#79 - Mike Hemming - Love Sum [Commercial Director]

0:00Mike Hemming:Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to your founders. Today I'm joined by the brilliant Mike Hemming, who is the commercial director at Love Some Dumplings. Now, Love Some make an absolutely delicious range of authentic dumplings, which are a chilled product now available in places like Sainsbury's, Ocado and Booth. They are really authentic with unique stories, great legends and origins with delicious fillings. And I loved Mike's journey into how he got here. Mike has a wealth of experience working with brands like Cadbury's, Green and Black's, Mars Pet Care, Peter's Yard, so many more. And it was fantastic to pick through his journey, his lessons, his learnings along the way.

0:37Mike Hemming:I love the fact that his grandparents worked at Cadbury's and he ended up working there. There were so many little anecdotes and takeaways from this that it is full, full of insights that are going to help you with your business. So I really hope you enjoy this. Mike clearly knows what he's doing, loves some, it's going to go from strength to strength and they are one to watch this year. So if you haven't tried them yet, get to your nearest chiller, grab yourself some dumplings and crack on with the episode.

1:07Mike Hemming:Hello and welcome back to Young Founders. Today I'm joined by the brilliant Mike Hemming. So Mike, can you let everyone know where you work and what your role is? I'm the commercial director at a business called Love Some Dumplings. We've been going for about two years. Amazing. So if anyone hasn't heard of Love Some or has never seen the brand before, Or who are the founders? What's the story? Give us that brand spiel. So Love Some Dumplings started actually five years ago with a different name, originally called Journey to the West, which is still our trading name. The two founders behind it are Sandy Tang, who is a MasterChef finalist from 2020.

1:41She got down to the three. So she did the flying around the world bit. And David Solomon, who is, I suppose, is a farmer entrepreneur. So he's a farmer. So his main business is pharmaceuticals, but he has a massive passion for dumplings. By traveling through Asia, he's obviously seen a lot of Asian food. He's got factories that make pharmaceuticals in Asia. And he met Sandy about five years ago through the Chinese-British business community. She had an idea for a food brand. He had a passion for dumplings. And I suppose in its infancy, Journey to West was born. And they started actually in a food truck, which I've been in and cooked in, but I've never been part of the original formation of the brand.

2:19So they literally were at the weekends cooking up dumplings, trying out recipes, going to pitches and just seeing what resonated with UK consumers. And I got involved with them three years ago. They had a product, but they didn't really know how to take a product to retail. So that's kind of how the brand started and my involvement from just over three years ago.

2:42Mike Hemming:Amazing. Well, we're definitely digging into why you're the man to go to for that with your amazing work history. but for you actually coming across the brand and Sandy and everything they were doing, what was it you made you go, actually, I could see myself doing this. I think there is a gap here or is it just you love dumplings? You're like, oh, I'm involved. I'm on board. I'll be honest with you. I didn't know an awful lot about dumplings. I'd eaten them in restaurants, probably like 50 % of the UK population. I still thought of them as a suety product that you have on top of stews. I probably knew dim sum as a more generic term, more broadly.

3:14I was introduced to David and Sandy, as I say, three years ago through Thea at Young Foodies, or YF as it is now. They were looking for someone to help them retail the brand or get it retail ready. And it was the most bizarre job interview in the world because I don't think they knew exactly what they were looking for. It was a conversation, not an interview. I think if we were a fly on the wall, I would have asked more questions of them than they asked of me. And I remember walking out thinking, I don't think I've got that job because I think I just interrogated them because I wanted to understand their idea, their passion and their purpose.

3:49And they had a great product and it was ahead of its time. But you do see chilled dumplings on the continent. You do see chilled dumplings in Asia, but they didn't really exist in the UK. And Asian food is having a moment, as we all know, gochigan, Korea, kimchi, all those kinds trends. So the idea to create a fresh dumpling product made in the UK that celebrates Southeast Asia cuisine from multiple geographies was something that just fell in the moment. And I suppose we talk about our vision is to make fresh dumplings as big as fresh pasta. Now, like most visions, that's a massive idea. But 20 years ago, we didn't buy fresh pasta.

4:32Now it's probably in half the fridges in the UK. And as we look for different ways to bring protein into our diet, as our taste buds have been driven by travel, we're definitely in the moment. And I think dumplings are interesting. And this is what I've learned. They started 2000 years ago, in Asia, and they traveled along the Silk Road. And every time they kind of landed in an area like Nepal, India, Korea, they took on the local flavors, the fragrances of the cuisine in those countries. And so we look to celebrate that. All our dumplings are different shapes and different colors and different proteins with different background flavors.

