British Corner Shop eyeing EU return as Brexit checks set to be scrapped

Expat favourite British Corner Shop is eyeing a return to the European Union after a deal between London and Brussels to remove Brexit red tape was recently announced.

The agreement announced by PM Keir Starmer last month – which promised to scrap most checks on goods traded between the UK and the EU – was “great news for BCS”, according to its new owner Harvey Hayer.

He added the company “looked forward to being able to supply our European customers once again very soon”.

The established ecommerce platform, which for over 20 years had sent popular British goods such as Cadbury Crème Eggs and Bisto gravy to customers around the world, went into administration last year in large part due to irrecoverable Brexit and Covid-19 losses.

BCS counted the EU as its largest exports market before going under, when the bloc’s costly controls on UK goods became unsustainable for the company.

It was then revived by two Newcastle entrepreneurs – Hayer and Amar Dulay – in March 2024, who initially opted to relaunch the British Corner Shop operations in countries outside of the EU to avoid the bureaucracy.

“The opening of the EU [market] is going to provide us with a huge opportunity,” Hayer said.

“Our teams have started working behind the scenes so that when we are finally given the green light we are ready to go and no time is wasted.

“We are looking forward to making BCS the global supermarket for British Foods,” he added.

The company has had a “slow but steady start” in the US, where Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports from the UK rolled out only months after BCS made a splashy comeback in American markets.

Despite the obstacles, US demand was stable and it had also “managed to win some good contracts in Africa, so they are keeping us busy for now”, Hayer said.

British Corner Shop was traditionally a direct-to-consumer business, but it recently launched a B2B wholesale division.

It is being led by former Ramsden International head of procurement and reprocessing, Angus Dinsdale, BCS’s new head of wholesale exports.