The Story

I've always been a fatty, I love food and my life revolves around it. When I'm not cooking at work or at home, I'm watching food shows, I'm collecting and reading endless cook books, listening to podcasts about it, talking to other foodies, writing and sharing recipes and salivating over ideas for the business.

 

I also love branding stuff, although I have limited technical skills in design. All i know is that I love skulls, matte black and white dots on everything.

 

Tubby Tom's is the perfect combination of all of my passions. I spend all day working with amazing food, creating sauces and seasonings and selling them to awesome, like-minded people.

 

It all started with a single batch of BBQ sauce i'd made in the summer of 2014. My friends loved it and joked about how I should sell it and brand it as 'Tubby Tom's'. I thought it was pretty funny and it seemed like a great idea, so I made some more, drew up some sketchy labels and took it down to our local farm shop. 

Surprisingly it started selling really well, so well that the local council heard about it and got in touch to highlight that our sauce labels needed to adhere to criteria to be sold to the public. That was the moment I decided to give it a go and take it a bit more seriously: this was the first step into becoming an actual business. 

That summer I roped my friends & family to help me with a catering gig for Barn on the Farm festival. I had to cater for all of the bands and staff as well as serve my own 'Tubby Tom's Chicken, Chips & BBQ sauce' to the public. We made lots of curries and lots of BBQ chicken. I even got some shirts printed for the crew and branded everything ' tubby tom's'.  It makes me laugh to think about it now, we had THE BEST time and my crew were amazing. I remember having most of my crew and three italian blokes from the pizza stall stay at our tiny cottage on the farm, the sofas were full and we had camp beds and mattresses on the floor for everyone with one tiny broken toilet to use between us. good mems.

Looking back I probably bit off more than I could chew with the larger catering gigs, we smashed it hard but I was ready to learn more about the food industry.

 

The little jars of BBQ sauce were selling away nicely at the farm shop, I'd recently got married to the love of my life and when the opportunity came along to get some chef training in Cardiff I decided to take it and we moved away. 

After 9 months of dough making, pot washing and lots of corn starch we decided to move back to Gloucester. We found a little flat to rent and I'd got a job making and then selling jam in a local jam factory in Stroud (Kitchen Garden). The guys there were awesome, I stayed for 2 years, learned loads and they kindly let me use their huge jam pans on the weekends to make my sauces. 

 

The weekends I didn't spend cooking the sauce, i'd be out at farmers markets selling it. My friends and family often got roped in (common theme here) to help me do the big cooks. They also helped me with the market stalls sometimes too, they're the best. Thanks guys, couldn't have done it with out you.

In the meantime, the sauce sales were building. In the evenings I would contact more and more shops and restaurants. We got listed in Harvey Nichols, I nearly died with excitement. I remember the day the buyer said she'd take an order and I welled up, nearly cried! I nearly cried again when I saw it on the shelves in the flesh, was so awesome. 

This was a great achievement for Tubby's and gave us exposure across the country. 

It got to the stage where I was starting to burn out, I couldn't juggle the running of the business with working full time anymore and it just kept getting busier so I decided to bite the bullet and quit my day job. 

Unfortunately this meant I could no longer rent the big production kitchen from my employers so I had to move all production back to my little flat. 

It was crazy, I had all of my spices, ingredients and bottles in the spare room and lounge of the flat. All of the boxes (three pallets worth) were crammed in our bedroom (and in my mates loft), piled floor to ceiling either side and at the foot of the bed. It was insane, the flat stank of spices too, luckily my neighbours were chill..

My mate Hetty makes incredible brownies. She'd started renting a kitchen in a local industrial estate and kindly said I could rent and use the space when she wasn't in there. This worked really well for us and enabled me to make larger batches again and store more ingredients. My mum had also recently quit her job, so was on hand to help out more regularly.

We eventually found our own unit, it was perfect timing as we were getting even busier and were struggling to make enough sauce even with mums help. In 2018 we moved in and built a production kitchen from scratch. We lay the flooring, built the walls and structure, plastic cladded everything and built our own mezzanine. My dad did the plumbing, my mates did the electrics and helped with all aspects of the build and my mum is just awesome at DIY and smashed it out with me. We finally had our very own hot sauce temple, where we could cook for as long as we needed and store all of the ingredients we needed.

Having our own space was life changing, it enabled us to run the business properly. I could pay myself and now pay my mum for all her help. She's now employed full time by the business and we've managed to pay back the money we borrowed which is awesome.

 

In 2020 our world turned upside down! I'd had a baby in the January & then in March, Covid struck the entire world and it threw us into a terrifying state of uncertainty. 

