A duo of coffee loving entrepreneurs from Warfield have bagged a £50,000 investment in this week’s episode of Dragons Den for their coffee subscription business.

Richard and Fiona Jones, launched Beans Coffee Club in 2019 with the aim to make it easy for coffee lovers to enjoy freshly roasted coffee at home.

Whilst enjoying a fresh cup of one of their exclusive coffee brands, the couple were grilled about their projections, customer-base and their experience within the sector.

Despite reservations by Peter Jones and Touker Suleyman regarding a subscription business during a recession, businesswoman Deborah Meaden saw beneath the coffee club to the tech that is used to analyse consumer habits.

When describing the business to the dragons, Richard said: “We ask you 7 quick questions and based on your feedback we’ll tailor the selection of coffees ensuring we only send you coffee that we think you’re going to love. We have over 100 coffees roasted to order and dispatched directly in letter box friendly recycled packaging.”

With over 2000 subscribers, Richard and Fiona have developed partnerships with various coffee machine manufacturers where they are expecting to see a huge growth despite the recession.

Fiona added: “We’ve also started discussions with coffee machine manufacturers. They’re very interested in working with someone like us because we’ve seen the investment that people are having in their at-home machines which has grown massively.

“What we’ve seen happening is because there is a recession about to hit people won’t go out and get their on-the-go coffees, they’ll bru it at home and take it with them which is cheaper.”

As Deborah Meaden delved more into the business she discovered another facet to Richard and Fiona’s company.

Richard explained: “We’re a technology platform. The value is in intelligent learning where you rate your coffee and then we learn which kind of flavours you like.

“What we need is the investment for us to launch a fully customised site where we would be able to push that technology further and introduce an app as well so that we can collect more data.

“Manufacturers that we are talking to, who are interested in partnering alongside curries are really interested in the data that we can collect in terms of consumer habits and that’s very valuable so we want to increase our data collection.”

After listening to the couples’ polished and articulate business plan and strategy, both Deborah Meaden and Steve Bartlett offered the full £50,000 with a 15% share in the company.

Deborah said: “I think you are brilliant. Looking at the two of you you’ve got the ingredients to help you win. You’ve got a lot of the skills that are going to help you mould this.

“Your partnership deals are very interesting and I think that was very smart of you to identify that as a really strong route directly into a market.”

In the end, the couple walked away with all the investment money from both Dragons, each taking a 7.5% share of the company.