As soon as Stefan White and his best mate Tom Renshaw graduated from university, they set to work making their beer snacks empire a reality. Each day, they would pick a London borough and pound the pavement all morning knocking on independent pub doors trying to sell their product - like scenes out of BBC’s The Apprentice.
By the afternoon, they’d make calls to pub groups, and by 3pm, start shifts working in bars as kitchen porters and bartenders, finishing at 2am. Stefan, 27, from North Reddish, was earning £1300 a month, but with his rent at £1250, he knew he had to make it work.
Their breakthrough was with Stonegate Group, who put their flavoursome snacks into 300 of their pubs, which then landed them in other chains, growing from zero to 2,000 pubs in nine months. But disaster struck in March 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic hit locking down pubs, losing the duo 95 per cent of their revenue stream and forcing them to rethink their strategy.
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Drowning their sorrows in supermarket beers, Tom had a lightbulb moment and suggested expanding into craft beers online, creating ‘care packages’ for customers to help them through the pandemic. Initially, this was a 12-week project while pub doors were closed, but packages were flying off the shelves following the release of their hit ‘Super Dad’ giftbox for Father’s Day - which sold out in 10 days.
Two years later, Bier Company - an online shop stocking craft beers from breweries across the UK, paired with their signature own-brand Bier Nuts and Bier Crisps - has generated a whopping £10million in revenue. The idea for the business came about after a trip to Bulgaria.
Whilst the pair, then 23 and 22 and living together at Queen Mary University of London, were pub hopping on holiday, they came across bar snacks that blew them away. “When we first tasted these amazing nuts we turned and said to each other ‘these are incredible’,” Stefan recalls.
“They were just so good, especially with beer, they were like nothing we had ever tasted before, and at that moment we knew we had to show the UK what they were missing out on.” In the summer of their graduation in 2019, they successfully raised £7,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, £5k of which was from friends and family. They also secured a £24,000 Government start-up loan.
They ploughed 95 per cent of the money into product, and as a result, were left with 100,000 units of nuts in a storage hold in London. “That’s when the door to door selling started," Stefan explains.
“But the beautiful thing about London is that there are 9,000 pubs. After about six months we had visited about 4,000 pubs, with 500 on board - a 1 in 8 success rate. My shoes were talking to me, my jeans were ripped, and I lost 20kg in weight.
“We didn’t realise selling snacks was the toughest industry to get into.”
To set themselves apart, they created unusual flavours, such as Jalapeno and Masala Curry, and packaged them in sustainable cans, resembling a beer can, instead of plastic. But this business hasn’t been the first innovative money-making idea from Stefan.
As a child, he was always finding ways to make extra pocket money, selling his Easter eggs a month later for £1 cheaper than supermarkets, and charging his younger brother and sister 2p a time to jump off of his top bunk bed, causing it to break. Whilst his peers were watching the Disney channel, he watched Dragon’s Den.
“I used to think the Dragons could save you,” Stefan says, of how the multimillionaires had the power to change people's lives. Talking about his humble beginnings, he says: “We weren’t struggling as kids. My mum was a housewife and my dad was on £22k. When my parents split up when I was 11, I remember my dad was really down.
“We were going around Denton Crownpoint, in River Island, and my dad really wanted this £110 leather jacket. I thought ‘what can I do to get enough money?’” Stefan began reselling cans of pop and sweets on the playground for a profit, at a time when chef Jamie Oliver had campaigned for a major shake-up of school snacks, banning crisps and chocolate from being sold.
“The entrepreneurial journey started out of heartbreak," Stefan continues. "Now it’s about family pride with me, they’ve always put me on a pedestal; I was the first to go to university.
“I grew up right next to the Fir Tree pub, that was where I had my first pint. But it was knocked down for a Lidl. The plan is that hopefully in the future I have enough money to rebuild the Fir Tree pub.”
There are two others from Stockport working in the head office in London, including Stefan’s brother Liam, heading up subscription service Bier Club, and his cousin Cameron, who went from South Reddish McDonald’s to becoming their head of customer service. Tom and Stefan, who have matching tattoos of their old flat number, also employ eight staff in their 45,000 sqft warehouse in Enfield.
The uni mates turned business partners now have their sights set on further expansion into Europe and the US. “This business will be the first name that pops into your mouth when you talk about craft beer,” Stefan assures. “It’ll be the brewery once we launch that, the snacks, in pubs, online presence, draft beer dispensers in your homes.
“This business will be everything. Currently, that's Brewdog - but it won’t be in five years’ time.”
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