Even in recession, We all have to eat

Spectator Magazine

July 2009

You wouldn’t expect the founder of a start-up that launched itself from an industrial estate in Feltham just days before Britain was officially confirmed to be in recession to be particularly cheery. Yet 27-year-old Graham Bosher of graze.com positively bounds down the steps to meet me. Behind his enthusiasm is Graze.com’s remarkable first five months. With a monthly growth rate of 30 per cent and projected first-year sales of £2 million, Graze seems to be munching its way through the downturn. Bosher’s recipe for starting a successful business in the midst of a severe downturn? ‘Everybody eats’, he says, ‘Even in a recession, you still have to eat.’

Bosher came up with the idea for Graze while still at LoveFilm – the DVD rental company he founded at the age of 20. Sitting at his desk in Acton, eating a cereal bar he’d brought from home and staring at a pile of DVD envelopes, he wondered how many other people were doing the same thing and wishing they had a more interesting snack option at work. Then he thought: what if you could choose your snacks like you choose your films and get them sent through the mail… and Graze was born. The similarities are numerous. With LoveFilm, you go to the website, pick the films you’d like to see and assign a priority rating to them. (Series one of The Wire = high priority, Slumdog Millionaire = medium priority, The Bourne Supremacy = low priority). As soon as you return one film, you’re sent the next one on your list. Similarly with Graze, you choose which foods you love (pineapple), like (honey pecans) are happy to try (yogurt covered apricots) or never want in your box (naked seed mix). Both companies have packaging that will slip through any letterbox and rely on Royal Mail’s next-day delivery to keep their customers happy.

William Reeve, a Graze non-executive director who has also served as LoveFilm’s managing director, points out to me that making the customer’s experience fun is part of the magic of both ventures. ‘I tend to use the “favourite bit of post” argument for both – amidst a stack of junk mail and bank statements, the red LoveFilm envelope or the recyclable Graze box are your favourites and will be the first thing you open. In both cases the “Yay! What’s in this one?” emotional response is an important part of the brand experience.’ As well as Reeve, Graze employs a number of former LoveFilm staff and shares some of LoveFilm’s non-execs and investors.

Graze is targeting the many thousands of people who apparently feel a lack of compelling snack options, or would rather not answer the 4 p.m. call of the chocolate biscuit. Instead of a KitKat, Graze provides you with a cute cardboard box with three different punnets – one of fresh fruit, and two of dried fruit, nuts and seeds plus the occasional chocolate button. The nutritional value of the box is laid out on a personalised card, which includes tear-off discount codes to give to friends and co-workers who would like to order their own boxes. Currently the only company in the UK delivering fresh fruit by post, Bosher, says that even if there is a delay of a day, the produce won’t go off. He’s even patented an absorbent sleeve which deals with leaking pineapple juice caused by the jostling of the box in the post. Since Graze buys direct from fruit companies, Bosher says his customers get it fresher than they would from a supermarket.

So far, Bosher has been running the Feltham operation on seed capital raised from friends and family. He’s actively looking for another £2 million to fund the next stage of expansion – lunch boxes for office workers, shortly to be followed by school lunches. Bosher’s record is pretty good: LoveFilm acquired or outran all its competitors before he left. So far Graze has no direct competition – and as long as people keep eating, Bosher’s hoping they’ll keep grazing.

This was written for Spectator Business , which you can Download