Just Love Food Company was founded with one simple belief: no one should be left out of cake.
After Mike Woods’ children were diagnosed with life-threatening nut allergies, he saw firsthand how isolating celebrations could become. Watching them sit out birthday parties - unable to share in a cake-cutting moment - was the catalyst for building something different.
In 2010, Just Love Food became the first company to bring nut and peanut-free celebration cakes to UK supermarket shelves.
As demand grew, so did the ambition:
- 2016: Launch of a gluten-free (nut-free, milk-free) range
- 2019: Launch of a vegan range (nut-free, milk-free, egg-free)
- Today: Cakes covering 13 of the top 14 allergens across the range
Stocked nationwide, Just Love Food combines strict allergen controls with high-quality, hand-finished celebration cakes produced at scale.
Their mission remains clear:
Bringing people together with cake - so everyone can share the joy.
The Challenge
Scaling specialist cake manufacturing requires significant upfront investment:
- Ingredients sourced to strict allergen standards
- Dedicated production processes
- Skilled labour
- Packaging and nationwide distribution
Yet customers typically operate on delayed payment terms.
As the business matured, some larger retailer volumes transitioned to bank-funded structures, reducing the proportion of invoices funded externally.
At the same time, new growth channels emerged:
- Increased exposure with major wholesale distribution partners
- Expansion of co-manufacturing as an additional revenue stream
- Continued growth with independent customers without structured bank funding
The business also experiences predictable holiday demand spikes, when celebration cake volumes increase materially. These peaks create short-term working capital pressure, precisely when production needs to scale quickly.
Operationally, certain co-manufacturing arrangements do not involve formal signed proof of delivery, adding complexity to invoice verification processes.
For a mission-driven manufacturer operating in a highly regulated category, working capital must be dependable and flexible.
The Solution
Just Love Food partnered with Kriya Invoice Finance to unlock cash tied up in unpaid invoices and stabilise working capital.
Facility Limit: £200,000
The facility allows the business to:
- Convert invoices into immediate working capital
- Fund independent and wholesale customers efficiently
- Manage seasonal trading peaks without liquidity strain
- Support the expansion of its co-manufacturing stream
- Adapt to changing retailer funding structures
Importantly, the facility flexes alongside trading volumes - increasing support when demand rises and maintaining stability during quieter periods.
Kriya works closely with the Just Love Food team to ensure funding processes align with the operational realities of specialist food manufacturing, balancing documentation requirements with practical delivery models.
The Impact
The partnership with Kriya has enabled Just Love Food to:
- Bridge cashflow gaps between production and customer payment
- Maintain smooth operations during peak celebration seasons
- Scale inclusive cake production nationwide
- Diversify revenue streams through co-manufacturing growth
- Stay focused on its founding mission - ensuring no one is excluded from life’s celebrations
About Just Love Food Company
Founded in 2010, Just Love Food pioneered nut and peanut-free celebration cakes in UK supermarkets.
Today, the company offers:
- Nut-free celebration cakes
- Gluten-free ranges
- Vegan ranges
- Products covering 13 of the top 14 allergens
As pioneers in food inclusivity, Just Love Food continues to combine purpose with scalable manufacturing excellence - ensuring every celebration can be shared.
Fast Facts
Founder: Mike Woods
Founded: 2010
Industry: Specialist Inclusive Cake Manufacturing
Facility Type: Invoice Finance
Facility Limit: £200,000
Managing cash when growing, especially in new markets for us, is so important. This invoice finance facility helped us establish ourselves in those markets, which are now flourishing. The Kriya facility has been very helpful in supporting this growth.
“We expect our B2B revenues to double as a result of providing Kriya’s flexible payment terms to our trade and business buyers.”
Stuart Zissman, Head of Financial Services
Halfords is the UK’s leading provider of motoring and cycling services and products. Its customers shop across over 1,750 fixed and mobile locations including, Halfords stores and garages, as well as its website, halfords.com.
Today, around a quarter of Halfords turnover is business-to-business. They sell to organisations of all sizes including SME businesses, garages, and workshops, offering discounts on automotive parts and tools with their Trade Card, as well as directly to larger commercial and government customers that buy in bulk.
However, like many well-established enterprises, Halfords found its future growth was challenged by the legacy processes of its past. Find out how they’ve teamed up with Kriya to remove the friction from their B2B commerce.
Halford's challenges
“The exam question” says Halfords’ Head of Financial Services, Stuart Zissman, “was how do we make selling to business and trade buyers less labour-intensive?” Having already overseen a successful consumer finance proposition at Halfords, it was clear to Zissman that their B2B offering had potential to grow by introducing a simple and effective credit solution.
