Charlotte and Luke Giddings, co-founders of family bakery business Brownie and the Bean, will appear on ITV1 next month, as part of Holly Tucker MBE’s new show Be Your Own Boss. Here, Charlotte explains what it has meant for their business
Can you remind readers who you are and what you do?
We are a family run bakery based on the Norfolk/Suffolk borders. Our cakes are available online and can be dispatched anywhere in the UK. You can also find our cakes in local restaurants, cafes and shops across Norfolk and Suffolk. Everything we make is handcrafted by our bakery team, from our caramels to meringues, marshmallow fluff and much more. We source nearly all our ingredients locally including flour made with East Anglian grown wheat, sugar from Bury St Edmunds and our eggs come from Hoxne.
We last featured you back in September 2023 – what has happened since then?
So much has happened in the last 2 years. The baking industry has taken a real bashing. We’ve had the price of cocoa increase by over 400%, plus all our ingredients and packaging have risen. It has become increasingly difficult to be able to make bakeries viable and the pressure has most certainly been on. Thankfully though, there have been some incredible highlights: in November 2024, we won the Great British Entrepreneur Award for Family Business of the Year (East of England), which was an enormous boost for us, and most recently we were selected to be one of the lucky 10 businesses to be featured on Holly Tucker’s new show “Be Your Own Boss”.
What did it mean to you to be chosen as one of the 10 small businesses to be featured on ITV’s Be Your Own Boss?
Being chosen as one of 10 small businesses for the show was absolutely wonderful. We were really at a stage in our business where we felt we had tried everything and our business felt stuck. Having the opportunity to be mentored by Holly Tucker for the show was a dream come true.
How would you describe the experience of working with Holly Tucker for the show?
It was amazing to work with someone who has built and sold a household name and comes with over 20 years of experience in e-commerce. Her insights and encouragement were so helpful at a time when we needed it the most. We feel so proud of what we’ve done with our business and what we achieved whilst filming the show.
When can people catch the episode on ITV1?
Our episode goes to air on Sunday 7th December at 1.15pm on ITV1, or you can watch the boxset on ITVX right now.
Any new plans for Brownie and the Bean you can share?
We are going to be launching our very own Youtube channel and updating it weekly with content. It will be a bit more personal than our social media content and people will get to see more of us as a couple.
Brownie and Bean features on Be Your Own Boss on ITVX (episode 5) or on ITV1 on Sunday December 7th, 2025. Visit brownieandthebean.com.
Featured image of (left to right) Luke Giddings, Holly Tucker MBE and Charlotte Giddings – True North Productions
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