On one of our Black Cab rides, Love Cocoa’s James Cadbury emphasised how he didn’t want his Cadbury ancestry to define him – and that some unique experiences, one involving Glastonbury festival, came his way before he fell into the entrepreneurial role.
Interviews with the world’s business elite often unveil that dream jobs come after a few stints in more humble roles such as waiter or grocery clerk. Very rarely do we know which field we’ll end up in, and it may take time to find what suits us best.
It’s perhaps odd then that we’re still surprised to hear which jobs entrepreneurs have previously had. Take Richard Branson for example. At 22 years of age he opened a recording studio and worked alongside Mike Oldfield. The result was UK hit Tubular Bells.
Steve Jobs allegedly started off selling illegal hacking equipment, while Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos created a summer camp in high school, educating students around nuclear war and black holes.
Cadbury, much like those before him, didn’t originally think of becoming a company founder – though he did express interest in the chocolate world early on due to his name. Instead, business inspiration struck at the age of 31.
“My mum loves chocolate, but for her birthday I couldn’t find anything appropriate,” he told Real Business. “I looked around at various brands, but they all took three days plus to deliver and all had to be signed for, so she’d have to go and collect it if she was out.
“In the end I went to a chocolate shop and put the box in a jiffy bag with a card, which she liked. There wasn’t anything simpler out there, so it gave me the idea to sell something different around chocolate. It’s worked for Bloom & Wild with flowers.”
While he may now firmly be grounded in the chocolate world, there’s one particular job he will remember for the rest of his life. During the Glastonbury festival, Cadbury was hired to look after a horse, with its owner worried Glastonbury festival attenders would scale the fence and steal it.
He tells the story in more detail below:
Share this story