He started with £10 of ingredients and quit Google to keep going

Simmy Dhillon was 19 and studying economics at Bristol when he started cooking and selling meals to other students. He told the BBC he had only £10 worth of ingredients when he began. He grew up watching his father work in a factory and his mother do supermarket shifts, and said his childhood aim was to earn enough for his parents to retire.

He originally treated the business as a CV line that would land him an investment banking internship. Instead it turned into Simmer Eats, and he left a marketing job at Google to run it full time. His older brother Jhai, a former Stevenage footballer who had qualified as an accountant at EY, left his job to join him.

The frugality was extreme. While working in London he slept on a blow-up mattress on a friend's kitchen floor because the sofa was too short, and put his £5,000 a month earnings back into the business. In 2024 he completed the goal he set as a teenager and funded his parents' retirement.

By January 2025 the business was delivering thousands of meals a day, had 15 full-time staff, had sold more than a million meals in twelve months, and had been ranked 11th in the Sunday Times 100 with three-year sales growth of 184%.

“Where we are today is exceptional, but it has happened very slowly over seven years time and we've been working on it every single day.”

Simmy Dhillon, speaking to BBC News