Amelia Christie-Miller is the founder of Bold Bean Co, an award-winning food brand on a mission to transform the way we think about beans. Combining a passion for great ingredients with a commitment to sustainability, she has become one of the UK's most exciting young food entrepreneurs.
Growing up in Oxfordshire in a big family, Amelia Christie-Miller was always besotted by food. Her favourite childhood books were all food-related, and her aunts on both sides of the family were chefs, so it seemed only natural for Amelia to go into a career in food.
In 2012, Amelia moved to Scotland to begin a History degree at the University of Edinburgh. Whilst studying, she worked as a private chef for Silver Teal Cooks, spending winter weekends in the Highlands and summers in Mallorca cooking for clients. During her third year of university, Amelia did an Erasmus exchange in Madrid. With few friends and inadequate fluency of Spanish, Amelia developed her passion for cooking further by experimenting with local ingredients, and became inspired by the food culture there.
A key moment in the Bold Bean Co story started here, where she tried jarred beans for the first time, realising how delicious they were compared to the tinned versions in the UK.
After university, Amelia developed an interest in the business side of the food industry, which led her to an internship at The Collective Dairy in 2015, and a digital marketing course in 2017. In the same year, she began working as a sales and business development executive at artisan bakery The Bread Factory (Gail’s Bakery’s mother company), where she began her work with London chefs and restaurants.
In 2017, Amelia moved into foodtech, taking up the role of Head of Sales and Marketing at sustainability start-up Foodchain, a platform connecting chefs, restaurants and households to a wide variety of farmers, growers and producers. Here, she helped grow Foodchain’s network to over 450 restaurant customers, working with top restaurants such as Lyle’s and Chiltern Firehouse and suppliers such as HG Walter and The Estate Dairy. Working in this space gave her a new appreciation of the importance of sustainability in our food system. During this time she also spoke on behalf of Foodchain on a variety of podcasts and panels.
Amelia’s work in the food sustainability space highlighted key food system issues such as soil health, diversity and our need to reduce meat consumption. With their millions of varieties and soil-rejuvenating properties, protein-packed beans were the logical answer to so many of society’s food system issues. Amelia realised this and, coupled with the way she saw chefs in the sector working with them on menus, she became obsessed with beans being the answer.
Aged just 27, armed with the knowledge of how delicious quality beans could be from her time in Spain, Amelia founded Bold Bean Co in May 2021, on a mission “to make you obsessed with beans, by giving you the best of beans”.
The company soon became a firm favourite of chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi, Thomasina Miers, Noor Murad and the Mob Kitchen team.
Bold Bean Co is a Certified B Corp, which means they balance profit with people and the planet, and is stocked in all major supermarkets as well as lots of independents across the country. As a young female entrepreneur, Amelia is a member of Buy Women Built, a campaign to mobilise consumers to buy from female-founded businesses.
Amelia is the author of bestselling cookbook Bold Beans: Recipes to Get Your Pulse Racing, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, and has become a familiar face on national TV, with recent appearances on BBC Dragons' Den and ITV This Morning.
In the last 12 months, Amelia was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by The Grocer in July 2025 and published her second cookbook, Full of Beans (Kyle Books, October 2025), which also became a Sunday Times bestseller.
Discover Amelia's favourite recipe here.
July, 2026
