Roots to riches: The BAME brands bringing new flavours to grocery

Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people are among the most entrepreneurial in the UK. According to the Startup Coalition’s December report, The Diversity Deficit, they are between 1.6 and 1.8 times more likely to “engage in early stage entrepreneurship” than their white counterparts.

But here’s the rub: between 2013 and 2023, BAME founders got just 9% of vc funding, despite making up 18% of the UK population. And it was even worse for Black founders in isolation, who received 0.9% of total investment value during that period. Black women? They secured just 0.14% of total vc investment.

“The biggest barriers are still access, exposure and ecosystem,” explains Segun Akinwoleola, founder of The Gym Kitchen. “Less than 1% of vc funding going to Black-owned businesses creates an immediate disadvantage when trying to scale, invest in growth or secure retail opportunities.”

While funding is perhaps the most significant barrier for BAME-owned businesses, exposure and knowhow are equally lacking. “For many people from underrepresented backgrounds, we weren’t necessarily taught how brands are built. When you don’t see examples around you, it becomes harder to visualise yourself succeeding in those spaces,” adds Akinwoleola.

Ethnically diverse founders also face barriers in terms of access – not only to capital, but also to networks and decisionmakers. “Many successful consumer businesses are initially supported by strong personal networks or friends-and-family funding rounds that allow founders to survive long enough to scale. A lot of ethnically diverse founders simply do not have the same access to those resources,” explains Sam Akinluyi, industry veteran and founder of retail innovation accelerator Psalt.

After years of progress in areas in and around DEI, particularly when it came to working with and championing founders from diverse backgrounds, things have now “stagnated”, according to Christarose Maphosa, the founder of Onyo, a travelling pop-up shop celebrating diverse-owned brands.

“We risk regressing,” she says. “In the past 12 months, there’s been a noticeable retraction. For instance, both Tesco and Co-op’s accelerator programmes have been scaled back, with Tesco moving away from a dedicated buying manager for community pillar brands, including Black-led businesses, and Co-op pausing recruitment for their Apiary programme. These have previously been lifelines for founder-owners from ethnic minority backgrounds.”

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, founder of The Black Farmer, also references the programmes run by several supermarkets that were designed to support entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds. He benefited personally from schemes by Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer but feels that momentum has faded.

“What disappoints me is that support for diverse founders no longer feels fashionable,” he says. “The uncomfortable truth is that meaningful change could happen very quickly if there was real intent. Supermarkets have enormous power. They already audit suppliers on everything from animal welfare to sustainability and technical standards. Why not diversity?”

Nonetheless, there are some causes for optimism. Akinluyi insists that retailers such as Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Co-op and Ocado are “all doing meaningful work in this area” and “the doors are more open than they once were for the right products and brands”.

Akinwoleola and Maphosa, meanwhile, both point to genuine progress, particularly when it comes to visibility of BAME-owned brands and their founders. And Emmanuel-Jones is also heartened by the fact that entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds “are still making an impact against the odds”.

“What I also see now is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are less willing to hide who they are in order to succeed,” he adds. “For years, many people felt they had to downplay their identity to survive in what often felt like a white middle-class business world. That is beginning to change. More people are willing to step into the ring and fight to build businesses on their own terms.”

They certainly are. Here we celebrate five BAME founders making their mark in the industry…

Megan Tan | Founder, Yumm Singa

Megan Tan “fell in love with the UK” when she moved here from Singapore to study law at Oxford University in 2014. But there was one problem, she says: “I missed the food so much!” This led Tan to start making the street food (known as ‘hawker’ food in Singapore) she couldn’t find here and posting them on Instagram. People went crazy for the dishes, and it wasn’t long before she was working full-time as a lawyer during the week and delivering noodles and other dishes to customers at weekends.

Supper clubs followed and, in September 2024, Tan left her legal career to “give this a proper shot”. Yumm Singa makes “Singapore-inspired sauces based on iconic hawker dishes I grew up with – but designed to make cooking them at home very easy for the UK consumer”. The brand’s three-sauce range includes two cooking sauces (Black Pepper and Curry Laksa) and its signature Ginger Chilli dipping sauce. They are currently onboarding with Selfridge, while also selling in independent grocery stores and DTC.

“The mission of the brand is to put Singapore cuisine on the global food map,” Tan says. “And the message we want to share is that of harmony and multiculturalism, which I grew up with in Singapore, so it’s in our DNA.”

She says that while she’s “been lucky not to experience any overt or micro aggressions” during her founder journey, “when you’re a minority you can’t help but feel it when there are very few other such people in the room with you”.

Tan says she’s never felt like people “don’t take me seriously”, but says they do often fail to see the brand’s potential. “The challenge is people pigeonholing the brand, or myself as a Singaporean, as being ‘for Asians’ instead of seeing it in the context of the wider food and drink startup economy.”

Roni Bandong | Founder, RoniB’s Kitchen

Roni Bandong was born in Ilocos, a region “at the very top of the Philippines”, but she came to the UK in 2002 – “a long time ago”, she laughs. After starting a supper club and then winning a cook-off on a Channel 4 TV show in 2016, she realised “there is a place for Filipino cuisine here”, but “there’s a lot of competition, so what’s the fastest way to get people to know our cuisine? I’ll teach them how to cook it.”

The following year, RoniB’s Kitchen was born. The brand creates sauces, condiments and preserves, from its signature Banana Ketchup to fiery Garlic Chilli Oil and savoury Adobo Sauce. “Our food is so ingrained in many cuisines, because we’re very much a conquered land, and we’re probably the most adaptable race on the planet,” she says. “Whoever comes into the country, we learn from their cuisine, then adapt it and make it Filipino. So my USP is about flavours and taste – the Philippine soul in our products.”

