From Vegan Cafe to Nationwide Demand with Plantside's Anna Gorman

Anna Gorman never set out to start a food manufacturing business. After 20 years in hospitality, she opened a vegan café - two weeks before the first lockdown. However, it would lead her to create a product that Vegans simply love and many thought was impossible to get right.

With time on her hands, she decided to crack something notoriously difficult: vegan Yorkshire puddings. Seven weeks of trial and error later, she opened the oven to find they'd finally worked. What started as a menu item for her 30-seat café became a nationally distributed product when customers began asking to take them home, then emailing from around the country to request postal deliveries.

In this episode, Anna shares how she built Plantside with no business plan, no formal consumer testing, and no marketing - just experience, passion and a product people genuinely craved.

What we cover:

• Why Anna chose "plant-based" over "vegan" on the packaging
• How she established collab with THIS sausages
• The challenge of convincing non-vegan chefs to stock a product their vegan customers are desperate for
• The moment she nearly quit - and the stranger whose kindness changed everything
• Scaling a handmade product
• The ethical tension between supermarket opportunities and supporting the independents who backed her first

Key timestamps:

• 01:02 — Plant Side's mission: spreading joy and happiness through food
• 02:48 — Opening a café two weeks before lockdown
• 03:23 — Seven weeks of failed Yorkshire pudding recipes
• 04:43 — "We accidentally created a whole business with no business plan"
• 05:39 — The THIS sausages collaboration for Toad in the Hole
• 09:25 — Why "vegan" makes people shut down but "plant-based" doesn't
• 10:47 — "You can't take the word of a six-year-old" — on consumer testing
• 17:51 — The hardest part: getting non-vegans to understand vegan demand
• 20:05 — The eureka moment opening the oven
• 21:28 — Feeling out of her depth at a packaging trade show
• 22:42 — "I would have quit" — the stranger who changed everything
• 24:02 — The supermarket dilemma: growth vs ethics

Where to find Plant Side:

Website: https://plantside.co/

Online stockists:

• Mighty Plants: https://mightyplants.com/collections/vendors?q=Plantside
• Jennings Pantry: https://jenningsplantry.co.uk/collections/vendors?q=Plantside
• Kiuki (formerly TheVeganKind): https://kiuki.com/o/plantside

In-store: Find Plantside products in independent vegan shops and health food stores nationwide

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My name is Jo Densley, and I help food and drink businesses grow with joined-up sales and marketing. There’s a wealth of free webinars available on my website, where you can also explore my services and read my case studies as well.