Shaquille graduates to drinks producer
EX-STUDENT HOPES TO GET HIS RANGE IN SUPERMARKETS
FLAVOURS of the Caribbean are helping a former student build a successful drinks brand.
De Montfort University graduate Shaquille Hunter founded Sip Shack in 2019.
Having started simply experimenting with flavours in his kitchen, Shaquille, 26, combined his own initiative with the skills he learnt from his business management degree and his Masters of Business Administration to grow his company.
His first flavour, Sky Juice, is a combination of juices including passionfruit and strawberry. It proved so popular with his friends that Shaquille went from selling exclusively on Snapchat to going shop to shop to ask owners to stock his brand.
His business has grown from a single-man operation to a team of five, with Sip Shack stocked in more than 400 wholesalers across the UK.
“Initially I wanted to set up my own restaurant, complete with unique recipes meals, side orders and drinks,” Shaquille said.
“I thought what’s the best way of building this, so I started with the drinks and blending a couple of ingredients and it wasn’t until one of my friends one day said ‘hey, I’d buy this’ that the idea truly formed.”
“My family originally comes from the Caribbean and I loved the food and drink out there. One of my favourite drinks was Sky Juice but it’s not bottled and sold in shops in the UK on a widespread scale, so I knew there was a gap in the market for my recipe.”
Shaquille and his team launched a new flavour, Mango Passion, in 2020. It has already proven a hit with customers online and is set to be joined by two new flavours.
Having recruited a large-scale UK manufacturer for his drinks and expanded his operations significantly last year, Shaquille is hoping to break Sip Shack into one of the big four supermarket chains.
He said: “The past two years have been manic. I’m now working on my pitches to supermarkets, showing them what I believe is a gap in a market and I think that we could be in one of the major supermarkets within the next year if we keep growing at this rate.
“It’s crazy to think how far the company has come in such a short time. Getting into supermarkets is the ultimate aim.
“From there we will be competing with some of the biggest drinks brands in the world.”