How to start a social enterprise start-up with… Boundless Activated Snacking

Who: Cathy Moseley

Brand launched: 2017

Product: Activated nut and seed mixes, plus the world’s first activated chip

Impact: Every pack provides a charitable donation to FRANK Water to help fund their work in improving clean drinking water and sanitation for remote communities in India and Nepal. Over the pandemic, Boundless also extended its donations to another charity – Give.Help.Share, ensuring school kids have the sustenance to keep learning.

The Interview:

SSM: Take us right back to the beginning — what made you leave your career in the City behind, and what inspired you to start Boundless in the first place?

Cathy: I left school at 16 and went to work in the City for nearly 25 years. I had enough of the vibe of how it ran. I was in Commodity Futures, so even though there’s an underlying fundamental product, realistically what you’re doing doesn’t mean anything — it’s just a number. I wanted to do something that meant something.

And everything they put around you was full of sugar. And that really wasn’t good for you, yet you were meant to be firing on all cylinders. I myself have intolerances, I’m celiac, and so it’s really important for me that I make sure I know what I’m eating. I started making Boundless Snacks – before they were Boundless Snacks – to take to the pub with my mates and I took it from there really.

SSM: How did you know that the product would work? Did you do market research?

Cathy: You never know it’s going to work. You have to take a leap of faith. And I think being confident in that leap of faith is very important — because if you can’t sell the product, then who else can?

But there’s also a strategic leap of faith. By that, I mean you have to do your research. Some of the greatest ideas come from the gap in the market and generally that is found by the consumer. We know we’re missing it – we were looking for it.

For us, it was really important to know – what can you sell, what can I make it for, what’s the turnover for snacks in the UK, what are people looking for… And if your gap fits, then great.

Research is paramount because whatever amount of money you’re going to put behind this start-up — it will never be enough. That’s part of running a start-up — it will be really about trying to make every penny count. Therefore if you haven’t done your research, your pennies will drift away far quicker than will probably be viable.

SSM: How did you do that market research for Boundless?

Cathy: I went into supermarkets, independents, stores that normally take on brands that are new – for us, places like Whole Foods and Planet Organic.

And you’d be surprised how much information you can get from Google — like Mintel reports that you don’t have to pay for. Also, getting on Facebook — jumping in forums like Celiac society.

I also found distributors and pretended to be a potential buyer to get the catalogue, so that’s a bit sneaky.. Just to see what’s out there, which you wouldn’t normally see as a consumer.

I’ll be honest with you I lived and slept the idea.

SSM: What came first — it sounds like it was probably the product and that gap in the market, and then the impact idea came afterwards?

Cathy: I knew from the get-go that I wanted my business to have some social impact. And in a challenger brand situation, if we’re not challenging the status quo, what are we doing? I think it’s important to be a challenger brand and be a challenger, you know, in that sense and really mean it.

SSM: How did you bring FRANK Water on board?

Cathy: Because we make activated snacks and activation takes a lot of water, I thought my social impact has to reflect what we stole from the earth, quite honestly, and that was water.

I also wanted to work with a charity that I could pop in and have a chat with. And maybe a charity that I could have more impact on in terms of being a smaller brand — working with a smaller charity, rather than, say, WaterAid, which is obviously a great charity, but you know — we’re just a drop in the ocean.

We are from Bristol and FRANK Water’s from Bristol so they just tied up.

They deliver clean drinking water and sanitisation for villages in Nepal and India. It also resonates really strongly for me because it also helps women get an education because they’re not carrying water day in day out. And generally, unfortunately, it will be the women that do that – they don’t get to a school and they don’t get to work. And that was a really important factor for me – being a female founder, coming from the City that’s predominantly male.

SSM: What did the starting months look like — going from your kitchen into manufacturing… there’s a lot of red tape around creating a food or drink product. How did you navigate that?

Cathy: Yeah, there really is. I went about finding a manufacturer, again, someone that was smaller — that I could work with, where I could speak to the owners. We went through the whole process, through all the testing in order to make it right.

