Bounce Back Better: Amanda Stansfield of Granny Gothards

Granny Gothards is an Artisan Ice cream and Sorbet maker in the South West that continues to go from strength to strength with the inspiring Amanda Stansfield at the helm; substantially increasing their exports to a number of different countries in recent months. Laura Seaward, Senior Manager and Fleur Lewis, Partner and head of Food & Drink, caught up with Amanda to find out more about the business and how business has been throughout the pandemic.

Amanda, you are an accountant by trade… how did you get into the Ice Cream business?

I worked for 12 years for a Somerset-based company as their in-house accountant. I became best friends with a colleague, Jean and we really enjoyed working together. We decided we wanted to run our own business and make a successful business for ourselves; perhaps a tea-room or a café.   

Granny Gothards came up as a potential business venture in 2012 (at that point supplying Ice Cream to 4-5 restaurants locally) and, although we knew nothing about Ice Cream we thought ‘Why Not?!’ Jean had a marketing background so was fabulous with words and my finance background helped us build the business plan that enabled the bank to lend us some of the money needed for us to acquire the company, but not all. Two days later a letter arrived on my doorstep; a bond I had forgotten about had reached maturity and it was the exact amount of money I needed to complete the acquisition of Granny Gothards!

At the beginning there was an incredibly steep learning curve. We had to learn about how to make Ice Cream and the critical control points. Making our Ice Cream uses unpasturised milk, which is a high-risk product, so we had to keep our heads down and learn everything we needed to know incredibly quickly. Luckily Donna, who was the reason we had known about Granny Gothards going up for sale, stayed with us as our production manager and she knew everything about Ice Cream so helped us build up our knowledge as quickly as possible. 

How did you grow Granny Gothards in the food service sector?

I soon realised that I did not want to give up a job and a regular salary to stand in a field selling Ice Creams every weekend, so we needed a new direction for the business. I used to think that every pub should sell our Ice Cream, but I then realised our ice creams were different to those already on the market and available to pubs and restaurants and as we were at the high end of the ice cream market we needed to be more targeted in our customer based 

We established that our customer base was high-end restaurants, where in a perfect world they would make the Ice Cream themselves but they didn’t have the time or want to spend that money on a new chef that would cost say £70k a year if they were based in Central London. We wanted to fill that gap and needed to offer them a wide variety of different flavours that would meet their needs. We spent our time developing new flavours and meeting head chefs and restaurant owners to sell our Ice Cream and introduce them to samples of the different flavours we had created.

We learned how to sell our Ice Cream providing a bespoke service, for example if a chef had a fabulous caramelised bread and butter pudding for their winter menu we could do a white chocolate and Orange Ice Cream for them, to get the creaminess of the white chocolate with the citrus of the Orange. 

We soon discovered that chefs are very transient and would often spend two years in a role before moving to another restaurant. The incoming chef would often keep us as the current clientele because they loved the variety of our Ice Cream, but when we had built a good relationship with the chef they tended to move on and take us with them, so business did continue to expand and within 3 years we had made good headway in the market. Jean left the business at that point as the business was not what she wanted to do but to this day she remains my best friend and is the greatest champion of the business and what we continue to achieve. 

How did you begin to export overseas?

Ice Cream is so seasonable and a lot of Ice Cream distributers close down in winter months as demand is so low.

I didn’t want to have to reduce hours or salaries in winter months and I felt it was my moral obligation to find a way to maintain business activity throughout the year to look after my team, so I started thinking about exporting, particularly Dubai. There are 365 days of sunshine, high net worth individuals and a huge ex-pat community, plus a fabulous place to go for a business trip if I could wangle it! 

I found a fantastic business owner on Linkedin who had a great Dubai base but understood the UK Food and drink industry and how we were different, and I effectively stalked him until he agreed to a meeting. I got the cheapest airline ticket to Dubai and 3 weeks later we had our first order for 3 tonnes of Ice Cream! We worked 7 days a week solidly for three weeks, but we did it and our first export order was completed to the deadline - a massive achievement. At that point we only had one 1 machine that made 10 litres of ice cream over a 20-minute cycle.

