A new range of air dried snacks from Nim’s Fruit & Veg Crisps are set to launch this year after its founding entrepreanur secured the largest ever raise on a new Tesco-backed crowdfunding platform.
Entrepreneur Nimisha Raja has ambitious plans to see Nim’s Fruit & Veg Crisps for children rolled out across high street retailers and more than 5,000 schools in the UK after more than 70 backers helped her achieve £22,761 of pledges through Tesco’s BackIt campaign.
The funding will reportedly be put to immediate use, helping to finalise specialist children packaging, secure attendance at a string of consumer and trade shows, and kick-start a high profile marketing campaign.
Some of it will also be directed into employing a part-time sales person, who will be responsible for liaising with potential stockists and pushing the first four varieties of apple, carrot, courgette and pear.
Nimisha Raja explained: “When we set the £20,000 target we knew it was ambitious compared to previous raises on the platform, but we also recognised it was the level of support we needed to give our ‘Kids Range’ the launch it required.
“To actually surpass what we needed shows the appetite in this country for healthier snacks and ones that parents feel happy to give their children, knowing they taste great, look good and offer lots of vitamins.”
Founded in 2014, Nim’s Fruit and Veg Crisps – which are fat, gluten and dairy free – are manufactured at its bespoke BRC-accredited facility in Sittingbourne (Kent) where it’s capable of producing more than 12 million packs of crisps a year.
According to Raja, the initial Nim’s Kids range of two fruit and two vegetable options has been developed with children’s taste buds in mind to introduce them to the concept and natural taste of air dried crisps, with more adventurous varieties planned over the coming months.
Raja continued: “Each pack is licensed by the Department of Health as being ‘1 of your 5 a day’, with one item on the ingredients list…it doesn’t get much simpler than that.
“I’m currently locked in discussion with a major retailer about launching multi-packs of Nim’s and with a distributor who can get our products into 5,000 schools. That would be a very strong start towards our projections of producing between 300,000 and 500,000 children packs in 2017.”
New business manager at Tesco ‘BackIt’, Katie Hewitt said: “This is our largest ever raise on ‘BackIt’ and proves that the platform is doing exactly what it was set up to do…to get fantastic independent producers out there in front of a captive audience.”
