Three years ago, Mike Williams was sprucing up his CV and dreaming of an office job. The Flake Bake co-founder had spent more than a decade alongside his father, Paul, supplying handmade Jamaican patties to Caribbean takeaways, restaurants and shops across the capital. At its peak, it was making 20,000 a week. But after Covid made trading increasingly difficult, Williams was ready to call it a day.

“We’d had a good run and done well, but I thought maybe I should go into corporate or try something different,” he says.

Then a friend sent him a link to apply for Channel 4 TV show Aldi’s Next Big Thing. “I thought: if we’re going to close down, we’ve got nothing to lose. Maybe I can get on TV and find someone to buy it off us, because I don’t want to do it any more.”