At first the sales completely dropped, people were much more focussed on trying to stay alive rather than securing their hot sauce fix. Then all of our catering customers closed and stopped ordering, including most of the restaurants, street food trucks, cafes etc. This was really scary as we still had rent to pay on our unit, rent to pay on my flat and I'd only just started paying mum properly for all her work. 

All of a sudden the independent store that we supplied started getting busier, we sure a huge rise in wholesale orders for shops. We also saw a phenomenal increase in online orders - it happened all of a sudden, one day we were packing a few 'overnighters' a day, the next day we were packing 50! Then it even got to a point where we were packing hundreds of orders! We couldn't believe it. 

The whole world was scary, so I locked myself away at the unit and continued to post online. We kept in touch with everyone and it was awesome to have a support network.

It got to a point where we needed help, and two of my best buddies were available to help. That's when we employed Robb and Fraser. 

 

It was a lot of fun, also pretty dangerous as all three of us loved to mess around. We always made sure the orders were done but there was a lot of towel whipping, pranking, bullying and general ruckus. 

We were constantly chasing our tails, cooking and packing endlessly. We held some markets once the world started to open up again and we were blown away with how many people turned up to support it! It was a particular Christmas one in 2020 and we got absolutely ransacked! We couldn't believe how much money we took that day but we needed it, it was a great cash injection that helped us get more cooking equipment and bulk buy ingredients while we could get them!

Sadly Robb left the Tubby crew to pursue a career as an Electrician, I always tell people I fired him. We really missed having him as part of the team, but we did keep Fraser. Fraser took a lot of rigorous training to get him to the sauce master he is today, but ya know, I think of it as good karma for me to give him such an honourable position here.

 

Emma is the partner of a friend and long time associate of ours Sam Piper. She joined the team once Robb had gone and absolutely smashed it and continues to boss it with her northern toughness. 

We also employed our buddy Dan Williams, the sound engineer from deepest darkest Wales. He came down to help with everything - from packing boxes to making dusts! We were sad to see him go, we had a lot of fun, but at the same time it was awesome to see him go back to his career in live music. 

We kept getting busier and busier and ended up needing to take on more staff, we employed Tori and then her husband Ant shortly after. Tori is a part of the kitchen crew and Ant is responsible for all of the packing of all of your amazing orders!

In 2023 we ended up moving across the business park to a unit that was quadruple the size and began the process of building the kitchen from scratch.. again. It was great but also a pain in the buttocks because it was the summer and we were super super busy.

We invested in a HUGE extractor fan which is way more expensive than anyone could imagine (20k!!!!) but this allowed us to slot 5 of our stock pots underneath and have them cooking all at the same time. 

With our expanded capacity we were able to take on more projects, some of those being white label producing for other brands and businesses. We've invested in our awesome team and kitchen so we have the ability to produce own-recipe sauces and dusts for restaurants - they get to have handmade products in their kitchens without the hassle of getting their (already super busy) chefs to make them all the time.

This has been mega for us as we now make for some large brands, infusing our passion for heavy flavour and quality but producing tonnnnnnes of it. Works well! 

2024 marked 10 years of Tubby Tom's which was incredible considering I never set out to have a business, it was an expensive hobby that sort of got out of control haha.

We marked the occasion by hosting TUBBY FEST! Which was a celebration of all things Tubby's along with a load of our friends that we've made a long the way. We had old friends like Hettys Kitchen and Woozy Pig, trading alongside Yeti and Dixxon. We hosted a BBQ competition with teams competing from all over the world, they flew in with all their kit and cooked up a storm.

I was so humbled and lucky to be surrounded by all my friends and family, they were all happy to get knee deep, helping host this mega thing and it was so so so awesome. 

Luckily, despite the shit weather it went down a storm (pun intended) and when we released tickets we sold 1000 almost instantly. My landlords caught wind and were not happy, so I capped the tickets and ended up having over a thousand people on the waiting list ahha!! it was incredible!!!

That summer we had a number of massive things that boosted us through the year on top of Tubby Fest.

We did our first ever collab with Honest Burgers, the nationwide burger restaurant where they championed two of our products in a month-long special. I had no idea what sort of quantities they would need but it transpired they needed literal tonnes of sauce. I mean like 20 batches of sauce and 20 batches of dust. Back to back. We were pooped. But seeing it roll out across the country was a fucking trip!!! So so cool. Thanks Adam for taking a chance on us for it.

I got a DM on instagram from someone that said they were from Channel 4. They asked if I was up for going on Sunday Brunch, apparently the producer was a fan of our gear. I was sceptical, we get tonnes of crazy messages online and you never know whats real or scammy these days! Anyway, we had a zoom call and it was LEGIT! I couldn't believe it.

