BOL founder Paul Brown
(Picture: BOL)Peek inside a fridge of that growing band of health-conscious Londoners and you’re bound to find some BOL inside.
The food brand’s range of “power shakes”, “posh noodles”, salad jars, soups and healthy ready meals have soared in popularity since founder Paul Brown turned the firm vegan — helping turnover near-double this year to £18 million.
Not long ago, Brown, 42, was, as he puts it, “a traditional meat and two veg Northerner”, while BOL’s bestsellers were Jamaican jerk chicken and Kerala chicken meals.
Then in 2017, Brown watched Netflix’s Cowspiracy documentary, read John Robbins’s Food Revolution and “began thinking more about the effects that our heavily meat-based diet was having on both people and planet. I quickly realised I could be part of the solution, not the problem”.
He decided to turn BOL vegan. It wasn’t a popular decision — “it halved the size of our brand overnight,” Brown admits.
“We lost so much fridge space in shops because I had to tell Tesco and others, ‘sorry, I’m not making your best-selling Jamaican jerk chicken any more, because we’re going vegan. “At that time we hadn’t made the new recipes to replace them, and being plant-based wasn’t a ‘big thing’ like it is today. It was pretty scary — investors were really concerned that we were going to go out of business.
“Looking back, it was the best decision we could have made.”
BOL
Founded: 2015
Staff: 27
Turnover: £18 million
Headquarters: Paddington
Last month — albeit “Veganuary” — BOL sold £2.5 million-worth of its creamy chick’n soup (made with jackfruit), Japanese rainbow slaw salad jar and its other 34 products.
The firm expects retail sales to hit £30 million this year.Vegans’ gain came at winter sports’ loss: it was while working in California — where a broken wrist destroyed Brown’s dreams of being a professional snowboard instructor — that he first dreamed of recreating the West Coast’s fresh, healthy convenience food in Britain.
“I loved the ready-made food out there that was so vibrant and good for you.”But once he returned to the UK, in 2001, “I couldn’t get funding for the idea. I didn’t know what to do next. One day, I had an Innocent smoothie in a café, and on the bottle it said, ‘come say hi at [its HQ] Fruit Towers’. So I did, and ended up getting a job selling their smoothies out of the back of a van for a few years.”
Brown, one of Innocent’s earliest employees, ended up staying 14 years, eventually running its food division and introducing its Veg Pots which, he claims, “fundamentally changed the ready meal category in the UK — until then it was mostly over-processed, unhealthy products.”
When Innocent was bought by Coca-Cola in a deal worth £320 million in 2015, “it soon became apparent Innocent would be all about drinks,” Brown says. Coke closed Innocent’s food division, and Brown secured £500,000 backing from angels including Innocent founders’ investment fund Jam Jar to launch BOL in April 2015.
You can certainly hear and see the Innocent-isms in Brown: staff are “epic team members”, BOL’s office is “The Veg Pad” and is perched next to Paddington Basin, which Brown jokingly calls “our infinity pool”. He says working at the smoothie firm “was my business school — I dropped out of university but learnt so much at Innocent. My contacts from working there were invaluable in helping Bol grow fast.”
Having a bulging contacts book helped Brown secure an impressive listing in Tesco in his first year of business.
The pandemic, however, hit BOL hard: one of its biggest customers was Costa Coffee, whose shops were shut; its popular salad jars were for office meeting-hoppers and offices were empty. “We lost 40% of sales, but compared with so many restaurants and other businesses, I was just grateful it didn’t go to zero.”Bol diversified, including launching as an add-on in Hello Fresh meal boxes, and on Deliveroo, where the account manager accidentally listed Brown’s mobile number for customer delivery issues.
“Luckily the only call that came through was from a relatively local Deliveroo customer who didn’t receive two of the soups he’d ordered. I just asked what he wanted and where he lived, and jumped on my bike and delivered them.”
Celebrity fans now include Made in Chelsea’s Ollie Proudlock — who has invested in one of BOL’s four subsequent fundraisers, alongside suits including Addison Lee’s CEO Liam Griffin — and Katie Piper, Kirsty Gallacher and Natalie Pinkham. Brown wants to launch in Ireland this summer, and across Europe too. “The plant-based movement is here to stay — and now is a brilliant opportunity for innovative food businesses to go mainstream.”