You can get your local authority to help. Finding the manufacturer was difficult—that took me nearly 15 months, because lots of them wanted to bastardise the process and make it, you know, not what I wanted it to be, not as good. And because we were small and they wanted you to do really large quantities, we couldn’t afford to do that, so finding a manufacturer that had the kind of ethos that we had — we were very lucky.

SSM: Tell us how you funded the business. Did you bootstrap? Have you received any funding or support grants?

Cathy: From the start, I used my own savings and I rallied my friends and family to back me. And they did. And that took us so far for so long.

Then I looked into government grants. I applied for any grants that I could get hold of, which I have to say were pretty helpful. There are lots of grants out there still now, for example the DTI Business West.

What’s quite sad is lots of people don’t know that you can get these grants. I think the government don’t actually advertise how much you can get hold of them. So I think that’s really important to get onto all the government websites, look through all the kinds of chat forums because there are lots of people out there that you know say “why don’t you try it this way.” That’s one of the nicest things about the start-up community — lots of people really want to help you.

And then we went down the route of getting investment. We’ve got an angel investor. The last round of investment that we did back in the beginning of 2020 — which was very lucky because, you know, lockdown happened — was backed by angel investors looking for EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme), which again, is a really good thing for any business to get into because there are tax incentives for your investor.

SSM: I don’t think a lot of people know about the EIS scheme…

Cathy: Yes, and then before EIS, you’ve got SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme), which really helps — like someone that might want to give you £500 or £250. It is really important that you get yourself registered for SEIS and EIS because it runs and runs and you can extend it if you need to.

And it’s free to do it. It’s a bit fiddly on the website, but believe me if you’re running your own business, you’ll be able to get through it — it’s not too hard, it’s just time consuming.

SSM: How did you find your angel investor?

Cathy: A little bit of a serendipity! Our angel investor picked up a packet of nuts and seeds in the local cafe to where he lived when he went to grab a coffee and he loved the packaging and the branding. And he contacted me.

LinkedIn is an amazing tool to use for looking for investors. In food, there’s the likes of things like Bread and Jam. Basically, what used to be like a kind of conference, now is a library and a great way to meet lots of people — and lots of investors watch that.

Also the other thing I did, now the world is opening again that might be useful — there’s lots of food trade shows and I used to just go there for free, walk around. You just never know who you might bump into.

I think I’m a real big believer you got to kind of try and make your own luck. You’re just going to have to put yourself out there, be up front — if you see someone’s got an investor badge, say “excuse me, I’ve got an idea” because you just never know who they might be.

Reach out on social media or that kind of stuff — but get yourself out in front of people in that different way too.

SSM: Can you tell me about your legal structure, are you a limited company and did you consider going the CIC route.

Cathy: We are a Limited Company. I didn’t consider going the other route. It sometimes makes it easier for EIS or SEIS investors, they’re a lot more comfortable with a Limited Company. So that’s the route that we’ve gone down.

I think, also, personally, the fact is when you’re starting a business, one of the worst things that could happen, is that people could lose their homes or things like that if they weren’t a Limited Company. For me, home is precious. So, a Limited Company does give you those kinds of benefits.

SSM: What’s the biggest success or moment that you’re most proud of in the brand’s history to date?

Cathy: We’ve recently worked with Give.Help.Share, which works to provide snacks and meals to children in schools that aren’t getting enough nourishment or getting meals.

I could turn around and say the most amazing moment was the day I saw a packet of Boundless on the shelf in a supermarket but for me — I grew up on free meals. To feed those kids to go back to school.. to me that’s probably my proudest moment.

SSM: Was it because of the pandemic that you you initiated that partnership?

Cathy: No, we already started looking into them but I think the pandemic highlighted to me — when you’re not going to school and getting your free school meal it’s a real pressure on your parents. And let’s face it, that might be the first and only hot meal of the day. And if they’re not getting that and then suddenly your children are now at home… There’s no extra support for you.

That has always been something that I’ve kind of resonated with. We’ve done a lot of things in terms of giving away [Boundless] to food banks and things like that. But this really resonated with me. When we found out that we could have that impact — that the kids would go back to school and have these meals ready for them.

