City profiles
Melanie Goldsmith and Emile Bernard
The duo behind confectioner Smith & Sinclair started out selling “edible cocktails” – sweets infused with daiquiris or whisky sours – from a stall in London’s Soho, said The Sunday Times. They made headlines two years ago with a cheeky range of “Trump Sucks” alcoholic lollipops, and have since pushed annual sales to £2m. Now a new future beckons for the start-up. It has been bought by Tilray, the Canadian cannabis business, which has big plans for European expansion and has asked the pair to come up with a range of weed-infused sweets. Although “recreational cannabis” is illegal in the UK, products made with CBD, a non-psychoactive compound, are not. The confections will hit America and Canada first, and land in Britain sometime soon after. Worth a potshot. The Chinese developed a taste for Greene King IPA in 2015, when President Xi enjoyed a pint at David Cameron’s local. Sales have since soared 1,600% – prompting Hong Kong’s richest man to pounce, said The Times. Li Ka-shing is paying £4.6bn for the Suffolk brewer behind Old Speckled Hen – adding to “a burgeoning slate of British assets” including Superdrug and the Three network. The low pound made Greene King particularly attractive to Li, a keen bargain-hunter and arguably Hong Kong’s “most influential” tycoon. Last week, he urged protesters to “love China, love Hong Kong and love yourself”. But at 91, “he doesn’t have to worry too much about 2047”, when Hong Kong loses its “one country, two systems” status.