Interview: Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne, founder of Genius

Genius, the gluten-free food company, became a runaway success after it was set up in early 2009.

Its first product, Genius bread, flew off the shelves of the 700 Tesco stores where it was initially stocked under an exclusive six-month agreement.

“I don’t think Tesco or any of us were quite prepared for it,” Bruce-Gardyne says. “It would run out on a regular basis so people would find out when it was next being delivered and would queue up. They would take a whole case away with them for their freezer because they were worried they wouldn’t be able to get it again.”

It wasn’t long before the other major supermarket chains were knocking at her door and in October 2009, almost as soon as the exclusivity agreement was up, Waitrose and Asda also got in on the act, shortly followed by Sainsbury’s.

Meanwhile, the founder of Gutino, the biggest gluten-free brand in North America, had spotted the bread in Tesco while he was over in the UK on business and got in touch. A licensing agreement allowing the bread to be manufactured in Canada and distributed both there and in the US was struck earlier this year.

Even though the speed of Genius’ success has taken many by surprise, Bruce-Gardyne is, however, keen to stress that it didn’t all happen overnight. It took four years of – quite literally – sweating over a hot stove before she was in a position to create her own company. “A huge amount of research went into it,” she says. It’s also no fluke that the she ended up running a food company.

Originally from England but married to a Scot, she is a descendant of the family that founded Lyons, the quintessentially British food brand.

After pursuing a degree in physiology, Bruce-Gardyne went into the restaurant trade. She worked as a section chef at the Michelin-starred restaurant, Bibendum, before branching out into food writing. She ran her own catering business for a spell and taught at the renown Leiths School of Food and Wine in London, where she had taken her first cookery course.

It was when she was writing her second book, How to Cook for Food Allergies, that she first grappled with a gluten-free bread recipe.

Her first son, Angus, had been diagnosed with a dairy and egg allergy at just six months old and when it became clear her second son, Robin, was coeliac, family meal times became a struggle.

“Living without bread is really quite difficult because it is eaten throughout the day and it was really impacting my son’s life,” she says. “With bread, it’s very complicated because 50 per cent of the ingredients have to come out of it [to render it gluten free] and then you are left with water and yeast so what on earth do you used instead?” she says.

And so the experimenting began. “I became obsessed with trying to develop a recipe that would be good enough to put into the book because I felt the book wouldn’t be complete without it.”

The other so-called gluten free “bread” on the market was, in her view, “very expensive, dry, crumbly and chemical in flavour”. Even after she had produced a recipe to meet her publisher’s deadline, Bruce-Gardyne wasn’t satisfied and the long hours in her home kitchen continued.

“I knew I could make it better,” she says. “In total I spent 18 months of development in my kitchen on my own and was making about ten or so loaves a day. I managed to break my oven and my Magimix,” she laughs.

When she came up with something she was pleased with, she decided to go along to her local branch of Sainsbury’s in Blackhall where her book on allergy-free cooking was stocked and persuaded one of the buyers to taste her product. Sainsbury’s was impressed and encouraged her to develop it commercially.

Although she’s clearly a shrewd businesswoman, Bruce-Gardyne says that there were certain events in the development of Genius that made her feel it was fate for her to go down this path.

The first was when she was searching for a bakery to make the product. Although she says she still has to travel south of the Border on a fairly frequent basis to find the right people to work with, Sainsbury’s recommended a suitable gluten-free bakery just 40 minutes away in West Lothian.

“I had been looking for a gluten free bakery at the time and it just seemed like fate that there was somewhere just down the road that I could go to.” It was that bakery that later introduced her to the Tesco buyer who signed Genius up.

Another major stroke of luck was when the coeliac father of one of her son’s school friends asked to try the bread. Fortunately for Bruce-Gardyne, that father was the energy tycoon Sir Bill Gammell.

“I didn’t actually know at all who he and his wife were at the time but I knew Bill was coeliac and he kept asking me: ‘How’s the bread?’ When it was ready I dropped some round to his house and very soon they were on the phone saying: ‘You have got something really special here and unless you take it to market properly, someone else will disappear with your idea.’”

The Gammells offered to back Bruce-Gardyne as investors and also introduced her to a number of experts in branding and commercialisation.

Genius, which now has a range of 15 products, has since helped to treble the size of the gluten-free market in the UK as coeliacs have returned to eating items such as cakes and pies that they had long since ruled out. It is stocked in every major supermarket chain and sales in North America are expected to at least match revenues in the UK once the brand is embedded.

Headquartered in Edinburgh’s New Town, the company is currently on a recruitment drive to support Bruce-Gardyne’s growth plans and its workforce of 12 is likely to double over the next 12 months. It is also going through another round of investment with its “very supportive” shareholders.A number of other Genius products are about to hit the market and eventually Bruce-Gardyne hopes to expand into Europe – although she’s keen not to rush the process. She’s all too aware of the dangers that some young companies which grow too rapidly can run into.

“It’s important not to over-stretch so that you’re not really doing anything well anywhere. It’s got to be carefully done.”