“My cousin, Sam, and I come from a very large, close family. We were both living in London; he was working as a property manager and I was a management consultant. Popcorn Shed began as an idea when we were in Sam’s apartment one time casually eating snacks and discussing the idea of starting a food business together. “We’re both foodies and eventually we settled on a gourmet popcorn business. We’ve always loved popcorn, because it brings people together and people associate it with happy memories. We’d seen just how far ahead the US was as regards off-the-shelf gourmet popcorn. But we decided that we’d only go into business if we could create superior gourmet popcorn and a genuinely new and exciting brand. “For many weeks we practised making different popcorn flavours in my mum’s kitchen, but we made lots of mess, so mum banished us to her garden shed, which became known as the popcorn shed, giving us our business name.

“We spent many months developing our ideas before finally launching the business in 2016. Our first major challenge was to find a manufacturer. We thought we’d found one after months of meetings, but they pulled out because they had financial problems. Then we found another, but they went into liquidation after a couple of years, which meant we had no popcorn for eight weeks. As a new company, suppliers wouldn’t give us credit, while our customers expected it, which has big cash-flow implications.

“At times, we wondered whether we’d bitten off more than we could chew. We had no food-packaging experience and on our first full production run we used the wrong packaging, because it didn’t have the shelf-life properties we needed. As a result, we had to throw away a week’s worth of popcorn production.