UK_F_Interview_1

This article was first published in the April 2016 UK edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

Popcorn is unexpectedly fascinating. Did you know, for instance, that people have been eating it for at least 500 years? Or that early Native Americans believed that a spirit lived inside each kernel of popcorn and when it was heated, the spirit grew angry and burst out of its home? Or of the four most common types of corn – sweet, field (dent), flint and popcorn – only popcorn will pop? It is a gluten-free, low-fat snack, which is – at least until you smother it in sugar and butter – low in calories.

It is also economical to make, which is why the mighty popcorn has also been credited with almost single-handedly saving the cinema sector – a tub of cinema popcorn has a markup of around 1,275%. It is hardly surprising, then, that the on-the-go, bagged popcorn market has been flooded with new entrants in recent years. 

According to research by Mintel, sales of popcorn in the UK reached £129m in 2015, and 7% of snack products sold in the UK during the same year were popcorn products, compared with 3% in 2010. A third of Britons, and 49% of those aged between 16 and 34, have eaten popcorn products in the past year. Popcorn is big business: 42 different popcorn brands currently compete for our business in the UK, but just five companies account for 95% of that market – Tyrells, Walkers, Butterkist, Propercorn and Metcalfe’s Skinny.

Metcalfe’s Food Company, which until last year consisted of Metcalfe’s Skinny and Itsu Grocery, was set up in 2009 by Julian Metcalfe, the co-founder of the sandwich chain Pret a Manger. The private company’s growth has been phenomenal. Turnover increased from £300,000 in 2010 to £13m in the most recent financial year (with Metcalfe’s Skinny accounting for about two-thirds of the total). On 1 June last year, the brands were decoupled and Metcalfe’s Skinny was demerged as a distinct company. 

The brands are now run as separate businesses from the same office near Westminster in London (its products are manufactured by third-party suppliers in the UK and Italy). It is a small but energetic outfit, characterised by quirky furniture and the youth of its employees. The average age of its team is late 20s and Metcalfe’s Skinny’s finance director, Vicky Westbrook, fits the demographic perfectly. After joining the company in 2014, she was promoted to finance director last year at the age of 28.

A languages graduate (she speaks fluent French and German), Westbrook’s interest in finance was sparked during an internship at Gü, an entrepreneurial pudding company founded in 2003. ‘My career wasn’t planned,’ she says. ‘I graduated the year of the financial crash and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, so I looked at various industries and thought the food sector would be interesting. Then I got the internship at Gü and just found that finance suited me.’

She started studying for the ACCA Qualification while she was at Gü. ‘I chose it because of the breadth of the Qualification and because it’s internationally recognised. There are more opportunities for working abroad, which I’d like to do at some stage.’

Pitching in

Westbrook was the only trainee at Gü at the time and working for a fast-growing company was helpful, she says, because she was expected to pitch in with many different roles. But she is also ambitious, and after three years she moved on to Unilever to finish her training, working in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and brand finance. 

‘A big company isn’t really me,’ she says, ‘and I knew that before I went there, but I wanted big-company experience to see what best practice looked like. And it was great.’

Her heart, though, was with smaller companies, so she jumped at the chance when a former Gü colleague, who is now managing director at Metcalfe’s, asked if she wanted to help set up a finance function in 2014. 

‘It was too good to miss out on,’ she says. ‘At the time, Metcalfe’s was growing rapidly but had only limited internal financial support – most things were outsourced. There was limited management reporting and business and cashflow forecasting, so that was the first area to tackle.’ 

She joined as head of finance and recruited two juniors over the following six months. ‘We started by bringing the bookkeeping function in-house, and then built a month-end reporting process and upgraded our IT systems.’ The finance team was five-strong – three qualified accountants, one ACCA trainee and a CAT credit controller – when Metcalfe’s and Itsu demerged last year. ‘We’ve just started to operate as separate finance functions, so Metcalfe’s Skinny will be three for now, but we’ll continue to grow as the company grows.’

Be in no doubt – popcorn is a very serious business. With many hard-hitting large companies competing for the same market and the barriers to new entrants very low, Metcalfe’s Skinny has to work hard to beat the pack.

Persuading us to eat more popcorn comes down to canny marketing and constant innovation – and Metcalfe’s Skinny is good at both. One clue is in the name: the company plays on popcorn being a healthier alternative to other snacks (meaning, in the main, potato crisps). The drive towards healthier eating in recent years has helped its cause, but Metcalfe’s Skinny also puts enormous efforts into coming up with new products. Its range currently includes wasabi and honey flavours, popcorn ‘crisps’ (advertised as a lighter alternative to tortilla chips), chocolate-coated rice cakes and corn cakes, and, its latest innovation, low-sugar popcorn made with stevia plant extract. 

The large supermarkets are central to its success, and it has recently secured a supplier deal with Morrisons, the last of the big grocers to stock its goods. But it also works hard to keep the brand prominent for its target demographic (it has more than 24,000 Twitter followers and 96,000 likes on Facebook). ‘The past year has mainly been about sampling and partnerships,’ says Westbrook. ‘We gave out 250,000 bags in samples last year, and we’re lucky that some incredible brands approach us. London Fashion Week asked us to send samples, and Nike, for example, doesn’t work with any other brand. We also ran a poster campaign in London for two months last year, and that resulted in a 64% increase in our brand awareness.’

Growing popularity

This has resulted in compound annual growth of 79% between 2013 and 2015, and a 30% increase in its workforce in the past six months – but there is more to come. Westbrook says that 90% of Americans regularly eat popcorn, compared with 40% of Brits. ‘Europe is the market to go after,’ she says. ‘Popcorn is growing faster than other snacks – there was a 2% decline in crisp sales last year – and there’s a long way to go.’

So far the company’s growth has come without the need for significant external funding, but in January 2016 Metcalfe’s Skinny announced that Kettle Chips UK had bought a 26% stake in the company ‘to help with strategic and financial infrastructure and maximise the growth potential of the brand in the UK and Europe’. The deal will not affect the day-to-day running of Metcalfe’s Skinny.

‘One of the great things about working in this business is the response time. We need to be quick to react to the wants and needs of our customers and consumers,’ Westbrook says. ‘But that means we’re always working to tight deadlines. I have to make sure I respond to what the business needs, which could mean cash if we’re looking to bring a marketing campaign forward.’ Her finance function priorities are to keep it simple and efficient: ‘For a company in high growth, we need to make sure we’re operating most effectively to keep up with the rest of the business and we’re continually reviewing our processes.’

She says the fast pace of the company is one of the best things about the job. Her colleagues are another: ‘It’s a joy to come to work. There’s a great team atmosphere. It’s very collaborative. We all sit close together and socialise together.’ 

In her nine months or so as FD she has had to cope with explosive growth, demerger, IT overhaul and a company sale (as well as her own wedding), so you have to admire her composure. ‘Being able to own the finance function here has been incredible,’ she says. ‘It was a bit daunting, but I wouldn’t change anything.’

As one of the youngest FDs in the country, she adds that you have to be ‘motivated and ambitious’ to get to the top. ‘I’m very proud to have made finance director in the time I did. It’s come with hard work, though, so you can’t be afraid of that.’

Liz Fisher, journalist