As soon as Stefan White and his best mate Tom Renshaw graduated from university, they set to work making their beer snacks empire a reality. Each day, they would pick a London borough and pound the pavement all morning knocking on independent pub doors trying to sell their product - like scenes out of BBC’s The Apprentice.
By the afternoon, they’d make calls to pub groups, and by 3pm, start shifts working in bars as kitchen porters and bartenders, finishing at 2am. Stefan, 27, from North Reddish, was earning £1300 a month, but with his rent at £1250, he knew he had to make it work.
Their breakthrough was with Stonegate Group, who put their flavoursome snacks into 300 of their pubs, which then landed them in other chains, growing from zero to 2,000 pubs in nine months. But disaster struck in March 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic hit locking down pubs, losing the duo 95 per cent of their revenue stream and forcing them to rethink their strategy.