5:09So we're more than gyoza. And that's kind of the territory that we're excited about developing with our customers. And that's the category opportunity I suppose we're taking to retailers. And as you probably know, taking a new category to retailers is hard because you can't just say we're like that plus 10%. So in many ways, the buyers that get us get the food scene, know what's happening, are looking to bring younger people into their categories. And I suppose that's the category opportunity that we're looking to exploit.

5:41Mike Hemming:Amazing. No, I love the story, the journey. I think the branding and the products themselves always look absolutely fantastic. And as you touched on there, you have been engaging with retailers and having some retail success. So for those listening going, I think I might have heard of it. Where can people find it now? So we started off at the start of 2024 and our first listings were with Cress as a wholesaler, with Selfridges as a kind of trophy store where food opinion leaders go to find new ideas, new concepts. And we were lucky enough to be listed pretty much from the off with booths in the northwest.

6:16And we built the brand out for 12 months, effectively in farm shops and delis. We won the GoPuff business, which was fantastic. So it's Qcom. It's people looking for quick, convenient meals at night. So that was kind of 2024 building the brand out. I suppose going back a bit, 2023 was all about making the pack work. So simple things like we weren't called Love Some, which is obviously a play on the name Dim Sum. And our products are made with love. We talk about dumplings being legendary, legendary dumplings. And all of our products pick up on the local legend of the area they're from. So this is a Korean mum.

6:53The legend in Korea is that Mandu is made with love if it's made by a mother's hands and folded. So we talk about the legend of all the places we've kind of come from. There's obviously a play in the word with the name. And then we got speaking with Ocado towards the end of 2024. And we knew we were due to shoot with Dragon's Den in 2025 in January. And Ocado were great. They took us from idea to listing in three weeks. So we were just into Ocado as we went live on national TV and was seen by over 2 million people. That was my biggest Ocado sales gig yet, but I'm close back up to that now. So last year we worked with Ocado and we're building out farm shops and delis, places like Eats 17.

7:41And then we started obviously, because the pipeline to customers is a long time, so we started to talk to Sainsbury's quite quickly, who got us. And in the background, we were also building our UK manufacturing site in Reading. so we had to build the capacity out first we launched with Sainsbury's on January 1st this year and we've obviously just had a mad week because it's Lunar New Year week and this is like our our Christmas seasons a lot's been going on but we're now in our first national physical retailer which is Sainsbury started in 130 stores Mitch this week we're in 447 so my demand planning forecast spreadsheets have been very much work in progress but it's great to be on that wave and

8:24Mike Hemming:try and stay on it yeah no i love that for sainsbury's were you refreshing sales the next day to be like how did it go what what was the sales like well ubw sainsbury term yeah of course i mean we launched in january we had to price establish um and obviously get our supply chain working and i have to say call out to anybody who works in fresh and chilled i previously haven't i've worked and ambient. I've worked with, you know, shelf life in my store of three months. I now have five days. So it's been manic. Lunar New Year was two days ago. We were lucky enough on Lunar New Year to be in Sainsbury's head office cooking for some Sainsbury colleagues, which was fantastic.

9:00Yeah, uplift wise, we're up 300 % on our base. Obviously, there's a little price promotion going on. We're also doing a lot of activity with Ocado. We're supported on their Lunar New Year pages. So yeah, it's been a pretty busy week.

9:13Mike Hemming:I think it's amazing. And as you said, like the demand planning, we're frozen, so it has its own complications. But obviously the shelf life's a lot longer. Previously, I've worked at La Formagerie, where it was plant based cheese with 21 days. So again, knowing like managing that with Waitrose was always fun. But yeah, five days, it's a different beast. but um i'm sure the word derogate and mlor all kinds of things because talking about the team you know we've now got 17 people helping us in the factory up from three but you know david's involved in the business a couple of days a week sandy's full time uh i've got a great office manager called gemma who does everything um and has to jump on stuff all the time yeah we're still a small team and we're learning all the time i think our biggest challenge last year was actually just building out our factory so we were really clear we wanted to make our dumplings in the UK fresh with quality ingredients so our duck product this is a plug sorry hoisin duck dumpling we use dressingham duck so there's a whole supply chain behind that but yeah the factory was supposed to go live last February it was built it took the electricity board six months to connect us to the electricity grid.

