At our Profit with Purpose events, we ask four social entrepreneurs to talk candidly about how their businesses have grown and the challenges that have come with that.

The theme of our last event was food, and appearing on the panel was Alicia Lawson of Rubies in the Rubble.

The social enterprise was started by her business partner Jenny Dawson, whose bugbear was the amount of perfectly good food that was being discarded because of shape or size.

16 million tonnes of it go to waste every year, costing an estimated £22bn.

Jenny knew there were lots of people in the world who didn’t have enough to eat, so wasting food seemed nonsensical and she set out to do something about it. Her answer was to create a range of condiments from the discarded food.

The products were first sold in Borough market and then started to be stocked in independent delicatessens and small but well known chains such as Harvey Nichols and Selfridges. The breakthrough came when they were contracted to supply the home groceries delivery service Ocado.

The condiments are now stocked in hundreds of stores up and down the country, including Waitrose. So how do you cope with supplying a growing customer base? Watch the video to find out.

We’ll be heading our next Profit with Purpose event on 17th September. If you’d like to come, sign up to our mailing list and we’ll send you further details soon.