Sweet success for Yorkshire brownie brand
Creme egg, lemon curd, salted caramel, stem ginger, peanut butter, hazelnut praline, kinder Bueno and Terry’s chocolate orange… these are just a few of the flavours Yorkshire brownie brand offers within its range of brownies and blondies.
With ambitious plans to introduce a new flavour every week, this is just the beginning for Brown & Blond.
Since founding Brown & Blond in 2010, George Welton has taken the business from humble beginnings selling a couple hundred brownies a month at the back of his mum’s house in York, to producing 25,000 a week in a 1,500 sq ft unit in Leeds.
He said: “When I first started some weeks I’d sell 100 brownies and some weeks we wouldn’t sell any. But this December we had the bakery running full steam and we hit capacity selling 25,000 brownies every week that month.”
Brown & Blond launched when 18-year old George saw a gap in the confectionery market which at the time was largely dominated by cupcakes.
“Every show we went to there seemed to be like ten cupcakes stalls, and we thought well why don’t we give it ago with brownies and chuck a few different flavours together and see if it works and it did and here we are today,” he said.
The brownies and blondies are gluten free and made with ground almonds which prolongs the shelf life of the traybakes and also gives them a more “luxurious” texture.
“With the help of my mum and dad, we converted a small hold into a little kitchen, borrowed a bit of equipment from my granny (she gave us a Kenwood chef) then we found this domestic oven and we sort of plugged it all in and that was it really,” George said.
The trio started by knocking on doors with the brownies, slowly building the customer base one neighbour at a time. From there, Brown & Blond started getting its produce into local farmer’s markets in Harrogate and Otley.
Through investments and national shows, the brand’s customer base has just kept growing, and now they’re brownies and blondies are sold nationally and can be found at King’s College in London, Fat Tony’s pizzeria chain in Gloucester and a several places up North.
But more excitingly, within the next couple of months, Brown & Blond will be launching a new interactive website where customers can purchase the many flavours in gift boxes of various sizes.
“We’ve also got a retail unit built, a pop up we’ve had built by another local company, and so the plans for that is to see how it goes, then look at potentially look at a franchising option in the next 5-10 years,” George added.