10:23And on the day we moved from Park Royal, where we had been in a kitchen, which we rented to Reading, we were moving all our kit down the M4 and we didn't have an electricity meter. The factory was dark. You know, you can't put kit into a factory that's dark. So luckily, and it's a question of style, isn't it? Sometimes you have to be emotional. Sandy is behind this business. She's been in Reading for 12 months. She's on the phone to whoever the man is who fits the meters who's forgotten to turn up but you're like going please I need my meter I've got to make dumplings tomorrow so yeah it's definitely been a steep learning curve and yeah respect to anyone who works in chilled because it's the windows of time are so different to what I've

11:05Mike Hemming:previously been used to yeah no amazing no I think it's it's a really exciting period and obviously having your own factory is kind of a big moment especially doing it in the UK like you said I think that's really vital and it's something that consumers are definitely looking for like where is my food coming from who's making it and all these things and i think the story you guys have the different legends and things tied into it i think it's such a fun thing and obviously as you mentioned earlier like dragon's den huge moment i think that's how i first discovered like sandy and david and the brand and it was like wow this is really cool um and then i think i saw her at bread and jam um like that year as well i was like oh this is amazing so for you now i'd love to take things right the way back to when you were younger right i could just remember when what was it you thought when I grow up I want to do this like I can't can't imagine like everyone I speak to for me personally it's like I never pictured working food and drink I didn't even know that was a job so for me it was engineering but I realized I was terrible at maths and things so I was like no we're the same I wanted to be an architect and doing my a-levels I realized that maths was not really something that was my strongest point um I my dad was a farmer so So when I was a kid in the summer holidays, Christmas holidays, I worked on the farm or in the pack house.

12:18So I'd always been around food. I'd listened to my dad trying to get deliveries into Sainsbury's depots at three o 'clock in the morning. So I obviously knew retail. I knew I wanted to work in business and I've always been passionate about travel and food. So I went back to university back in 1990. I know you're going to ask me about who I went to and why. I was thinking it was the era of, you know, oasis and blur. no mobile phones and by this point I wasn't going to be an architect I was studying business at Aston University in Birmingham I'd gone to school in Devon so I just wanted a metropolis I wanted something completely different and Aston's very different to Exmoor so I did what I'm encouraging my kid to do now who's also at university going into and into his career you know you've got to play the numbers game I knew I wanted to work in food or retail I'd love to be on either side of the desk.

13:12I've never been a buyer. I'd love to have tried it. I think it's a blooming hard role. But I applied to Sainsbury's. I applied to Unilever. I applied to Procter & Gamble. I applied to some brands that we don't know anymore, like Bass, Leafway. And it was kind of almost like predestined because my grandparents had made Cadbury's chocolate. They were Cadbury pensioners. I'd grown up with my grandparents having a chocolate box at Christmas with all, you know, misshaped roses in it. And my first assessment centre that I went to was Cadbury. I got offered a job and I was delighted to stay in Birmingham and kind of follow in my grandparents' footsteps.

13:53And I remember ringing up my nan and telling her that I'd got a job as a sales rep on this, you know, on the graduate scheme. And I told her I had a Redford Escort. And my nan was like, your management, you've got a car. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to Scotland to sell chocolate in a Redford Escort. But you know, you start somewhere. So yeah, I was lucky enough to start at Cadbury. And I spent 15 years there and had a really enjoyable career. I was lucky to work for some really inspirational people, some great leaders. I learned a lot. I got to travel. I think the most obscure job I had was looking after Tesco, but not in the UK.

14:31So I would travel to Mumbai and Shanghai and Warsaw and meet our Cadbury business units in those markets and help with Tesco JVPs in different languages. So yeah, I really enjoyed my 15 years at Cadbury. I finished my time there as the sales director of Green and Blacks. And that was the first time it piqued my interest in SME because you have a brand developed by Craig Sams. It had been bought by Cadbury, but it was still very much its own family. And you could touch the edges, which was fantastic. and I had two great years working at Green and Blacks. And so the question is, then why did I go to Mars?

