last 18 months, we've become a lot more transparent, um, and very, very inclusive of the whole team when it comes to the financials. Like every monthly meeting, we go through the pnl um we, we look at the finances as a whole team including, like you know, everybody, customer service, designers, marketing, everybody, um. So, like now, we get people very, very engaged with the, with the numbers side of things, um, and have small incentives, you know, attached to the finances as well.
Martin Holden-White:This this year for the first time, um. So, yes, leadership wise, I think that's been probably the bit that I've tried to focus on the most is just like, keeping a bit of a rhythm to the week and and, um, yeah, ensuring that we're celebrating the wins as we, as we go to think, in the early stages I wasn't very good at um sort of celebrating stuff because it always just felt like we were thinking about the next thing. Um, so, and yeah, that was definitely feedback I got at one point is sort of not, uh, yeah, sort of saying it's not saying thank you, but more just kind of like let's actually celebrate this because it's a really good achievement, um, and sort of doing that a bit more, a bit more frequently amazing.
Jay Greenwood:Well, I think that's a perfect place to wrap up the interview and I want to say um, thank you for, like uh, the amazing interview and also just the amazing work to build and Grabby. It's a brilliant company doing brilliant stuff. Where can people find this book that we've been talking about?
Martin Holden-White:It's actually published with Penguin, it's on Amazon, it's in all the different bookstores across the UK. The recipes in there are. I think one thing about recipe books which I've realized is that a lot of the big cookbooks are not there. There's, there's, uh, they have like ghost writers. They have lots of people around them. They're not tested like a great deal. Um, whereas ours. The great thing about them is they've been through basically five years of customers trying these recipes and feeding back in great detail about how we can make the recipes better. Uh, and yeah, the recipes in that book have been tried and tested by literally thousands of people. So, um, they're simple. That's that's the idea is simple and ingredients that you'll just easily be able to get your hands on. Um, for quick sort of weeknight dinners amazing.
Jay Greenwood:Well, everyone go and get your krabi cooked by what. I really appreciate it. It's been such an honour. So, thank you. Thanks, jeff, appreciate it, as always. Guys, thank you so much for listening, really appreciate the support and if you guys like it and you're enjoying what you're listening to, please like and subscribe and write a review. We'd really appreciate it. Again, we'll be back doing this weekly and, yeah, if you want to know more about starting a food business, head to wwwjgreenwoodcom. But, guys, as always, thank you and be great.