Interview: entrepreneur Andy Murray shares a name with the tennis star, but instead hopes to win new sales with the Edinburgh-based The Drinks Bakery

Appearances on screen on way to scaling artisanal Scottish biscuit producer.

Entrepreneur Andy Murray was once an extra on the Hollywood film Vertical Limit, which involved being on a New Zealand mountain “pretty much every day for about three months… it was great fun”. His role saw him sporting a bright yellow jacket (“you can’t miss me,” he laughs) that he explains is the same colour as the packaging of one of his firm The Drinks Bakery’s four types of savoury biscuits – Lancashire cheese and spring onion to be precise – crafted to accompany a drink.

And now, the business that is based in Edinburgh’s Leith is toasting its range, which it calls Drinks Biscuits, being signed up to feature on the shelves of all Whole Foods Market stores in the UK. “It's always nice to get the products into a retailer that you've had your eye on for a while,” says Murray, who holds the title of “chief biscuiteer”. Each of the quartet of products is made with a different kind of artisan cheese to complement certain types of beverage, the Lancashire cheese one, for example, designed to match, say, Speyside whisky or bitter beers and IPAs.

US-based chain Whole Foods (whose seven UK branches are all located in London, having shuttered its sole Scottish operation, in Giffnock, in 2017) in inking the deal joins existing high-end stockists of the biscuit firm, such as Waitrose, Selfridges, Liberty, and hotel Claridge’s, while passengers in first class on Eurostar and business class on transatlantic Aer Lingus flights can also tuck into its wares.

'We’re looking to launch another flavour this year… It's something I've been thinking about for a long time,' says Murray, pictured with his existing product range. Picture: contributed.

What’s more, Murray has notched up a key role on the small as well as the big screen, with a landmark appearance on Dragons’ Den in 2018 that saw Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones both snap up a share of the business. Jones has now in fact said: “The Drinks Bakery is one of the best brands I’ve ever seen in the Den, and Whole Foods Market is yet another ideal pairing for Andy’s delicious Drinks Biscuits.”

The Drinks Bakery was also garlanded with a Gold Award at the Great British Food Awards 2023 by legendary chef Raymond Blanc. “That's cool because he's a bit of a hero of mine,” says Murray of the accolade. His artisanal operation is one cog in the machine aiming to double Scottish food and drink’s contribution to the economy to £30 billion by 2030, while the sector is credited with being one of Scotland’s largest global exports, worth £8.1bn a year to the economy.

The Drinks Bakery showcased its wares to international audiences recently at Showcasing Scotland, billed as the largest global food and drink trade show north of the Border, which took place last month. Organisers said it generated a potential £77 million in sales globally.

However, Murray has also been boosting his air miles balance travelling to overseas trade shows, including Hamburg and Las Vegas, and set to appear this summer in New York. And transatlantic growth is in fact very much in his sights, something he hopes the deal with Texas-headquartered Whole Foods will accelerate.

The firm's Lancashire cheese and spring onion offering, which it says also pairs with certain white wines. Picture: contributed.

Other key existing export markets include Europe (with Sweden earmarked as an important territory) and the United Arab Emirates, with product descriptions altered to not reference alcohol, while Murray is also keen to grow in Japan, where it already has a small presence. However, “we've got loads more friends to make in the UK, definitely”.

The Drinks Bakery is riding trends including a premiumisation of snacks, steering away from a market where established products can taste bland and sawdust-like, or be highly salty and/or spicy. Murray set out to create something “a little bit more premium and more thoughtful” than the usual crisps and nuts, which saw him seek out cheeses that keep their flavour after baking, adding ingredients such as rosemary to “balance out the palette” with different drinks.

However, the business (which has smashed through the £1m turnover barrier) has not been without its hurdles. He is frank about the relentlessness that is part and parcel of being an entrepreneur, entailing a lot of knock-backs on the way to achievements. There are also the “huge” jumps in the cost of the firm’s raw ingredients, while the UK's Food and Drink Federation earlier this year called for more state support for the sector, saying critical investment over the 12 months to the third quarter of 2023 was down a third from the same period in 2019.

However, Murray says that while consumers’ purse strings are tight, they are prepared to shell out a little extra for an affordable luxury. “I think it's still a really important category and a really important product to have on the shelf,” he says of his company’s offering. “There are a lot of healthy products coming in, and it’s great to have loads of choice. But it's really important that people also reward themselves,” he says with a laugh.

Additionally, the entrepreneur says the firm, which only has four staff, established and settled on its four existing flavours relatively quickly after its debut in 2016, but quickly expanded its retail and geographic presence. The range now looks set to expand. “We’re looking to launch another flavour this year… It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. There's nothing that’s ever been put out in the market like it,” he says of the secret new offering. It is also currently working on a tie-up with a Scottish bakery on a new product that also will pair with a drink but will sit outside the Drinks Biscuits category, and under the broader The Drinks Bakery brand.

That said, Murray stresses that while new products and listings provide a buzz, “we all the time need to be thinking about planning for sustainable growth, and sustainable presence, and sustainable turnover – that's what we need to focus on”.