Chocolate duo ready to taste sweet success
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THEY were savaged in Dragons' Den and ridiculed for trying to run a business from the remotest north westerly village on mainland Britain – branded by the tycoons as a place for "hippies".
But now Paul Maden and James Findlay of Cocoa Mountain are making the dragons eat their words – or rather drink them.
The entrepreneurs are on course to become millionaires by launching a hot chocolate drink the Dragons rejected.
They already have landed major export orders from Japan, Portugal, Singapore and Norway, and are in "encouraging" talks with supermarkets and coffee shop chains.
The pair expect to be turning over £5 million in less than five years after they launched Cocoa Mountain The Best Hot Chocolate in January from a brand new purpose built factory.
Mr Findlay and Mr Maden did not manage to secure the £80,000 investment for a 15 per cent stake on Dragons' Den when they appeared on the show in August 2015.
And to add insult to injury, the Dragons variously described Durness – where Cocoa Mountain is based – as a "diabolical" place to do business and where "hippies" dropped out.
However after Mr Findlay and Mr Maden appeared on the show they were approached by more than 80 potential investors.
"It got to the stage where I based myself down at Heathrow for three days interviewing them, one by one," said Mr Maden.
"One guy wanted to give us £100,000-a-year just to use the Cocoa Mountain name.
"But in the end we decided to do things ourselves – none of the investors were going to share our passion for the product or add value to it."
So the pair have raised £130,000 to launch the hot chocolate from a new factory in Perth and are already tasting sweet success.
"The Dragons were right about one thing – the location of the factory. We needed to be more central, including having access to a pool of staff. In Durness there's only a few hundred people in total after all," said Mr Maden.
"But it's nice that we have proved them wrong – though there were plenty of times I wanted to give up. I struck on the recipe 12 years ago – it just has taken all this time to commercialise it. It's been a struggle. But we hope to be millionaires from it.
"I'm going to send the dragons a tin to show them they got another one wrong.
"We will continue to keep our outlets at Durness and Dornoch – our home will always be in the Highlands."
