Aneisha Soobroyen and her husband, Jack Walker, were at Crufts in March 2020 when an email from a Sainsbury’s buyer landed telling them they were going to stock the pair’s Scrumbles pet food in 100 stores.
Having anticipated it being “yet another rejection”, the pair were ecstatic — but their joy was short-lived; less than two weeks later, Britain was plunged into lockdown, and by the time their pet food hit the shelves, non-essential contact and travel were banned.
“Normally when you get a new listing, you want to tell everybody to run into stores and buy it,” said Soobroyen, now 36. “But we couldn’t. So it was a weird moment and frankly we didn’t know if we’d be able to make it work, because,