1. B2B buyers expect payments terms
“All successful B2B propositions have some sort of financial support” Zissman explains. Whether large or small, Halfords’ business buyers want to be invoiced on payment terms. This is especially beneficial for garages and workshops, which thrive on efficient working capital cycles, allowing them to source parts upfront and defer payment until they have received compensation for their services.
Halfords recognised the opportunity to enhance their offerings by providing scalable trade credit, which was previously untapped. As Zissman says, "offering payments completes the circle."
2. Manual, unscalable processes were holding back growth
Halfords' hands-on approach to B2B processes presented an opportunity for greater scalability and growth. Wholesale orders, managed via account managers, involved manual quotes and purchase orders, which added complexity.
“We’d like to say yes to every single customer that wants to order from us,” says Head of Trade Card, Chris Millan. However, processing these detailed orders for existing buyers took time, limiting the retailer's ability to proactively attract new business and expand their account base.
What Halfords sought was a way to make their B2B offering more accessible and achieve a better economy of scale.
“We work with sole traders, business customers and government entities. Kriya is the only supplier that could support all three.”
Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
The search for a solution
Recognising the need for change, Halfords set out to find a way to modernise its B2B offering. With Kriya's 12-year track record and willingness to collaborate on a solution for their unique requirements struck a chord with Halfords.
A solution for all B2B buyers
Halfords has a diverse buyer base and needed B2B payment terms that could be offered to limited companies, government entities and sole traders.
Multichannel
With trade customers already purchasing online and in-store, Halfords needed a solution to offer payment terms holistically across their sales channels.
Risk expertise
With their focus on Motoring and Cycling, Halfords sought a partner with strong expertise in finance and payments, including robust credit and fraud detection capabilities, to help onboard their buyers.
“We are experts in motoring and cycling, and to ensure exceptional service for our customers, we decided to partner with Kriya, specialists in B2B payments and lending decisions.” Stuart Zissman, Head of Financial Services
The B2B vision
Halfords partnered with Kriya to transform their B2B offering. By integrating Kriya PayLater with their Trade Card, the retailer is combining trade discounts for B2B buyers with the ability to pay on account for online and in-store orders.
Adopting an eCommerce-first model has a number of advantages. Firstly, providing online buyers with highly-demanded payment terms expands the businesses they can sell to. Secondly, much of their offline business can be shifted to a self-serve, online checkout. Not only does this provide a smoother buyer experience, it also frees up the Halfords team to focus on the customers where their expertise has the most impact.
The near-infinite scalability of the Kriya solution means Halfords can not only improve their overall B2B customer proposition and experience, but they can also see financial benefits through the partnership too.
“Offering trade credit through payments makes it much slicker. It’s something buyers are familiar with from the consumer world.”Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
Wholesale change
Halfords have kicked off their payments transformation with their wholesale offering.
Business buyers come to the Halfords wholesale team to place bulk orders and request custom details, such as branded bikes and accessories. Before Kriya, this fully offline sales channel required multiple teams and processes to transact each order. This process led to delays and hampered conversion, such as inventory becoming unavailable during the order, or customers purchasing elsewhere.
By streamlining the entire wholesale workflow into Kriya Merchant Portal, Halfords now have a single, automated flow for processing orders.
Wholesale buyers are first onboarded into Merchant Portal. This screens for credit and fraud risk, directly providing their sales team an instant spending limit decision for the buyer. Orders can then be placed on payment terms and invoices are automatically generated for the buyer. Additionally, Kriya assists with credit control by managing payment collections too.
“We needed a way forward that was less hands-on because the whole process was very, very manual.” Chris Millan, Head of Trade Card
How it works
The buyer places a wholesale order with Halfords
Halfords onboard the buyer into Kriya’s Merchant Portal
Payment terms selected and purchase complete. The buyer pays at the end of the following month.
Partnering for growth
Reflecting on the journey so far with Kriya, Zissman says “It’s that personal touch and relationship that makes the difference to the product we’re building together.” For Zissman, it's not simply outsourcing the expertise to a third party. “It’s more like we’re onboarding Kriya into Halfords and by extension they’ve become part of our team”.
There’s a busy roadmap ahead for Halfords and Kriya, with plans to bring the whole multichannel offering to market by the autumn of 2024.
We're very excited about this development,” says Millan. “Introducing payment terms to our Trade offering eliminates barriers that previously slowed us down and unlocks opportunities with a vast number of businesses we haven't historically engaged with.”
