- Innovators Uncensored
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- ⚡ How this Start-Up is Turning Coffee Waste into Meaningful Products
⚡ How this Start-Up is Turning Coffee Waste into Meaningful Products
Genius marketing hacks, Authentic Start-Up Stories, Fantastic Start-Up opportunities and so much more in this week's issue of Innovators Uncensored!
Richard Lee
June 20, 2025
Morning Innovators ⚡ In less than 5 minutes, we’ll cover…
🥳 The best funding opportunities, events and jobs in the Start-Up world this week
📰 This week’s biggest news stories in the Start-Up world
☕️ How is this Start-Up turning coffee waste into purposeful products?
😆 How cracking a few jokes can win you bags of customers
✍️ A tool that helps you streamline all of your onboarding
✨ Last weeks most clicked link, despite all of the exciting investment opportunities, was this link taking you through to our Start-Ups jobs board. We’ve got loads of great opportunities on there currently, so if you’re looking for a role at an exciting Start-Up, or looking to hire at your own Start-Up, take a look!
🥳 BRISTOL - We’ve only got 4 more tickets for our next Bristol Start-Up Social on the first of July at 6pm in Dirty Martini! We’ve got Paul Dodd, the Co-Founder of Huboo, coming in to talk about the earliest days with two of them in a garage, to raising £180, to having to sell the business last year. It’s going to be a crazy story, grab one of the last few spaces here.
Happy hustling,
Rich
🎤 Opportunities + Events
🥨 Bits&Pretzels are hosting their annual pitch competition, with last year’s winner going on to secure €18.6m in funding - you can apply here!
🤖 Felicis have just raised a new $900m fund to invest in Start-Ups solving big problems, regardless of stage or sector - you can connect with the team here!
💪 Entrepreneurs First are accepting applications for their Fall cohorts, with successful applicants getting a chance at $250,000 in funding - you can apply here!
We now have a community of thousands of Start-Ups and Founders, here are the hottest Start-Up job opportunities from the Innovators Uncensored community on our very own Start-Ups Job Board!
💼 Start-Up Jobs
📞 Klarna joins Revolut and N26 in bid to take on big telecom with mobile phone plans. Sifted
👶 6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80m in cash. TechCrunch
🍏 VOI CEO says he’s open to acquiring Bolt’s micro-mobility business. TechCrunch
🤯 Treasury names FIRST-EVER Entrepreneurship Advisor. UKTN
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Most of the time, marketing is about creating a feeling within the consumer, and what better feeling is there than a bit of joy and laughter? This is exactly why the recent advertising campaign from Joe and the Juice has done so well!
Instead of huge billboards and expensive TV campaigns, they’ve just dotted fruit/juice related puns around busy areas. There’s no big branding plastered all over the ad here, just brand colours and a subtle logo in the corner.
Passers by will start to associate this colour and brand to a feeling of joy and laughter, meaning they’ll be far more likely to purchase.
How can you create this kind of feeling for your brand, without putting your brand front and centre?
Each week we highlight our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our Start-Up community have recommended.
Fluidworks is an AI onboarding agent that lives inside each user’s session in your web app, guiding them in real time with voice and clicks. No more static tours. Just smart, personalised onboarding that drives activation and conversions. Go live with single line of code
Grounds for Good: The Coffee Waste Brand Brewing Change with Purpose
Some see coffee as a daily ritual. Rosie saw it as a revolution waiting to happen.
Grounds for Good (GFG) is a Welsh-based, impact-first company on a mission to turn waste coffee grounds into powerful products with purpose. Whether it’s up-cycled spirits, chocolate, homewares or body scrubs, every item is part of a bigger vision: fighting food waste and challenging the stigma around homelessness.
At its core, GFG speaks to the conscious consumer - the ones who want more than sustainability soundbites. They want sustainability with soul.
And Rosie? She’s not your typical founder. After 30 years in the NHS, she swapped scrubs for coffee grounds - and hasn’t looked back since.
A Stubborn Idea, a Kitchen Table, and a Lot of Coffee Grounds
No Co-Founder. No investors. Just one woman with a medical pension and a fire in her belly.
When Rosie left medicine, she wasn’t ready to stop giving back - just ready to do it differently. In 2021, she launched Grounds for Good from her kitchen, armed with nothing but grit, graft, and a very strong sense of "why".
“Doing it solo has been equal parts terrifying and thrilling,” she says.
“But it forces you to get crystal clear on your purpose.”
Without a Co-Founder, Rosie built a “shadow team” - a trusted circle of collaborators, advisors and people unafraid to call her out. No echo chambers. Just real talk.
From Scrubs to Scrubs: First Sales and Storytelling
The first product? An upcycled coffee body scrub, handmade in Rosie’s kitchen.
There was no PR machine. No Shopify guru. Just a basic web shop, a few hours of paid help, and an Instagram account filled with honesty, behind-the-scenes chaos, and unfiltered storytelling.
What GFG lacked in polish, it made up for in purpose. And customers noticed. Early sales trickled in online, followed by local markets and small independent retailers. One scrub at a time, Grounds for Good started making noise.
Coffee That Closes the Loop: Scaling with Supply Chain Innovation
The real shift came when GFG expanded from skincare into food and drink.
Suddenly, those coffee grounds weren’t just waste - they were ingredients. And the cafés Rosie collected from weren’t just suppliers, they became part of the story.
“They didn’t want to just offload waste. They wanted to be part of a circular solution.”
This led to trade partnerships and wholesale opportunities. With support from Cywain, a Welsh Government-backed agency, GFG navigated food regulation and refined its offering.
Earlier this year, they opened their first physical retail space in Barry’s Goodsheds - proving that purpose-led doesn’t mean playing small.
Bootstrapped, Not Broke: Building on a Pension and a Prayer
Rosie didn’t raise a round. She reinvested her entire NHS pension lump sum.
“This isn’t spare cash. It’s my retirement. My family’s inheritance. Every decision matters.”
No loans. No angel investors. Just conscious risk and careful spending. That’s allowed GFG to grow on its own terms - no diluted values, no corner-cutting.
The business isn’t profitable enough yet to bring on permanent staff, but Rosie’s next milestone is building the team she needs to take GFG further — without compromising what makes it special.
Biggest Lessons: Passion Starts It. Precision Sustains It.
“Biggest lesson? You can’t build a purpose-led business on passion alone.”
As a creative Founder, Rosie thrived on product development - but quickly realised that most of the grind lay elsewhere: cash flow, margins, logistics, VAT.
Her advice?
Don’t wait for perfect. Transparency beats perfection every time.
Bring in help sooner. Especially people who’ll challenge your blind spots.
Protect your energy. Burnout helps no one - not you, not your mission.
The brand’s evolved a lot since launch, and Rosie’s learned to be agile without losing the thread of her purpose.
The Bigger Picture: Coffee Grounds, Circular Design, and Second Chances
GFG isn’t just about quirky products. It’s about changing mindsets.
With a bespoke coffee ground collection service across Cardiff (saving 5 tonnes of waste monthly), partnerships with homelessness charity Llamau, and local production that keeps the impact in Wales, for Wales, Rosie is building a brand that’s as rooted in place as it is in purpose.
“We’re living proof that waste doesn’t have to look like waste.
And that reinvention, personal or planetary, is always possible.”
Grounds for Good isn’t just innovating with coffee. It’s serving up a bold reminder: some of the richest stories come from what others throw away.
Next week I’ll be highlighting another awesome Start-Up, as well as sharing all the usuals including funding opportunities, Start-Up news, plus plenty of awesome tips, tricks and tools.
P.S. Connect with me on LinkedIn…
