‘tiny tummy touch points’ - a portion of fruit and vegetables for children. For Paul the other statistics are secondary, “we can convert the ‘tiny tummy touch points’ into financial numbers and P&L but all our staff, suppliers and customers know that we have one goal; to get 200 million portions of fruit and veg consumed by children in our first 6 years.”


“I wasn’t the suited and booted office type but I also knew that it was a fantastic train- ing and grounding in broader business”


Beyond 2012, Paul is challenging his team to develop new products and explore new markets in order to achieve the 1 billion mark. His ability to think big and globally was influenced by his early years and career before Ella’s Kitchen, growing up in Zambia, a vibrant and diverse country with a strong international and expatriate influence. Going through school and university, Paul confesses to being, ”a bit of a jack of all trades. It was quite difficult to carve out a path when there were so many choices along the way. When I went to university I made the big decision to study pathology because of my love for biology and sciences but in retrospect I chose a very unusual subject because I wanted to be different then…needless to say after a term I realised I was rubbish at that and changed to something I’d never done before: Economics and Politics, which was something I was very interested in so I went with my passion or my experience and I loved the rest of my degree.”


Finishing university in 1989, Paul realised that a recession was coming and that finding a job would be tough so he decided to become a chartered accountant. From the outset he knew, “I wasn’t the suited and booted office type but I also knew that it was a fantastic training and grounding in broader


23 entrepreneurcountry


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