My son motivated me to make millions
When her baby nearly died of a nut allergy, single mum KIRSTY HENSHAW cooked up her own solution...
When I speak to Kirsty henshaw, the 35-year-old powerhouse behind Kirsty’s — a range of tasty, healthy meals free from gluten, wheat and dairy — she apologises if the signal is crackly, as she’s dialling in from her new £2million factory in the north Yorkshire countryside.
It’s something she’s been working towards since launching her business in 2012. now, she can prevent crosscontamination and boost production, and is aiming to hit an annual turnover of £25 million by 2024.
To achieve this, the single mum of two — Sophie, three and Jacob, 15 — is willing to commute up to four hours a day, four days a week, from their home in hale, Cheshire, to avoid moving the kids and disrupting their schooling.
Instead, Kirsty shares alternate dropoffs and pick-ups with Sophie’s dad, who was her partner of five years until they split last February.
It happened just a month after she collected the keys to her new, empty factory (which required five months of renovations) and one month before lockdown was announced.
So, it seems rather an understatement when she describes the past year as ‘very, very hard’.
‘The break-up was fairly amicable’, she says. ‘But we were chucked in at the deep end of full-time childcare. It was horrendous trying to manage that. Suddenly, I had a three-year-old at home all the time. her behaviour deteriorated as she missed the nursery routine.’
Alongside the hell of heartbreak and home-schooling, the business itself was severely impacted by Covid.
‘We would have had an amazing year,’ she explains. ‘But we had big problems with suppliers, which heavily impacted sales. It was a disaster.’
Today, the business is back on track, with £11million of sales so far this year, though it’s still down 30 per cent on projected figures.
Kirsty credits exercise as the best stress-relief — running, Peloton and weekend walks — but her core motivation comes from motherhood.
‘I’ve been through worrying, awful times in my life,’ she reflects. ‘But having them [the children] makes you feel like you will do anything.
‘You’ve got to ride the storm because it’s not an option to let them down.’
The pandemic is far from the first storm Kirsty henshaw has had to weather. She grew up on a council estate in Preston, with little money.
‘We never went to a restaurant, ever,’ she recalls. ‘I remember eating out once in my whole childhood, at Deep Pan Pizza, for my dad’s 30th birthday.’
From an early age, she says: ‘I wanted to work for myself and be independent so I wouldn’t be poor.
‘I didn’t want my family holidays for the rest of my life to be camping in Wales. I thought, there has to be more to life than two weeks in a tent. Beneath my working-class exterior, was a middle-class entrepreneur dying to come out!’
not being good at passing exams, she left school at 16 and trained as a masseuse. Then at 19, she found herself three months pregnant to her ‘bad boy’ boyfriend, who was by then in prison.
‘My parents said, if you stay with us and cut him out, we’ll help you. I’m so glad I did. My son Jacob was the making of me. I wanted to build a future for him.’
The idea for her business also came from her experience as a mum. At nine months old, Jacob almost died from anaphylactic shock. It turned out he was allergic to nuts and dairy, and mildly sensitive to gluten, too.
Back in the early 2000s, the free-from options in supermarkets were limited, explains Kirsty. So she started cooking meals and treats from scratch.
his favourite was a coconutbased ice cream concocted using a £30 ice-cream maker from Argos. When neighbours started requesting it, too, she knew she was onto something. Shortly afterwards, in 2009, she launched Coconice ice cream, renting a local kitchen and funding it with a £2,000 overdraft on her debit card.
But by early 2010, her product was stocked in 600 health food shops nationwide. Then Tesco got wind of it and invited her to a meeting, where they asked her to supply 500 stores.
‘I said yes to everything: fake it till you make it,’ she says. ‘But, after that meeting, I went outside and cried for an hour, thinking, how will I do this? That night, I drank a bottle of rose and applied to Dragons’ Den.’
A week later she got onto the show. Kirsty won £65,000 of investment from Peter Jones and Duncan Bannatyne. Rebranding the business as Kirsty’s in 2012, she replaced ice cream with free-from meals after other mothers who had children with allergies started requesting meal tips.
The original Kirsty’s range of five meals was stocked in Sainsbury’s. now she supplies Waitrose, Morrisons, Tesco, Coop, Booths and Asda, and has 20 products across ready meals, pizza and desserts.
During this time, she’s also had to navigate maternity leave, after having Sophie in 2017.
‘I had 12 weeks off, then got a full-time nanny. But I didn’t want her to miss out on breastfeeding. So, I’d nip home or the nanny would bring her to the office. I remember feeding her in the boardroom during a meeting with lawyers. It was surreal, but they were lovely about it.’
Kirsty is open about the difficulties of juggling a successful, fast-growing business, as a mother.
however, she is adamant: ‘You can’t be everywhere or everything to everyone.
‘And a word of warning,’ she adds. ‘Money doesn’t make you happy, it’s about family and friends. And my children bring me the most joy in my life.
‘I wouldn’t do any of this — work for 70 hours a week — if it wasn’t for them.’