For the fourth episode of season 6 of the Piper podcast, How I Grew My Brand, Mary Nightingale sat down with Anjum Anand and Adarsh Sethia, husband and wife co-founders of the authentic Asian meal kits brand, The Spice Tailor.
They exited the business in 2022, selling to Premier Foods. Now removed from the day-to-day, they have a perspective on their experience that only comes with distance. After a 10-year journey, they feel pride in their accomplishment. As they should, having grown the business to £17m with a curated range of 27 products across all the major supermarkets. The brand saw particular success internationally, with around half the sales coming from Australia and Canada.
Anjum, the culinary force behind the brand, had a highly successful career as a cookery writer and TV presenter before becoming an entrepreneur. She is the author of eight Indian cookbooks and host of Indian cuisine cooking shows on the BBC in the UK and SBS in Australia. She says, however, that the reason she got into cooking as a career is the same reason she began The Spice Tailor, ‘What was on the supermarket shelves when we started to me wasn’t authentic Indian food and I knew we could do better… I wanted to do it properly and went into writing cookbooks, but that was the beginning of my need to teach everyone what real Indian food is.’
Meanwhile, her husband, Adarsh, had a more traditional entrepreneurial journey. He started in his family’s tea business before founding various ventures. Though initially hesitant, he eventually got on board. Adarsh admits he didn’t expect The Spice Tailor to be as successful as it has become, ‘I didn’t understand Indian food because I don’t cook.’ That has all changed now and comparing it to his previous work in trading and IT, ‘The thing about food and beverage… It’s real, it’s got a little bit of everything and it is really the most enjoyable journey.’
When talking about the proposition, they have a singular and strong point of view. Anjum wanted their food to be ‘Better and tastier than your average curry house.’ When they did product testing, they asked, ‘How does this compare to your favourite takeaway or your favourite restaurant experience, it wasn’t how does this compare to the supermarket.’
Adarsh talks about how the premiumisation of their product put them at odds with the rest of the market, ‘At the time when we launched, we were about £3 for a packet, the average price point for everything else on the shelves was about £1.25 and so there was this big gap. Some of the buyers we spoke to said, “Well everyone else is at this price point, they’re not going to pay that”, but actually that wasn’t the case, people just want good quality food.’
Talking about our 7,17,70 inflection points, they pick out hitting £17m turnover as their big shift. During that time, supply chain and retail requirements became so complex they considered buying a factory, ‘But it’s a whole different business model to run a factory… whilst it was going well, we had issues and it didn’t work out, but I think that was the right move for us.’ For Piper, this is the essential reason we focus on inflection points; by acknowledging and preparing for them, founders can make the right choices that align with their proposition and business model.
While they considered PE and other funding options, it never felt quite right for them, and so until they exited, they self-funded. Adarsh details how they achieved this by working with retailers and suppliers to adjust their relationships bit by bit to suit their growth expectations. However, Anjum does note, ‘I think we were quite lucky that when we started people were getting quite interested in challenger brands and I think that made the difference. If people were not supporting the challenger brand trying to do something different and better, we might not have been so lucky.’
On top of the luck, they believe their approach to funding wasn’t driven by necessity, but by how they were raised to think about business, ‘Both our fathers ran their own businesses, and in those days you never really got external funding so if you grow up in a world where you need to work hard, keep going, you don’t get external money and also make a profit, that’s the values that were in us.’ At Piper, as well as young challenger brands, we also meet and invest in long-running established brands who are handing over from founders to professional management, many of whom carry this same attitude as Anjum & Adarsh and have built strong sustainable businesses that we are proud to partner with.
They decided to sell to Premier Foods in 2022 after facing the challenges of operating through the pandemic with international manufacturers and supply chains. However, the real reason was their desire to feel a sense of worth from the business they had devoted 15 years of their lives to, ‘If this isn’t successful, we’d start again from the beginning… If we cash out we have something in the bank to relieve the stress.’
Mary asks them frankly if there is a bereavement after exit, a sense of loss. Anjum agrees there is, ‘The Spice Tailor was my third child… you grow with it, and it grows with you… So, it is hard to say, go and fly without me.’ But after the sale to Premier Foods, ‘I found the relief of no stress was quite good actually!’ More importantly, she knows that it is still her legacy, ‘It still makes me proud, but I’m not thinking about it all the time.’
And they haven’t given up being founders for the quiet life. Instead, Adarsh has returned to his family trade and launched his own tea brand, 96 Degrees, the most exquisite tea leaves from around the world. They’ve got just the same focus on quality and taste that they brought to The Spice Tailor, and we have no doubt it will be just as successful.
Hear the full story and all their insights in the podcast, available on all major podcast players. We hope you enjoy, and we will be back with a new series next year.