But also, my next feeling is that most people that have that really tight budget, unfortunately can’t afford to buy food that’s generally what we would call ‘better for you.’ If you can buy 1,000 Chicken nuggets for a quid and you’ve got to feed your kids, you’re going to buy 1,000 chicken nuggets. So it was really important for me also to make a snack that is technically affordable to most people, but also to make it nutritional.

SSM: Is there anything that hasn’t gone quite to plan in running the business that maybe you learnt something from?

Cathy: Oh my god, I could start my own blog!

The first thing is trying to run before you can walk. When we first launched, we were taken on by Ocado — it felt like, oh my gosh, this is unbelievable. [Boundless] had been running about three weeks… and it completely failed. For several reasons. It failed because we didn’t have a clue what we were doing and suddenly we went in with a big fish and we weren’t even a tadpole. We certainly didn’t have the technology infrastructure to work with someone of that scale. We had no understanding of how much marketing budget you would need and I think we had and my mom and my nan following us on social media. And we were too expensive (we didn’t want to be expensive, but because we didn’t have the money to run up more bags to make it cheap.)

We should have turned it down and said we’re flattered, but it’s not for us right now. We’ll come back to you when we’re ready.

I think listening to too many people tell you what you should be doing, rather than kind of sticking with what you want to do — I think that’s been a failure and I think we make mistakes every day. Yet we don’t quite know what the fall-out of those are going to be. So, in terms of pandemic, the failure would have been that we were overweighted in high street retail, in terms of how we sold our product, and we’d kind of neglected online. Now we’re more balanced in terms of online sales and in local high street retail so I think that was a big mistake that hurt us for a while. We were extremely lucky that we were able to get through that. Had we not have had the money to do that from investment and then we would have failed, and that would have been a shame

I think in start-ups you make mistakes every day, and some of them are almost by the skin of your teeth catastrophic. There’s so much to learn. But our motto is “fuck it, we’ll find a way”. I think having that attitude, learning from your mistakes, being able to hold your hands up and say, I made a mistake there. It’s important that everybody comes with an idea and a view and we hash it out. And because everyone’s in that team working for the same goal, as a team, everyone would say, you know, that it’s really important that this real ethos I have within our team is just hold your hands up if you did it.

I think it’s important to have someone close to you within the business in terms of don’t mean, your husband or your boyfriend or your girlfriend… I’m just saying it’s a lonely place to be a founder, without someone that you can kind of speak to and I think that’s probably a mistake that a lot of people make. I was fortunate, I didn’t make that mistake. You need to bounce ideas off people, you know.

SSM: What’s next for Boundless?

Cathy: We launched the world’s first activated chip — in two flavours.

I think in terms of where we are as a brand. I think it’s a really nice position to be in currently — the world is starting to recognise gut health. Well, I think we did understand it centuries ago and yet we’d lost sight of how important it is. Now we know much more about our microbiome. The next year for Boundless, being on the forefront of gut health snacking, I think we have will have a lot to say. And I’d like to think there’ll be a lot of people who want to listen.

It feels good to be selling products that are good, you know, and are genuinely trying to make change. At a time when, you know, we don’t always agree with everything the government does, no matter what government’s in power. Not affiliating myself with any party, but what I would say is the one good thing that we’ve seen come out of the pandemic is that the government will change HFSS which is high fat, sugar, salt content in products.

So, I think there’s a lot of change coming over the next 18 months in that in that section. And like I say I will praise the government for actually having the courage to go through with that, albeit delayed, but the courage because the food sugar lobbyists are pretty wealthy and they have been very powerful for a very long time. It allows 26% of the supermarket shelves that has been filled with Buy-One-Get-One-Free on offers, you know, grab food, to now be removed. So I think, going back to my point about children being able to be nourished properly at an affordable rate. So I think that’s a great movement and I think for Boundless, I’d like to see us being able to share about that.

But ultimately, pushing that gut health message in such a wide audience that we can all be alive to how important health is with the fact that it will help us with donations for the rest of our charity partners, obviously.

Follow Boundless Activated Snacking at @eatboundless and on LinkedIn at Boundless Activated Snacking.

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