THE Vegan Kind Supermarket was set up by husband-and-wife team Scott and Karis McCulloch eight years ago after they spotted a gap in the market for vegan food that is easy access. The business made £6 million last year and saw sales boom in the first Covid lockdown. This year they have plans to release their own range of vegan meals.

Name: Scott McCulloch

Position: Co-founder

WHAT IS THE BUSINESS CALLED?

Vegan Kind

WHERE IS IT BASED?

Glasgow

WHY DID YOU SET UP THE BUSINESS?

IT has been going for eight years now. We’re making vegan and plant-based food easily accessible to all. When we went vegan in 2013 there wasn’t much on the market and we had to do a lot of label checking but after a few months we realised it was quite simple. Our first product was a monthly lifestyle box. Customers don’t know what’s in it and it often contains products that are new to the market. The original premise is making it accessible to all.

We’ve definitely always wanted to run our own business. I had a couple of jobs before that helped me set up a business. I worked in business banking at Royal Bank of Scotland for 10 years and had a portfolio of 600 businesses at a time so I dealt with thousands of businesses over the years. I then moved on to a high-level leadership sales role at Worldpay. Karis worked in banking as a project manager at Santander and she had her own microfollowing of 20,000 people on YouTube.

Our sales exploded during lockdown. We moved warehouse in the middle of the pandemic to a 34 sq ft space in Rutherglen. We don’t see demand letting up any time soon. Going vegan is the general trajectory happening. The UN Climate Summit is taking place in Glasgow this year [on November 12]. Often veganism is spoken about as the single biggest change people can make to improve their carbon footprint.

WHAT IS YOUR TARGET MARKET?

WE were originally targeting vegans in a way. Now that we have such a large offering we serve anyone who wants to buy plant-based food. In the next one to two years we will be working on people who aren’t vegan yet. The audience of those who are vegan are growing more and more.

More people are going vegan every month. This year 40,000 people signed up for Veganuary, whether it was for health reasons or for the environment. People who don’t necessarily align to those things now see that veganism is not a fringe movement but a positive life change. If you want vegan halloumi or cheddar there are amazing choices now compared to 10 years ago. The vegan food sector has blown up.

READ MORE: Could Scotland provide the leadership needed to save the planet?

People generally love it. Our supermarket is the largest vegan offering in the world. We sell 5.5k products and have next day delivery seven days a week. It’s like Asda but all the products are vegan so it removes difficulty.

HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM COMPETING BUSINESSES?

THERE was one other vegan subscription box at the time. Now there are a few but they are smaller. There are a few online vegan stores but their inventory is smaller than ours with less than 1000 products. We’re above and beyond any vegan stores in the UK and bigger than any in America too. You can now go to Subway and get a meatless meatball marinara and at Burger King and KFC you can get vegan burgers. Every main food outlet now needs to have a vegan option. They know the vegan audience is there waiting for new products. On Instagram we are the most followed vegan business in the UK. We also run the Accidentally Vegan UK account.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN RUNNING THE BUSINESS?

CASHFLOW. We’re going through an investment round for £3m right now. We raised £600,000 in 2020 to tide us over but the pandemic hit and we used it to buy more warehouse space. We turned over £6m last year. To have only done a small investment of £600,000 is pretty rare as a business of our size. Lots of different investors want to see different things – the way to prove you’re investable is to get the business to a decent scale. It would be reckless of us to try to do something new right now. It will be the first time we have had serious money. We’ve got lots of key people interested and are excited about what we do.

WHERE DO YOU HOPE THE BUSINESS WILL BE IN 10 YEARS’ TIME?

WE will expand with new products this year with our own range of meals coming out. We will also expand the warehouse. We want to do more strategic product development by creating products that are missing on the market. We have 10,000 people who get our lifestyle box and we can promote our products on Accidentally Vegan. We’ve got a big opportunity to grow the business. We’re so lucky to be in this position. There are loads of good businesses who have had the rug pulled out from under them.