Olly Hiscocks Is Trying To Turn Olives Into The New Potato Chips

Olly Hiscocks, founder of Olly’s

Olly’s

It’s a neat enough punt – that is, a man named Olly starting a business selling olives – but OLLY’s has proved to be much more than a good idea.

In fact, in the eight years since launching the brand at his kitchen table, founder Olly Hiscocks’ instincts have really paid off. At the time, he saw a gap in the snack market others hadn’t. Britain already understood olives – loved them, even – but the handful of quality options available felt awkward. Too wet, too briny, not especially portable.

That, for Hiscocks, was the gap.

“The category was broken,” he says. “Olives in the UK were either bland supermarket deli counters and uninspiring plastic pots, or fancy delis you’d visit once a month. Nobody was treating them as an everyday snack and giving them the love they truly deserved.”

Hiscocks studied neuroscience at the University of Manchester and had planned to become a doctor, but he had, as he puts it, always been “an ideas person,” filling notebooks with concepts that mostly stayed there. Olives did not.

He began marinating batches in his parents’ kitchen, taking sandwich bags of different mixes to friends, then selling them at Duck Pond market in West London at weekends, while working at a GP surgery during the week. “Eventually, I decided to tell my parents that I didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to sell olives,” he says. “I am sure you can imagine their faces.”

From the beginning, though, Hiscocks says he wasn’t just trying to make “better” olives, which is crucial to the business’ later success. Plenty of premium food founders can make a product taste better than the supermarket version. Far fewer can change the way a product is bought. For OLLY’S, the key problem was format. Loose olives needed a bowl. Deli olives needed a counter. Many supermarket olives needed a fridge. None of that made them credible rivals to a packet of crisps.

“The insight was simple,” says Hiscocks. “If you put olives in a convenient, on-the-go pouch, suddenly the barrier disappears.”

But convenience was only half the problem. At the time, existing on-the-go olive products often relied on pasteurisation, which extended shelf life but compromised texture, flavour and nutritional value. To combat this, OLLY’S developed an unpasteurised olive snack pouch, designed to be shelf-stable while keeping the product closer to what people actually liked about olives in the first place.

The choice didn’t come cheap. Finding a supplier willing to make an unpasteurised pouch took months of unanswered emails and calls, and when he eventually found one, the minimum order was 12,000 units per flavour.

“That’s a significant bet for a first-time founder with no retail listings,” he says. “I took the gut call and went for it.”

Still, buyers were initially sceptical on price. With a lesser version of a product familiar enough to feel cheap, asking shoppers to pay a premium for a branded snack pouch required a different argument. OLLY’S had to show that this was not an alternative to a tin of olives. It was an alternative to crisps. “People buy crisps impulsively every day,” he says. “Olives, buyers assumed, were more occasional.”

The strategy became part product, part placement. The pouches needed bold flavours—Chilli & Rosemary, Garlic & Basil—but they also needed to pop up in places where people already bought snacks without thinking too hard. Early distribution included Sainsbury’s, easyJet, pubs and theatres: high-footfall environments where olives could begin to behave less like antipasti and more like an impulse buy. All of which yielded brilliant results.

The business has since grown into more than 10,000 stockists across 20 countries, with listings including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Ocado. “Everyone celebrates the listing,” he says, “but you have to be ready for what comes with it—long payment terms, an incredibly competitive environment to hit your sales targets, marketing complexities in and out of store, and then also the compliance headaches of making sure you are on shelf all the time.”

The less Instagrammable side of challenger food, if you will. Cash moves slowly, stock moves unpredictably, and being on shelf is only useful if the product sells quickly enough to stay there. It’s also where OLLY’S recent expansion into chilled olives has brought a new level of operational pressure.

“Shorter-shelf-life products leave shorter selling windows between producing and getting onto shelf,” Hiscocks says. And the lesson became very literal when OLLY’S first launched its chilled olive pots and overproduced. Hiscocks and his co-founder Sam ended up with “a mountain of stock with a short shelf life,” hired a van and started guerrilla-sampling across London to shift it.

“It was an expensive lesson,” he says, “but, indirectly, an incredibly valuable one—sampling works brilliantly for our products.”

You only need to look at the business’ numbers to see how; OLLY’S has sold more than 3.5 million pouches over the last five years, amounting to more than 40 million olives, and generated £3.1 million [$4.1 million] in revenue in 2025. Hiscocks forecasts £4.5 million [$6 million] in 2026.

The company has also raised £1.8 million [$2.4 million] to date, capital Hiscocks says has gone into the team, marketing and, at one point, producing chocolate pretzels in its own factory. He says he was particularly interested in investors who understood the FMCG journey and had entrepreneurial experience of their own. “You cannot underestimate the value of smart money,” he says.

With their help, the brand has also moved beyond olive pouches into pretzel thins and more. Hiscocks says product expansion has to sit under the company’s positioning: “health at the heart, flavour to the full.” If a product shares the same snacking occasion, bold flavour and personality, it is worth exploring. If it is simply chasing volume, it is not.

Of course, distinctiveness can be both a strength and a constraint. As Hiscocks puts it, “one SKU will rarely be enough for the shelf space you need to be truly impactful.”

That is the commercial reality beneath the crisp-aisle ambition. Turning olives into the new crisps doesn’t mean convincing Britain that olives taste good, but it does require the hard labor of changing their perception, justifying the price, earning the shelf space, surviving the working-capital cycle and making people come back.

For Hiscocks, the ultimate sign of success will be linguistic as much as financial: shoppers saying they are picking up “some OLLY’S” rather than olives. Or, perhaps, any other superior snack aisle competitor he dreams up next.