Candy Kittens: From sweet brand to snack powerhouse

Candy Kittens is a brand that was born – and has bloomed - on social media. Co-founders Jamie Laing and Ed Sweet-Williams leveraged the power of social media to directly engage with customers and turn their love for confectionery into a nationally recognised brand within a decade.

In early 2026, Candy Kittens announced the acquisition of Graze, a deal that will make the company a key player in the healthier snack market. And this is only the beginning of its ambitious growth plans.

To turn these aspirations into reality Candy Kittens needed a banking partner that could not only support the acquisition but also provide the strategies and solutions to help the business scale at pace and realise its growth ambitions.

Unwrapping Candy Kittens

When Ed and Jamie started Candy Kittens in 2012, they were entering a category they hadn’t operated in before, so approached it with a fresh perspective. “We wanted to disrupt the incumbents in the sweets category, but we were honest enough to say, this is new to us. How do you do this?” explains Ed.

This belief in doing things differently saw them pitch to a high-end department store. To their surprise, the retailer agreed to take 75,000 units of each of the brand’s four initial flavours, giving Candy Kittens the funds to put its first batch into production.

Other specialist retailers followed, but the key moment came when a major British supermarket signed a deal with the business. Securing a national supermarket was when Ed and Jamie realised they had built a business with a future. It also presented a logistical challenge: the supermarket required multiple smaller deliveries across the country every week, which meant ensuring the business had the necessary operational and cashflow capabilities in place.

Candy Kittens received a further boost in 2019, when German confectioner Katjes Group acquired a majority stake in the business. With Katjes’ backing and production capabilities, Ed and Jamie could focus on growing the brand and beyond. “I think, like lots of entrepreneurs, we desperately want to hit that next thing. The UK is a strong consumer goods market. There is so much headroom and so much to go after,” says Ed.

At the heart of Ed and Jamie’s growth strategy is understanding the power of brands and the ability to grow them through social media and digital communities. Through their subsidiary, Tuckshop, they help creators become product founders. The success of Niko Omilana’s Shades by Niko sweets highlights how effective this approach can be.

Financing a transformational opportunity

In 2025, a significant growth opportunity arose when B-Corp brand Graze became available to buy. Ed and Jamie recognised the strength of the brand and viewed it as a truly transformational acquisition. However, completing the deal required the right funding to be in place.

David Sitch is a Relationship Director in the food and beverage sector for HSBC UK in the Southeast. He’s worked alongside Candy Kittens since the Graze purchase. To fund the acquisition, David’s team provided a Revolving Credit Facility and a working capital facility.

Importantly, David understood the need to look beyond the initial facility and help put
structures and solutions in place to support Candy Kittens’ wider ambitions.

Structuring the business for seamless success

To keep pace with Ed and Jamie’s ambitions, David’s team put together a package of financing solutions - from trade finance to invoice finance - that can support the business end-to-end. This gives it the flexibility to take advantage of emerging opportunities as they arise.

“A lot of our business is UK grocery, but given challenges within the sector, bills often aren’t paid quickly. That can mean you have to bridge quite long, sometimes up to 90 days, between delivering a product and getting paid. When you're growing as quickly as we are, those are big numbers to try and wrestle with, so HSBC UK have helped us with that,” says Ed.

With the right working capital solutions supporting its rapid growth, Ed and Jamie can keep their eyes firmly fixed on the horizon.

“We want to keep building, building, building, and we truly believe we can become a key player in the UK food industry,” reveals Jamie. “Acquisition is a great way to supercharge growth; taking the lessons we’ve learnt from building brands and applying them to brands with strong foundations and further protentional.”

For David, that’s ideal. “The best client is someone who wants to keep growing. It’s brilliant to work with a company that ambitious.”

Ed and Jamie’s tips for brand growth:

1. Use your inexperience as an advantage
   To begin with, our lack of industry experience didn’t hold us back. Stay curious, ask questions, and challenge how things are usually done.
2. Build your brand through direct customer connection Consider whether social media, or another form of direct engagement, can connect you to customers early on and help build a strong brand community to support you as you grow.
3. Be bold about growth opportunities
   From the start, our strategy was always to be bold, from landing major retailers to acquiring Graze. Look at which moves could accelerate your growth, rather than what’s the easiest next move.
4. Put the right financial and operational support in place
   Be mindful that rapid growth can create pressure on cash flow, delivery, and scale. Having the right banking partner, support and funding structure can help you be agile and help with your business growth.

See how other businesses are using financing to support their ambitions in our HSBC Financing for Growth report.