Small business heroes: BananaBerry A black and white photo of a man wearing a plain white t-shirt. He is looking off picture with quiffed hair

Small business heroes: BananaBerry

Direct Line for Business spoke to Dan Roberts about the challenges of running your own business and how he started BananaBerry.

Small Business Case Study: BananaBerry

BananaBerry, launched in 2014 by Dan Roberts, is a social enterprise that uses surplus fruit and veg (prdouce that otherwise would be wasted) to create smoothies, freshly made to order for offices and events around London.

Dan first caught the entrepreneurial bug when he took on the role of treasurer of the University of Bristol's Social Enterprise Society. Then a few years later, while working as an accountant and ski instructor in France, he was scouted by a modeling agency and went on to grace the runways for major designers like Vivienne Westwood.

How did Dan get his business off the ground?

Dan successfully pitched the idea to his sister and business partner, who works in finance, and a year later the business has a team of four and a production kitchen in Canary Wharf. Not only that, but they're exploring the possibility of creating a surplus food production facility to act as a central shared hub for like-minded companies, who could then collaborate on sourcing.

But for the time being, every day that Dan isn’t flying out to Milan or Tokyo for fashion shoots or shows, he’s in the car at 4:30, doing his rounds, collecting surplus food that was previously destined to become wastage to deliver to the BananaBerry kitchen so that it can become tomorrow’s smoothie sustenance.

Make no mistake about it: the next generation of entrepreneur has arrived - young, confident, intelligent and fiercely committed to sustainability, to simple solutions and to social progress. Why wait for tomorrow to start a business when you can start today?

To find out more about starting and running a small business head over to our Small Business Heroes video hub.

Related topic: Learn how Jane Means started her business from her kitchen table and now makes cards for royalty.

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Last Updated: 08 Dec 2015