Although RoniB’s is stocked in the likes of Selfridges, Fenwick and similar retailers, Bandong still does “a lot of markets and festivals, because my customers like seeing me and having a conversation”.

She enjoys those moments greatly, saying it helps balance the relative difficulty of doing business as a Filipino woman in the UK. “It is quite hard as an ethnic minority, because sometimes you come up against a lack of trust. If you look at new independent brands, a lot of those that get stocked faster are owned by – and forgive me for saying this – mostly white people.

“I see brands that are ‘pan-Asian’, but even though it doesn’t have the cultural identity of the founder in that brand, it gets picked up quite quickly. I guess that’s what I’ve tried to shout about, because there’s a lot of female, ethnic minority founders out there that I don’t think are being heard.”

Wycliffe Sande | Founder, Blue Turaco Coffee

“There are no templates for people like me to build a business,” says Wycliffe Sande, founder of Blue Turaco Coffee. Growing up in a fishing village in Uganda, Sande’s father died when he was eight and his mother when he was 12. He picked coffee beans to pay for school fees and food, and became the first person from his village to go to university.

After studying law at the University of London and working for Nestlé and Nando’s, Sande launched Blue Turaco with two missions. The first was to source coffee fairly from smallholder farmers in his home country (the brand pays 30% more than traditional coffee trade routes) and the second was to champion specialty robusta coffee, which has not always “been taken very seriously”.

Blue Turaco became the first black African-owned coffee company to gain a UK supermarket listing when it landed in Waitrose in October 2023. It has since added Ocado, Co-op and most recently Tesco.

“Building as an African smallholder farmer, within this historical industry, is very hard. There’s never been someone like me building a brand within UK retail, so there are no precedents for investors to take solace in,” Sande says. “And I underestimated how much money you need in order to succeed.”

Sande’s background might not have prepared him for the realities, financial and otherwise, of running a challenger brand in UK retail, but he’s certain his childhood in Uganda ultimately helped him to flourish.

“I often think that if I didn’t grow up how I did, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing right now,” he says. “With so many challenges as a child in Uganda, and having faced so much rejection, now that I’m building a brand it’s like I’ve been immunised. So, I’ve never looked at my poor upbringing as the worst thing. I’ve looked at it as something that’s prepared me to overcome anything.”

Riya Patel | Founder, All the Aunties

“Indian food is one of the UK’s most popular cuisines, but it’s been really stuck in the past,” laments Riya Patel. “We’re an increasingly globalised society – we eat, like, miso in cookies now. But for some reason the Indian retail offering in supermarkets has felt very dated and dusty.”

Patel started her food and drink career hosting supper clubs in 2023. But it was a desire to make Indian cuisine more interesting that led to her quitting her civil service job in November 2024 to concentrate on All the Aunties, the premium paneer brand she founded and runs with brother-in-law, Jack.

“Paneer has been poorly positioned in the UK: it’s often just a really uninspired block in the ethnic aisle. So, we use 100% British milk and have lovely, colourful artwork – we’re on a mission to break paneer out of the curry house and really premiumise what’s become a bit of a commodity product,” she says.

Despite only launching in March last year, All the Aunties is stocked by “lots of wholesalers”, as well as Whole Foods Market, Ocado, Tesco and as of a few weeks ago, Sainsbury’s.

“We’re a young brand, a team of just three at the moment, but we’ve had a lot of growth, which has been super exciting,” says southwest Londoner Patel. “I absolutely recognise we’ve had a very lucky experience thus far, and I think lots of other ethnic founders who are building at the moment will have a different story,” she says. “So I do feel a responsibility to help lift other minority founders up in whatever way I can.

“The industry is still largely homogenous, but on a positive note, there’s so much more support for ethnic minority founders, female founders, than probably there ever has been. And my overwhelming feeling is that I’ve not felt disadvantaged at all by being a minority founder in the industry over the past couple of years.”

Abi Adefisan | Co-founder, Yumchop

Yumchop “really got ignited when our nieces and nephews went to university around 2016 and 2017”, explains Abi Adefisan, who co-founded the African Ready meals brand with her husband, Michael. “They knew that auntie and uncle were lovers of food, so they would call us, and we ended up back and forth taking meals to them at universities.”

It wasn’t all one-way, though – in return, Abi and Michael insisted their nieces and nephews “undertake market research” for them. They discovered a real desire from students of all backgrounds for home-cooked African meals, and it wasn’t long before Yumchop was supplying 18 universities. The pandemic necessitated a pivot “into the mainstream”, which led to a pilot with Sainsbury’s, then a Tesco listing about 10 months ago.

“There’s a growing demand for amazing, interesting and different flavours,” says Adefisan, who was born in London, but spent “the best part of my teenage years” in Nigeria.

It’s been an interesting and varied journey so far for the couple, who left corporate jobs behind to launch Yumchop. “As an ethnic minority, there’s some unique challenges you face – access to funding is a major one, that is undeniable,” says Adefisan. “We’ve had to go and pitch in places where there are not many people of our skin type. And imposter syndrome is real.”

While giving a talk in Manchester recently, it occurred to Adefisan how she and her husband had been able to leverage their background as a superpower of sorts. “In getting Nigerian meals, Ghanaian meals, into supermarkets and the mainstream, we find we’ve now got a community that’s so proud of us and that’s rooting for us. People are hopeful now, and they’re coming to us for guidance and to celebrate the win because they never thought it would be possible for Nigerian meals to be visible in the main supermarkets.”