Home Flow is the bagging machine for home bakers and small businesses wanting to expand and grow their business.
To discover more, follow my journey below:
- Late 2017: Looking for a home based business to start so I could stay at home with my baby daughter, I identified a gap in the market for locally branded, shortbread biscuits. I outsourced production, secured outlets to trial the biscuits and designed the packaging.
- Start of April 2018: On the day of launch I met with my outsourcing partner who told me they were shelving their biscuit line for a bigger client order. (They subsequently launched a new line of biscuits).
- Also April 2018: Got a job in an aircraft seat factory as an admin doing compliance paperwork, which included driving around their five sites. I Googled the top selling flavours in the world and made iced biscuits at home in the evenings using those flavours (because I knew they would sell). Got renamed “Biscuit Mike” in work.
- 2020: Covid reduced the workforce of the factory so I used my redundancy plus a loan to open a mini biscuit factory in a disused bakery unit attached to a café. The biscuits were great but the packaging was dreadful, especially as they were being sold to gift shops for tourists, but the top selling flavours (mostly alcohol flavours) sold well.
- Christmas 2020: Covid regulations closed all the gift shops and stopped most travel.
- January 2021: I sold biscuits door-to-door into off-licenses (the only shops still open other than supermarkets).
- August 2021: Tried selling my flow wrapper to release cash and go back to hand bagging. A larger bakery came to see the wrapper and spotted my biscuit moulding machine, which was the same as theirs. We got chatting and agreed to outsource some production to them, but I would still handle wrapping.
- September 2021: A start-up energy bar company came to see the wrapping machine and offered to buy the whole factory, minus the biscuit machine.
- October 2021: I placed my biscuit machine in the outsource partner bakery and outsourced biscuit production, moving back home to handle biscuit icing and packaging.
- December 2021: Fed up with manual packaging (i.e. physically knackered after the Christmas rush), I looked for more packaging solutions and couldn’t find any, worldwide. I started designing my own machine using existing technology and YouTube.
- June 2022: Won a grant from TechStart to build a prototype.
- September 2022: Lined up distributors for Europe and the USA (non-exclusive). If you’re interested in becoming a distributor, get in touch).
- March 2023: Redesigned my biscuit packaging to look fancy and professional, moving away from stickers to pre-printed.
- April 2023: Completed the prototype and proved semi-automatic packaging could be done at home with single phase electricity and a machine under 1 metre long. At the time the minimum length of a flow wrapper was 4 metres and cost £25,000.
- June 2023: Won a grant from Innovate UK to build a commercial version of the machine, which can be used and tested by myself and in commercial bakeries. Still bagging biscuits by hand with a jaw sealer in the meantime (it’s an incentive to keep going).
- November 2023: Patenting began and machine construction.
- April 2024: Won funding from Invest NI to develop the electronics of the machine.
- September 2024: Appointed supplier came back to say they had been too busy with bigger clients and didn’t do the electronics work.
- February 2025: Launched a new online bakery using Facebook ads to fund the machine myself and sold out twice a week.
- March 2025: Facebook Ad Manager was hacked and Facebook deleted affected accounts, including mine, putting me out of business.
- May 2025: Closed the biscuit business to sell off my machinery and stock so I can focus on finishing the bagging machine.
- July 2025: Sold the biscuit machinery and bought a 3D printer. Finalised most of the design.
- October 25: Accepted onto the Catalyst Breakthrough.Idea programme.
- November 25: New funding granted from Innovate UK to provide electrical and mechanical engineering support to review the machines parts for conversion from prototype parts to manufacturing parts and build the minimum viable product.
Patent Pending officially granted! - April 2026: Through another Innovate Us project with the excellent SERC, power requirements and wiring have been calculated.
- May 2026: The patent has passed the first stage, with no objections from the IPO Examiner. I’ve redrawn the machine, even smaller, to allow for the printing of all custom parts in 3D, enabling me to rapidly prototype the entire machine. The next target is a fully working prototype by mid June.