It was a challenge, but we did it and learnt from it! It gave us the revenue to invest in a new 20 litre machine and it gave us confidence - we could play in the export market and we could deliver what clients needed from us. We built on it and we started to deliver regularly to Dubai as a result. 

We used our Linkedin connections to build our network further and we then started to deliver to China! 

How have you improved UK sales and margins?

We realised that selling to individual restaurants was great but if we wanted to grow substantially, we needed to sell to restaurant chains, so we started to target some fantastic chains in the UK. This has gone well and we are currently selling to prestigious places such as Blenheim Palace and the Gherkin to name a few. 

I had a vision that Granny Gothards could go big, so from the outset I negotiated hard with our suppliers to get better prices on ingredients. We knew we wanted to grow so although we only needed smaller quantities of cream, etc at that point and were paying small volume prices we convinced them that we would be needing larger quantities of ingredients shortly and negotiated lower prices as a result. We could then build retrospective rebates and distributor margins into our margins without having to increase the price of the Ice Cream (which we knew we couldn’t do as we were already top-end) and quality remained as previous, which is paramount in the whole ethos of Granny Gothards.

This has enabled us to bring in distributors across the UK who understand our business ethos and our offering and they sell our Ice Cream well, increasing our revenue whilst maintaining our margins. 

My manufacturing background has enabled me to understand and improve supply chain needs, etc. and my finance background (CIMA qualified) has helped me make good informed decisions and the auditor in me from a previous life has enabled me to develop important systems and procedures in the business to strengthen the business, both financially and operationally. 

How has lockdown and COVID impacted the business? 

Our UK season starts at Easter and we had loads of stock ready to go out, then COVID hit! All our contracts and orders (to restaurants, pubs, National Trust, cinemas, etc) were cancelled or put on hold as everywhere had to shut. As it is worldwide it obviously impacted our Dubai and China business too and everything was put on hold. 

I spent two weeks staring at my laptop waiting for something to happen! We started doing doorstep deliveries to shift some stock. We didn’t make any money, but it got the brand out there and reminded people that we were still there and fighting. We also got a few local Spar contracts to keep the brand out there while our ice cream shops were shut. 

The online retail market went through the roof during lockdown, so we decided to start selling online to improve revenue while our main income streams were on hold or significantly lower than normal.   

It was mega scary for us, as it is for everyone, but we’re keen to maintain our brand and strengthen our business in a post-COVID world. 

We have also managed to secure a massive new Dubai contract in the last few months, selling to Kibsons; the largest online retailer in the UAE. We were hoping for a contract for a 20ft container, instead they ordered two 40ft containers of Ice Cream with 56 flavours on the order, with a value of over £150k for the first order alone! 

What are your future plans for the business?

We want to strengthen the brand further and continue our exporting across the world. Our success to date has generated more interest than ever and we are talking to businesses in Bahrain, China, Ukraine and Qatar about potential orders.

We are also hoping to tackle the North America market in 2021 and are already talking to Trader Joe’s which has 3-4 stores in every US state. 

We are keen to strengthen the Granny Gothard brand and we are really confident with what we can offer moving forward! 

Any tips for others starting out in business? 

1. I’ve always been able to talk about how great we are because of the product and it’s easy to sell it as a result, but I often go back to the team and say ‘Have I over promised?’, luckily my team have a fantastic ‘can-do’ attitude and always rise to the challenge with amazing attention to detail.  Make sure you have a team around you who are as passionate as you are about the product and the success of the business and treat them well. 
2. Do what you love, trust your instincts and do not be afraid to make a leap of faith. We moved business premises in 2018 as we had outgrown our previous site. It was 12 months too early as revenue and orders were not quite there but the site was perfect and it would have been a missed opportunity and I am so glad we took the leap of faith and trusted our instincts. 
3. Know your customer base and the market. We know who our customer base is and what they need. We have recently developed new 100% compostable wooden boxes for our Ice Cream to meet the changes in customer tastes and sustainability needs and this has been incredibly successful. 
4. It’s a small world and business can come from anywhere so build up a good network and maintain your connections.  A recent India contract actually came from somebody who studied for their MBA at Exeter University and discovered Granny Gothards at our Budleigh Salterton Ice Cream store!

More details on Granny Gothards can be found here.