Going nuts about saving the planet and your good health

PEANUT butter craving while marathon training in 2012 inspired Pip Murray's £15 million-turnover business. "It was my go-to running fuel," she explains. "But nearly all the brands I picked up contained palm oil - one of the biggest [causes] of deforestation globally, as well as being high in saturated fats which aren't that good for you." Twenty-six (and a bit) miles is a long time to ponder peanut butter.

- Lucy Tobin

"I spotted a gap in the market to create a nut butter brand which innovated with new and exciting flavours, that was both good for you and good for the planet by not containing palm oil, and appealed more directly to a younger consumer like me."

A decade on, Murray, 33, has very successfully shoehorned her spread business, Pip & Nut, into that gap in the market. The Spitalfields-headquartered brand now sells 20 products, from nut butters to chocolatey snacks. Yet the entrepreneur entered the food industry without any experience, starting the firm aged 24 while working as a theatre producer at the Science Museum.

Initially the prospect of launching a food business was "pretty daunting," Murray explains. "It was an industry that I knew very little about, and I knew nothing about how products in our supermarkets are actually made."

She started small, preparing batches of maple peanut butter and coconut almond butters in her Finsbury Park kitchen to sell in Bermondsey's Maltby Street Market on weekends. A £10,000 Start Up loan and £5000 from dad ("I've paid him back, with some interest!") covered some kitchen equipment and ingredients. "I made a few hundred pots a week, and each week I would sell out."