Fudge hit from Blackpool Pleasure Beach
Heard the one about the Irish American fudge maestro, two battleground tour guides and their dutiful daughter?
Don't worry, this isn’t a dodgy gag, but a series of unlikely chance encounters that has spawned an almighty business success story.
Let’s start at the beginning. In the early 1980s Fudge Kitchen md Sian Holt's parents were showing British tourists around the American Civil War battlegrounds of Gettysberg,
While enjoying a day off and relaxing beside the pool of their hotel, a certain Jim Garrahy, a former US Marine and owner of Jim Garrahy’s Fudge Kitchen stores in the States, bowled over and said: "You two are Irish, aren’t you?”
Holt takes up the tale: "Mum and Dad said, ‘No, sorry, we're British,’ and this Yank said, ‘Ah, never mind, come to my house for steaks anyway.’”
A couple of years later Garrahy and his new wife visited Britain and Sian, who at the time was living in London and working in marketing, was asked by her parents to collect them from the airport. She obliged and a friendship was struck up.
Business beginnings (Return to top)
She adds: "A few months later, out of the blue, Jim called me up and said he’d met this bloke in a bar at 4am called Geoffrey Thompson, the owner of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, who was insisting he should have a fudge shop in his park.
"I told him if he put the contents of a shop in a container and shipped it over, I’d set it up.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, almost.
The Blackpool store pretty much bombed, with Holt quickly realising that an outfit making high-end fudge amid the bumper cars, kiss-me-quick hats and candyfloss stalls wasn't going to work.
"I knew immediately this was a premium product so I said to Jim, ‘this is not the right place’, our theme parks aren’t like yours in the States. The best thing we’ve got are our historic towns. So, Jim and I agreed a deal for me to buy the business over here and we set up a shop in Bath.”
Fast forward to 2008 and the company had eight shops across the UK, all doing a roaring trade in the likes of York, Windsor and Canterbury, with shoppers able to see the whipping cream fudge being handmade in store on marble slabs.
But Holt, whose ability to tell a cracking tale is only overshadowed by her knack for making fudge, wanted more. She harboured a desire to move into full-scale manufacturing so her products could be sold on to other retailers.
Major problem (Return to top)
There was only one, major, problem: the product that had served them so well for the previous 26 years, had an incredibly short shelf-life.
"Essentially, the product we make in our stores has a five-to seven-day shelf-life,” adds Holt.
"It doesn't necessarily go off, but you could use it for smacking a burglar over the head because it goes as solid as a brick.”
Cue a lot of head scratching about how the shelf-life could be extended. Unsurprisingly, this was not an easy exercise.
“I know about fudge, because we've been making it for a long time, but I'm not a food technologist. I didn't even know the science behind fudge,” Holt admits.
After exploring a number of packaging solutions, none of which were up to scratch, she conceded there would have to be changes to the product. However, she was adamant there wouldn't be “anything horrible in it”.
“I didn’t want any preservatives, it had to be natural, so it was a hell of a challenge.”
Realising she needed some outside help, Holt began working with the University of Greenwich and one of its students Julie Crenn who now works for Fudge Kitchen full-time to set up a project to extend the shelf-life.
“While they were doing that, I did a lot of research into the market and looked at what was happening to the confectionery sector in the UK and overseas. I quickly discovered in terms of marketing there was no premium fudge out there. There had been an awful lot of activity in chocolate, but little in fudge, so I knew we were on to something.”
Fudge sauce (Return to top)
While the technologists at Greenwich were beavering away to extend shelf-life for the core fudge product for wholesale, Holt inadvertently created the company's first retail-ready product: fudge sauce.
In her hunt for packaging solutions, she persuaded a small firm in Sevenoaks to let her use their vacuum packing machine for a day.
“It sealed the fudge but it almost imploded,” she laughs. "But, interestingly, I could snip off the corner and squeeze it out. And that's how we invented our fudge sauce. It’s literally our whipping cream fudge in a jar.”
The fresh fudge sauces were launched, swiftly followed by a kit for people to make fudge at home. A brainstorming session then followed to improve the on-pack messaging.
“We all sat around the table and were coming up with all the things people could use it for. I said my daughter scooped some into a mug, poured hot milk into it and drank it. Emily, our marketing girl said, ‘My God, Sian, that’s drinking fudge.’ I said, ‘Christ, it is.’”
That was a third item ready, but the firm found itself in the crazy situation of having an ancillary group of products on the market, but no fudge.
“I went back to Julie and said while the product still had to be natural, it might well have to be made in a different way. A year later, we ended up with a product that is made with butter, not whipping cream.”
The fudge range was launched in September 2011 and, since then, the company has gone on to a launch a staggering 40 products, including a pudding-inspired range, fudge sticks dipped in chocolate and sharing squares.
“It’s been crazy, massive, mad,” adds Holt.
Retailer relationships (Return to top)
It also led to a seismic shift in the way the business was operated. Holt quickly had to strike up retailer relationships (“We just kept knocking on doors until they let us in.”), get the financial infrastructure in place ("We weren’t even used to sending out invoices.”) and, crucially, get the correct manufacturing processes in place.
After striking up deals with scores of independent food shops, high-end retailers such as Selfridges, Lakeland, John Lewis and Hotel Chocolat, it became apparent that its existing manufacturing practices weren't up to scratch.
“We started by using the spare capacity in our stores,” says Holt. “We put all the butter fudge production in York and caused chaos.
“We were operating a production facility up three floors of a Grade II listed building. It was utter madness but we had to start somewhere, because even though we’d been in business a long time, this was like a start-up.”
Now, the set-up is much more polished, with the firm operating out of a new factory on the outskirts of Aylesham, Kent.
So after a whirlwind four years, what's the long-term plan? Holt doesn’t fudge the issue.
World domination (Return to top)
“We want world domination,” she quips. “We want to be the premium fudge brand. On the high street, with our stores, we already are. But we will be that in terms of selling through other mediums too.”
And a quick run through of what's in the pipeline suggests this is not unlikely. The firm has recently been signed up by Selfridges to make all its own-label fudge and it's about to launch its drinking fudge into the foodservice sector.
“I think that will be huge,” adds Holt. "There hasn't been a new hot drink since Noah.”
A wealth of export opportunities are also opening up. A shipment recently went to New Zealand, a Dutch distributor has been appointed and deals are in place in Italy, France and Kuwait.
Holt’s relaxed nature and self-deprecating personality might suggest that a lot of this success has come about by trial and error, but no-one runs a successful business for 30 years without having a shrewd eye for detail and opportunity. And while she is clearly striving to further grow the business, don’t expect to see her products hitting the supermarket shelves.
“We are not about volume, we are about value,” she insists. “We don’t make the kind of fudge that people buy to thank people for looking after the cat.”
Listen to our exclusive podcast to hear Holt discuss the biggest challenges of moving into manufacturing and what her biggest learning curve was.
