UK-based vegan cheese brand Kinda Co. took first place at the Bread & Jam Fest “Dragon’s Den” style competition for startups, securing £25,000 in investment funding and £10,000 in funds for branding along with a year’s worth of mentoring support.
In an emotional post on Instagram, founder Ellie Brown shared the news with the company’s followers. “I’ve been wanting to write a post since Friday night but didn’t really know where to start!” she wrote. “The events of last week still haven’t quite sunken in, but I’m beyond happy and grateful and want so much to share the exciting news with you all!”
According to Brown, her presentation varied from other contestants; Kinda Co. relied mostly on taste, laying out cheese for the judge investors and telling her backstory.
A self-described “life-long cheese addict,” Brown was a lifelong vegetarian who wanted to go vegan but thought she couldn’t because she loved cheese “so much.”
She told the New Statesmen last year that she finally gave the vegan diet a go and found that the vegan cheese options on the market were “generally disgusting,” prompting her to figure out a viable alternative. And just when she thought she had resolved the issue — creating a vegan cheese that she enjoyed — she was targeted by a lobby group for the dairy industry calling her products, marketed then as Kinda Cheese, “unlawful” and “deceptive.”
Efforts were made to stop her trademarks registry, which forced her to rename the brand to Kinda Co.
“It literally says all over [the packaging] that my cheese is made from nuts,” she said. “It’s almost laughable that they would want me to change my name as I’m so small. The amount of sales that I would take from them would surely be so minuscule, yet they’re coming to shut me down.
“It must be pretty bad for the dairy industry if they’re trawling through trademark applications to find products with the word ‘cheese’ in them.”
“Winning felt like such validation and recognition for all the hours and days of hard work I’ve put in over the last year to try and grow the business from nothing,” Brown said in her Instagram post, “all the while also still working my [full-time] job.”
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