Probably the most nerve wracking time of my life but luckily I had Han and Shane there to hold my hand and we smashed it! I survived 8 minutes of live telly without saying anything too stupid. We did eat so much spicy food and drank so many spicy drinks at Black Axe Mangal the night before so that didn't help my delicate disposition the morning of the show. 

The show runner asked to take my phone while I was on air, she said she could take a few piccies etc for me. When my 8 minutes was up she came over to me and said 'you might wanna take a look at this' which gave me a cold sweat as I tried to remember if i'd said something illegal on air. In fact she meant that my phone was blowing up - the vibrations from every single new order coming thru the website were constant, I guess it's what being tasered would feel like. 

As we walked out of the TV studio I was an emotional wreck, we'd made 500 orders on the site in that 8 minutes. That's more orders than we'd had that whole month, condensed into such a short space of time and it wasn't showing any signs of slowing down.

We hopped in the taxi and I emotionally spoke to my team back home. They said 'Don't worry mate, we saw the whole thing and you smashed it. We saw the orders come in and we've high tailed it the unit to start cooking and packing' because for some reason I hadn't banked on us having this many orders coming in and therefore didn't prepare anywhere near enough stock LOL!!!! 

The following week and a half was spent frantically cooking and packing, endlessly, with the help of all the friends and family I could wrangle. Many sick days were called in so that people could help us. Thank you so much for that.

Once the dust settled we had a chance to look at the numbers and we'd made enough wonga to actually extend our production kitchen further. We decided to build a completely separate kitchen for our dust making. This time we didn't have to build it ourselves. No more white rocking, no more lino laying. We paid actual professionals to come and slam it in and that they did. We really cherish that kitchen, still to this day. It's just so damn nice!!!!

That summer was jam packed with BBQ Courses, something i'd started the year before with my good pal Shane. We would invite people down (usually 30 at a time) and show them how to cook awesome bbq food. With the help of our trusty BBQ team Dan Peattie, Tom, PJ and Alex. Those courses are basically a good excuse for us to buy really expensive, top quality meat and cook and eat it, all while chugging beer and slamming tunes on super loud. So much fun and we've met so many awesome people in the process.

I had another email from the Sunday Brunch team, apparently my little slot was a hit! They'd like me to come back but this time, they wanted me to COOK LIVE.

Same old story, super nerve wracking. I couldn't function properly for the month or so before the show LOL. But i'd hoped that by pushing myself to do it again we might be able to afford something else that would help us in the business.

The show was mental. It was behind schedule so just before we went live a show runner had a word with me 'you'll need to be quick ok? we're running behind so make it snappy'. We went live and I did my usual babbling, but quickly remembered I actually had to cook some shit! I ended up trying to squeeze my words in, with show runners in the background signalling to wrap it up. But I really wanted to show off my mayo mixing lol. I carried on and mixed some pablo in my mayo in order to drizzle over the finished tacos. 

Unfortunately the nozzle of the bottle was not equipped for some chunky pablo sauce, so what actually happened was I drenched the whole plate, the whole side, the floor and a large part of the studio in delicious green mayonnaise. I was red in the face, out of breath and not really sure what had just happened. I came off air thinking 'i've completely fucked this'. Luckily the audience (and film crew) found it hilarious and we still made some big wonga thru the website.

Besides some amazing trolling comments from sharons and nigels on facebook comments it was a success and we managed to buy a huge 300kg spice tumbler to help us make more dusts. To put it in perspective we were used to mixing dusts in huge horsefeed buckets, 50 kilos at a time. Some of our customers that ordered bulk dusts would order 200kg at a time, that's four batches hand mixed in a horse feed bucket. Hurts ya back. 

This new machine was so awesome and has actually (and i HATE to say this) given us a better mixed end product. The rubs are more vibrant and really nicely balanced now that the ribbon blender works it's magic. So again. thanks to Sunday Brunch and to all the viewers that slammed the orders through!

I've got so much more to say, but so little time to write it all. I'll update this when I can. 

As for right now, we're in the arse end of 2025 and we've done so much cool stuff this year. We're just about to launch this years Festive Bundle which contains 5 brand new products which we had so much fun making. 

This week I did a workshop with aspiring start-up businesses in Gloucester, it was awesome to show and tell how we've navigated the business world in the last 11 years and to show that you don't have to be a cut throat weirdo suit to make an awesome business. We might not make tonnes of profit but we have an incredible team, we love what we do and we're so proud of the products we make. All we want is to show that to the world.

Please keep slamming us with orders, keep sharing ur hauls and home cooks on socials and keep recommending us to ur mates, it means so much.

Thank you x

 

 

 

 

Watch this space!