Black milq: Running a vegan venture

In 2018, the UK launched more vegan products than any other nation (Mintel Global New Products Database, 2018). Curious to know what it feels like to be a smaller player in this space, we sat down with King’s20 Accelerator Founder Natalie Slack to chat about the realities of running a vegan venture, and see how she’s dealing with the increased competition.

Hi Natalie – you run award-winning plantbased ice-cream company Black Milq. Can you tell us how you became a food entrepreneur?

I’ve always been fascinated with the interaction between food, people, society, culture and nutrition. My undergrad was in Food Science and Nutrition and I did a Masters in Dietetics. I also had a number of jobs in the food industry before becoming an entrepreneur.

The idea for Black Milq started developing when I worked for a food start-up in 2015. We were looking at the future of food and plant-based replacements – like lab-grown meats and complete meal replacement powders – and it felt like something so obviously on the cusp of becoming massive.

You left a job in the food industry to start Black Milq. What spurred you on to take that leap of faith?

After studying, I was working in Tesco as a Product Developer and Technologist when a leadership change meant everyone was offered voluntary redundancy, and having always wanted to start a business, I decided to go for it. After that, I spent five months working for Innocent developing products before moving to a start-up called Proper. Proper was an interesting place with a super young talented team – and that’s when I started to understand what it was to be an entrepreneur and believe I could do it.

What made you pick vegan ice cream?

On a trip to New York, I was inspired by its ice-cream scene; they were making it all in-house, doing seasonal rotations on flavours, being experimental with colours. We didn’t have anything like that in the UK at the time. I combined that inspiration with what I’d seen about plant-based diets.

I was sure you were going to tell me you were a lifelong vegan and that’s how you got into selling plant-based ice cream!

For me, it was about asking: how can I make ice cream better? What will it look like in the future? It’s going to be exciting flavours that people haven’t tried before, or flavours of the past reimagined.

It sounds like you have a great product/founder fit. How do you think the industry knowledge you gathered before starting your business has impacted your journey?

Working at Tesco gave me full exposure to the concept of the food supply chain, and that’s where I got to understand that there was more than a factory involved in getting food on the shelf. On the flip side, everything at Tesco is up and running and its operations are super slick and resilient, so it’s hard to jump from that into a start-up environment.

What helped you keep going through that transition?

When I first launched in 2017, I had a stall at Hackney Vegan Market and I sold 500+ scoops of ice cream in a day. That’s when I knew that consumers were ready for this and it felt great. The market organiser – a guy called Sean O’ Callaghan, aka the Fat Gay Vegan – was also really keen on supporting women of colour and LGBT+ people in the food industry. And that was a really nice thing to be a part of, because bringing more underrepresented groups into the food industry is really important to me.

What’s next for Black Milq?

It’s an emerging market, and people are catching on really fast. So I stopped trading for a while and took some time to think about how we continue to differentiate so we can have longevity. I focused on recipe reformulation and developing an allergen-free base. My next priority is getting a retail range sold where my customers are most likely to shop. As one person, it can be difficult to find a balance between everything that needs to be done!

Has this time helped you think about how you can keep a market share as your competition grows?

Absolutely. A lot of American brands use a direct-to-consumer model, which I’m keen to explore. It’s about asking: how will people shop in the future, and want to access and experience products? Businesses that are nimble and pivot into direct-toconsumer models seem to be the most resilient – and that’s only been reinforced during the COVID-19 crisis.

Customer loyalty is also really important, especially if you don’t want to be forced to constantly drive for the lowest price point! One of our differentiators is our unique flavours; the other is our brand. I’m starting to think creatively about what the people that buy our product want to hear and learn – is it recipes? Or tutorials?

Finally, what would your advice be to any budding entrepreneurs hoping to launch a food business?

Be strategic early on, and map the operational stages involved in transforming that creative home-kitchen idea into something that entices enough people to pick it up on supermarket shelves. Building sustainability into your plans from the outset is also critical.