Heart and Soul Nuts is a new peanut butter brand that is sweeping the niche market! The UK market for peanut butter is approximately £127 million, with a global value of £2.5 billion. While there are other brands available, what sets them apart is their exclusive formula, which emphasises a healthy lifestyle.
We recently sat down with Heart & Soul Nuts co-founders Asli Gokturk and Adem Garip to hear more about their journey in crafting the peanut butter of their dreams.
A bit of background about the co-founders of Heart & Soul Nuts:
Adem was an Elite Personal trainer who worked in one of the best fitness clubs (LAX Fitness in South Kensington London) for almost 10 years. Adem wanted to share his expertise in fitness and nutrition to help people to reach their health, vitality, complexion and overall well-being goals with the products they produce.
Asli worked as a chef in prestigious restaurants including Gordon Ramsey and The Lanesborough. Asli is a serial entrepreneur and ran her own successful catering company before co-founding Heart and Soul. She focuses on producing unique products with unique recipes by focusing on finding the finest ingredients that the world offers us, as well as great taste.
In a nutshell, what is Heart and Soul Nuts’ mission?
Our mission is to provide people with the healthiest, tastiest and finest ingredients and produce exciting, new and best products without being boring, restrictive nor unhealthy.
How do you differentiate from other nut butter brands?
Heart and Soul peanut butters came out of our home kitchen in Greenwich, London. We’ve developed our peanut butter over the last 10 years with the same ingredients we used for our consumption. We wanted to share this recipe with people to show them how they can create a tasty and healthy meal.
There are two alternatives to peanut butter right now. They are either using peanuts and adding salt, which is boring and often dry. Or they combine peanuts with palm oil and refined sugars which makes it extremely unhealthy.
There’s a misconception that peanut butter can only be healthy if you don’t add anything to it, but that’s not the case with our products.
Can you tell us about the team behind Heart & Soul Nuts?
We are a team of two, highly involved in every process of Heart & Soul Nuts from ingredient sourcing to production and sales. Karen Green has been pivotal in our journey, helping us with sales and consulting on fundraising. Darren Barron has been a key team member helping us find wholesalers for the brand.
What has growth for Heart & Soul Nuts looked like to date?
So far, Heart & Soul Nuts has sold over 20,000 jars in local independent stores without market stands, tasting sessions or a big supermarket backing. This validated our product’s idea and proves that we can do even better when we become a nationally recognised brand stocked in British supermarkets.
We are currently stocked in three major wholesalers, over 100 local organic stores, cafes and delis. Heart and Soul became available on Amazon UK at the end of July 2021. In November 2021, we doubled our sales which gave us a solid start to December.
What has been the biggest learning for the company so far?
We learn new things everyday, especially when you’re new in an industry! Bringing a new product with ingredients foreign to many people is difficult. But at the time, seeing their reactions to our product is positively overwhelming. We have also learned that it’s challenging to produce a high quality and unique product. But it pays off in the end.
What part of Heart & Soul’s journey are you most proud of?
We are very proud of producing a peanut butter that is truly unique in all ways. We wanted to be tasty, exciting and healthy. We set out to produce the best or nothing. When using ingredients familiar to many people, it’s easy and safe – you do not have to explain anything to people because they already know. But being different and trying to prove a point is difficult. We believe when you put your Heart and Soul into something, there is nothing that can stand in your way of success.
What do you have coming up in the future that you’re excited about?
We are at the point of making Heart and Soul a widely recognised brand. We have new products lined up and they will be very different with unique ingredients only used by Heart and Soul.
We will be bringing new nut butter products and some new exciting impulse buying products that are tasty, exciting and the healthiest.
When you’re not working, what do you do in your spare time?
We love going to the gym and training to be a healthy individual. We also enjoy going to the cinema or cooking plant based meals.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs starting out?
Plan well beforehand, be different, trust your ideas and never give up.
“THE PATH YOU CHOOSE SHOULD FEED YOUR HEART AND SOUL”
Heart & Soul Nuts are now on the cusp of wrapping up their funding round. Visit the pitch today if you want to join the 90+ investors who are rooting for their national success.