15:09Because I was probably scared and still corporate and jumping into SME full-time still felt a little bit alien. So I then did two years at Mars, but I couldn't do Mars chocolate because I'm still a bit purple, still got every dairy milk in the cupboard. So I joined their pet food business, which at the time was bigger than their confectionery business in the world. So people don't know, but Whiskers, Sheba, all those brands are mass pet food businesses i had two years there and then about a decade ago i had the confidence to think i want to help create a business where i can see the decisions i've made touch all the edges uh and i suppose have a legacy and so that was when i pivoted 10 years ago to working in the smu community um and i've worked with white rabbit i've worked with peter's yard and i've now obviously worked with love some dumplings amazing yeah no fantastic i'd

15:59Mike Hemming:love to tuck like right the way back into the Cadbury's days like as a as a young lad with your red lovely yeah it's got to have a name one thing I do want to say is you said your chocolate in the cupboard not the fridge which made me very happy because I'm adamant fridge chocolate is just the devil like it's it needs to be in the cupboard yeah it's interesting because you know you you're gonna ask me about Cadbury in a minute but I am when I was working at Green and Blacks I had to change my taste buds because obviously it was 70 % dark, 85 % dark. There is something nice about that being cold and the snap of it.

16:32Mike Hemming:Yeah. But yeah, if it's really hot, I would probably stick some chocolate in the fridge. No, I'm a fan of 12 and products like that. The one product I don't like is cream egg, but don't go there. Yeah, controversial. Me eggs make up for it. So yeah, I went into Cabrio, did a three-year graduate scheme. I know listening to your younger audiences, they talk about some of their graduate assessment times. So we did three years at Cadbury. We were a great cohort. I'm still in touch with half of them. Some of them have gone on to be MDs of Innocence. One ended up being the MD of Cadbury itself, which is fantastic.

17:06Some are still there. But we joined in as all the functions joined together. And the first week we were there, you did this thing called Chase the Chocolate Box. and for five days i think it was about 18 of us you basically followed the supply chain so you started in a field in herefordshire with the milk you went to chirk where the beans came in from africa went to where they were made into how we make base powder of chocolate and then obviously you go to bournville which is where most of it was was made and you followed one brand so we followed roses and then on day five which is where it was great we got to present back to the Cadbury board and tell them our ideas about how to enhance or improve the product make it more relevant to today's market and also cost wise what we thought we could do so the thing I loved about Cadbury was it was like a family there was only 30 ,000 of us which doesn't sound sounds ridiculous but actually you knew so many people.

18:09And yeah, from day one, we were, or week one, we were presenting to the board about ideas on roses. And then I did 15 years primarily in sales, some marketing, some trade marketing, as it was called in those days. I've worked on most accounts. And then, as I say, I pivoted at the end by having some time at Green and Blacks.

18:27Mike Hemming:Yeah, no, I love it. I think Cadbury's is one of those legacy brands that you look back at the history and how the original founder looked after everyone had the like the villages and all these things and i love the fact that your grandparents were like actually involved in making the chocolate and then you end up working there was there anything in obviously that chase the chocolate box is a great example of like right we're going to get you understanding the supply chain and all the touch points so you can reflect on it and present to us but was there anything that Cadbury's did really well as a business that you kind of still got with you to this day whether it was like okay we do a an all-hands meeting we do this kind of process or anything because i think it's every journey or every business you work and everyone does it slightly different but i feel like being there for that long you must go like oh yeah i really like this i mean i definitely had my corporate bullshit bingo um we did lots of courses um obviously we did lots of stuff around commercial capability we were taught by gap the same people that taught our asda buyers were teaching us in different weeks.

19:24So I think it gave me what I call my NAMM suitcase or my NAMM briefcase. Our data rigor, the way we could understand demand, the way we would build JBPs at the time was quite new. You know, look at hero deals or exclusives with retailers, putting the customer at its heart was quite important. I also think just being the one thing that's for me stood out with Cadbury was it was close to its community. It was values led, You know, it was a great British business and I probably had it at its peak. It made me always want to work in businesses where I would follow the leader over the trenches, if that makes sense.

20:04You know, I was I wanted to be inspired. I was still pretty reverential, I think. And, you know, there was seniority and things like that. But it wasn't a formal, stiff, rigid culture. Everybody was accessible. So I suppose at Cadbury, the key thing I learned was my NAMM playbook. Some of the language followed me to Peter's Yard, which I'll explain in a bit. But even things like how we thought about points of awareness, points of buy, points of consumption, they're silly words I don't use now in an SME environment. But they're still so relevant to think about the consumer journey and the moment of truth and working with your retail partners in order to develop true category growth.

