Small Business

Team Grasshopper consists of sisters, 33-year-old Abi and 35-year-old Fleur Emery, and they make and sell porridge. It comes in cool little pots and all you have to do is add boiling water, wait patiently for 10 minutes and then eat it. Originally Fleur made the porridge at the sisters’ Southampton childhood home and took it to the beach for their surfing and sailing friends.

“I love porridge and I love portable things,” explains Fleur “and after a while we started selling it in the local surf shop.” These days you’ll also find Grasshopper porridge in supermarkets such as Waitrose and on board Flybe flights; however the sisters are currently seeking extra cash to take their business to the next level. While they’re prepared to hand over 20 per cent of their company to a suitable investor, one thing they won’t be selling out on is their environmental principles. “Our porridge is organic and the pots it comes in are fully recyclable, so we like the fact that Vauxhall is producing cars with such low CO2,” explains Abi, perusing the Corsa ecoFLEX’s details.

Sending out the right message is vital for business both big and small, say the sisters. But one thing that never changes is the amount of hard work required and while the porridge may only take ten minutes to prepare, there’s no recipe for instant success in business warns Fleur. “Work out how long it will take, how much you’ll spend and how much you’ll make. Then double the time and the cost and half the profit.”

The sisters hand over a couple of pots of chocolate porridge for us to try later. We store them in the Corsa’s handy glovebox, happy in the knowledge that they will spare us the horrors of sampling a motorway service station sandwich
on our journey. An hour or so later, we leave London behind and head for Norfolk and Great Yarmouth.