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.
blackmilq.com @blackmilqicecream
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.
32 Start! Issue six 2020-21