20:42So it was a great place to be. And yeah, I will always be a little bit purple if you cut me in half.

20:47Mike Hemming:And how did that differ to say like Green and Blacks, which came in with this, like we're an amazing dark chocolate proposition. It's all about like that quality, that premiumization. I remember when it first kind of came out and be like, wow, what is this chocolate? Like it's so different to what's out there. Was there any contrast or different ways of working you had to learn with that? Or was it very much like, OK, how can we take that big Cadbury's energy and big Cadbury's business into what you're doing at Green and Blacks to accelerate it even further? Yeah, I think I went in probably as the first Cadbury person into Green and Blacks as opposed to in-house Green and Blacks.

21:21We had our own development kitchen in the building. We would cook chocolate at lunchtime. You were never that close to it commercially in Cadbury. The traceability back to the bean was very, very different. Craig was still on the board, but wasn't involved in the business day to day. We'd had some great people in the business in its inception, like Mark Palmer, who's obviously gone on to do lots and lots of different things. I think the key thing was probably the authenticity of the brand because it was new. And I was lucky enough to meet with Craig two or three times to understand the brand DNA and its point of difference.

21:56And it's very different to Lint. But probably my job was to make the brand a bit more like Cadbury in the back office. Develop a category story, which we called the golden basket. Work with insights and in effect, argue for our shelf space versus Lint. and versus some of the private label and other emergence in that market. I think Green and Black's was one of the first there. Whilst we were there, we also bought out creamy milk. So we took our taste profile down. So we kind of started with very high cocoa content, premium chocolate. But you need to have a recruitment flavor that brings people in.

22:32So we developed those propositions. But yeah, it was, you know, every day you'd be talking to the factory. You would understand what's happening with your bean supply. you might be talking about a category story you might be talking to the team the team was only 15 it was small so it was the first place I think where SMEs just energized me and I think I had become a little bit now all the all the big CPG businesses at this time were starting to have European hubs of innovation and it just took the decisions away from your market and kind of tried to mask them out across multiple markets and it meant that the agility that an SME brand has sometimes the panic the blind panic but you didn't have didn't have that authenticity and it made me want to go back into SME which I then did after my time selling dog food yeah I was I was going to

23:23Mike Hemming:say before we kind of touch on Peter's Yard because I just feel like that brand came out of nowhere and just exploded and it was at the time it's kind of you get Christmas crackers and you're like oh wow what are these ones they're just they were so different again to what was on shelf so we'll definitely unpick that a bit but for mars and the kind of the pet care world yeah what was the was it like day one like wow this is different it was different yeah well you couldn't talk to the consumer because they barked and meowed um it was a massive passion for pets it's the only office environment i've worked in there was 300 people in the office in waltham where you were encouraged to bring your dogs in which if you're in trouble in a meeting was quite useful because you could make a dog do something and it might cause a distraction.

24:05I think the key thing that changed me at Mars was the focus on people management and people leadership. I learned initially through mistakes, but then through kind of changes to be more authentic and more vulnerable. I think I had been made a bit stiff, a bit British in my mind. You didn't necessarily show fear at work, but with my team and with a process that Mars ran where it was like a climate survey they called it engagement and on the same day every year every people leader in the business got a score from their team and the whole business was fascinated by their score and in many ways your bonus was based on whether you're getting better and better and better at being a people leader so I think the authenticity and vulnerability of leading quite a big team at Mars I had over 60 colleagues working with me was a real realisation moment for me.

24:58And the fact it probably made me learn to relax and just listen. You know, I say to myself, sometimes you've got two ears and one mouth, you put a room of sales guys in the room. There's a lot of directors, there's a lot of red energy. And yeah, it definitely made me more reflective as a man manager.

25:14Mike Hemming:No, love that. And then yeah, going through into Peter's yard, like when you joined, this is 2019? Yeah, I kind of started to help the brand in 2016 a little bit. And I formally joined properly in 2019. Peter's Yard's a little bit like Love Some Dumplings because it's taken an idea from overseas to premium a category in the UK. A little bit different because obviously Savory Biscuits exists. So the business was started by Wendy and Ian. And there is a guy called Peter. Peter was importing Swedish knocker bread from Sweden. So Swedish, what we would call crisp bread. And it was in different formats.