Sweet success of a pandemic pick 'n' mix

24-year-old entrepreneur turned a comfort food craving into a viable commercial opportunity

We all turned in some shape or form to comfort food during the pandemic. For many it was the warm morning scone, for some the pleasure of a deep pan pizza, while still more found happiness in freshly baked sourdough bread. 

For the vast majority of us, though, the prospect of indulging in our favourite sweets became a simple joy to counter the dramatically changing world we were living in.

This was the market where 24-year-old Nathan Adams saw a viable commercial opportunity, and grasped it with both hands. 

Forming Sweet King in June of 2020, and officially launching it a month later, he plugged neatly into Ireland’s emerging desire for small daily pleasures at the height of Covid-19, and found himself at the helm of a business that continues to grow far beyond his expectations.

“It has been a phenomenal year, reaching €1.6m in sales was well beyond our best estimates,” Nathan explains of the upward sales graph. 

“It has all been online sales so far, but our plan for the remainder of this year is to launch into retail.”

Nathan Adams.

He has recently taken over an 11,000 sq ft unit in Little Island, Co Cork — the former Xerox building, where €100,000 has been invested across infrastructure and staff facilities.

“We will continue with our online sales, but now added to by a move into the offline market. We are talking with a number of supermarket stores and distributors.

"Our aim, over time, would be to have Sweet King products available in all the major chains."

It has been a spectacular year for Sweet King by any commercial measure — and especially given that most of the country had come to a standstill due to continual lockdown.

Outlining where the original pick 'n' mix idea came from, Nathan had already established his own digital marketing agency, RMPR, which served as the launch pad for the fledgling venture.

“When the pandemic hit, everything came to a complete standstill within a very short time, and I ended up having to let all my marketing staff go.

"When you employ people you become very invested in their lives and would feel a very strong responsibility toward them.

I was determined to get all my team back to work, despite how Covid had shut down the country.

Knowing that the online world would likely boom due to the total enforced closure of every shop and retail outlet, Nathan conjured up a winning business formula around the human desire for an affordable comfort in a world turned upside down.

“I was always a fan of pick 'n' mix, and I thought there was a gap, an opportunity for an online pick n mix store, with speedy delivery to your door.

"A big part of the concept was having re-sealable bags, so people could regularly dip in and still retain the product’s freshness.”

Sourcing sweets from Ireland, Belgium, Spain, and the UK, the team’s original 1kg classic bag contained a mix of 21 different types — including watermelons, sour fangs, strawberry drops, brains, fizzy dummies, wine gums and bunny heads. 

Determined to offer a premium quality product, Sweet King arrived at launch day with 1,000 bags.

“I thought the thousand bags would last a month, but they sold out completely in two hours flat.”

Brexit challenge

With sales hitting a constant upward trajectory, the earliest challenges to Sweet King came from transportation, rather than Covid.

“Brexit did throw a problem at us in terms of getting goods into Ireland, but we solved that pretty quickly by setting up a base in Northern Ireland and channelling product into the republic from there.”

Working hard to source a quality product at the right price was only part of the Sweet King success story, pushing it over the line with clever marketing was the real gamechanger for this fizzing enterprise.

“There is a huge audience out there for pick n mix products, and we worked very hard to get the best and most unusual sweet mixes possible.”

That combined with the team’s marketing skills around Facebook, Instagram ads, email marketing and influencer promotion.

“Influencer brand ambassadors would be very important to us, and our RMPR agency was already very conversant with how best to work online marketing and strategy to suit our needs.”

Constant customer polling is a feature of the company’s operating ethos, and has been the source of new ideas and changed product lines resulting from regular feedback.

With the whole country stuck at home, we knew that online shopping sales were going to spike.

"People were getting more and more familiar with ordering online, and especially when the product would arrive on their doorstep the next day," Nathan says.

“We knew what had worked for a variety of clients back in the pre-pandemic days, so it was really a case of re-implementing that strategy to our own advantage for Sweet King.”

More staff

Already employing 23, the Sweet King future blueprint sees the workforce more than doubling with the addition of 25 more staff.

There is no sign of the growth slowing down at this point.

"We are confident that we will need these extra bodies when the overall plan for the company becomes a reality.”

Having serviced 50,000 customers over the past 12 months, selling 150,000 bags of sweets in the process, Nathan has no fears that trends and tastes will change going forward — if anything, sales will grow even more when overseas expansion plans come into play.

“Over the next six to nine months, we’re planning to take on a second warehouse in the UK.

"As things stand with Brexit, we can’t ship direct to the UK, so having a base over there makes sense as part of our future plans.”

With ambitions to achieve a €5m annual turnover within the next three to five years, Sweet King will continue to extend its geographical footprint beyond Ireland and the UK into the wider EU territory.

“The real dream is to take Sweet King into the USA, but that is all down the line at this stage,” Nathan concludes. “We’ve come a long way in the first twelve months, I’m confident we will continue to grow and expand into the future.”