I ditched medical school to sell olives and built a £3.8M a year business - meet the Olly's founder trying to make snacking healthier

Olly Hiscocks started marinating his own olives in 2016, a few months before he hoped to start a postgraduate medical degree.Neither he nor his parents, who kindly lent him their garden to experiment, thought it would grow beyond selling sandwich bags of the stone fruit to friends.But after two years of spending his weekends at a West London farmers’ market while working at a GP surgery during the week, Hiscocks had an ‘awkward conversation’ with his parents.‘I said I don’t think I’m going to do medicine. I want to try and sell olives,’ he says.‘They thought the olives were a side thing until the medicine came through… but they didn’t question it much further than they needed to.’The 34-year-old’s foresight in predicting the rise of healthy ‘picky bits’ means he expects to turn over £3.8million this year, with an eye on profitability within the next 12 months.The first seeds of the business that became Olly’s were sown in the months after Hiscocks finished his neuroscience degree at the University of Manchester.‘My name’s Olly, I love olives. Plain and simply, I went to the local supermarket and looked at the olive fixtures. There was no colour, no character, no innovation at all.’ Olly Hiscocks cancelled his medical degree to focus on his business, Olly'sThe next morning, he bought a bucketload of plain olives from local markets and started to marinate them at home - ‘I’m not sure the environmental health officers would have approved,’ he says with a smile.But he couldn’t keep making up pots at his parents’, and a stroke of luck saw family friends, who worked in the frozen pizza dough business, offer him space at their factory. He drove his product to ‘pubs, hotels, anyone that could do food service.’Food safety and shelf life had largely passed Hiscocks by, though. ‘We had pots blowing up in delis and olives going off a lot quicker than I thought they would. I didn’t really know what I was doing.’The time driving around London without gaining much traction was ‘part of the journey that a lot of people who set up businesses don’t realise. There’s the loneliness and also the comparison,’ he says.‘I was two years in and I thought I could have been two years into medical school by now, and I’m just driving around in a Volkswagen Polo with bags of olives blowing up.’He stepped back from the business for three months, but he couldn’t stop thinking about olives, ‘which made me realise how much I believed in the concept of it.’Hiscocks’ ‘love of product’, which he attributes to his father who worked in advertising, started at a young age. That saw his university years spent coming up with startup ideas, including ‘very painfully’ a reselling platform before Vinted and Depop took off.He was early to the party again with Olly’s, finding a supplier just as demand for healthier, on-the-go snacks rocketed. A £50,000 investment from the Startup Funding Club paid for the first order and by the end of 2018, Olly’s had secured a listing with Eurostar and Sainsbury’s for his unpasteurised olive pouches, priced at £1.25.Hiscocks cancelled his medical degree.Now stocked in 10,000 locations across 20 countries, Olly’s has sold 3.5m pouches in five years and grown into a wider snacks business.‘I don’t think it was necessarily the performance that kept us in supermarkets; it was the fact it was such a different product,’ he says.No longer content with just olives, Hiscocks briefly flirted with a nuts range just as the pandemic hit, but it was a trip to the US with his now-wife that inspired the move into pretzels in 2021. It’s had ‘tonnes of success’ with the range ‘really bedded in as a great snacking option’. Olly's products are now stocked in 10,000 locations across 20 countriesPretzels now makes up half of the group’s revenue after a push into workplace snacking, now a core market, and listings across supermarkets - although Olly’s is yet to crack the meal deal.This year, the business hopes its £4 chilled olive pots will boost sales, with Hiscocks also eyeing a potential launch of platters and dips.‘We know how underrepresented snacking is with things that taste good. If you want your food product to sell and sell again it needs to taste good. We’re focused on health and flavour.’While Olly’s is not yet profitable, Hiscocks is confident it will hit the crucial milestone in 2027, though some things are out of his control. The business is already facing price increases across the board, while forest fires could wreak havoc on the olive harvest, and any further increase in the price of olive oil will see growers pivot, he says.For now, his biggest challenge will be getting consumers to shell out for his snacks as supermarkets ramp up cheaper own-brand alternatives. After a ‘phenomenal’ summer, Hiscocks says he’s up for the fight.DIY INVESTING PLATFORMSAJ BellAJ BellEasy investing and ready-made portfoliosHargreaves LansdownHargreaves LansdownFree fund dealing and investment ideasinteractive investorinteractive investorFlat-fee investing from £4.99 per monthFreetradeFreetradeInvesting Isa now free on basic planTrading 212Trading 212Free share dealing and no account feeAffiliate links: If you take out a product This is Money may earn a commission. These deals are chosen by our editorial team, as we think they are worth highlighting. 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