Chef awarded £150,000 to help expand bean business

A CHEF who started a gourmet bean company during the coronavirus pandemic has been awarded £150,000 to help grow her business.

Amelia Christie-Miller, 31, from Swyncombe, is the founder of Bold Bean Co and has been named young entrepreneur of the year by the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation.

She took the top prize in the inaugural awards, launched by Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, who is best known as the founder of EasyJet.

Ms Christie-Miller launched her company in May 2021 and it sells a range of heirloom beans sourced from Spain and Poland. She has also produced a cook book.

The beans are sold in Waitrose stores nationwide, as well as in Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury’s and she is hoping to use the grant to create new products and sell abroad.

Ms Christie-Miller was among 52 entries for the awards to win a share of £300,000 across three categories.

She said: “I am just incredibly overjoyed — the grant is game-changing and I didn’t expect to win.

“We are still fine-tuning the details on what we will spend the money on but we are going to invest in understanding our customers more and visit our bean growers, while continuing to make delicious recipes.

“The grant allows us blue-sky thinking and creativity that we just couldn’t indulge in before. We are beyond grateful for this opportunity to help us make even more people bean obsessed.”

Before setting up her business, Ms Christie-Miller earned money as a private chef while a student at the University of Edinburgh and worked at a Gail’s Bakery in London before graduating.

She came up with the business idea in Madrid when she woke up with a hangover and had nothing in the house to eat but a jar of beans.

She ate a spoonful straight out of the jar and spotted a gap in the UK market for high-quality and nutritious beans.

Ms Christie-Miller said: “My obsession with beans started when I was in Spain on an Erasmus exchange. I was doing a lot of cooking and experimenting with fresh ingredients.

“One morning I was too hungover to go shopping and took a jar of creamy heirloom butterbeans out of the fridge. I remember eating them and thinking they were incredible and how tasty they were just by themselves. It transformed my view on beans.

“I know beans have quite a dusty reputation and that people think they are tasteless but I also know what delicious beans taste like and I know more people want sustainable meat alternatives, so I’m on a mission to make people obsessed with them.

“With a lot of canned beans you buy from big supermarkets, you don’t know where they come from as the label only says ‘non-EU’, while ours are from Spain, which is why they taste better.”

Ms Christie-Miller began selling her products in local stores, including the Granary in Watlington, McQueens in Nettlebed and the Henley Larder and Pavilion in Henley before they were picked up by the supermarkets.

Last July she penned her first book Bold Beans: Recipes to Get Your Pulse Racing and in March she was secured a £50,000 on BBC programme Dragon’s Den.

“Dragon” Debrah Meaden, who previously ran a multi-million-pound family holiday business, paid the money for a 6.5 per cent stake in Bold Bean Co.

Ms Christie-Miller said: “Securing a deal with Deborah was the dream outcome for us going into the ‘den’. The whole Bold Bean Co team really pulled together to prepare for the pitch, and the experience of discussing all things beans with the Dragons is one I’ll never forget.”