What Is an Employee Ownership Trust? Why Phat Pasty Became One
Big news from the Phat camp this year: as of April, we're officially an Employee Ownership Trust — or EOT, if you're into acronyms. It landed just a year after we became B Corp accredited too, so it's been a journey of "putting our money where our mouth is".
If you're sat there thinking "cool, but what does that actually mean?" — you're not alone. Here's the lowdown, plus why we did it, and a few other food and drink names doing the same thing.
Okay, but what actually IS an EOT?
In plain English: an Employee Ownership Trust is a way of a company being owned by the people who work there, rather than a private owner, an investor, or a bigger group swooping in to buy it.
It's a proper legal structure — been around in the UK since 2014 — where the founders sell their shares into a trust, and that trust holds those shares on behalf of every single employee. Not just the folks at the top. Everyone.
A few things that make it stand out:
● It's genuinely for everyone. The trust has to act in the interest of all staff.
● It's a proper alternative to a sale. Loads of founders reach a point where they want to step back, and instead of flogging the business to the highest bidder (who might completely change what it stands for), they hand it to the team instead.
● It protects what made the business good in the first place. No outside owner suddenly deciding to cut corners or shift priorities.
● It's not some fringe thing either. There are well over 1,000 employee-owned businesses in the UK now, across everything from farming to manufacturing to, well, pasties.
Basically: it's one way of making "this belongs to the people who built it" true on paper, not just in the pub after a few pints.
Why now, for us?
2026 is a big one for Phat — 20 years since we started out as a kitchen-table idea and a converted camper van, driving pasties out to office workers who deserved a real taste of Cornwall for their lunch. Two decades on, we're feeding people up and down the country, from the National Trust and RSPB cafes to Welcome Break, universities, hospitals and even now found in Costco. We've also picked up a fair few trophies along the way, iproud to be crowned Cornwall’s best pasty in 2026 at the Global Pasty Championships (held in Heligan and featured on Channel 5s ‘A Year by the Sea’ series 2), previously winning the accolade at Eden, when it was named ‘World Pasty Championships (2020/2021) and again winning at the British Pie Awards in 2025 and 2026 with plant-based Keralan pasty. Not bad going for something that started with a camper van and a dream.
Twenty years felt like the right moment to think hard about what comes next. Rather than looking outward for a buyer, we looked at the people already in the building — the ones actually working in the business — and thought, it should be theirs.
"It just felt like the right thing for us to do and pass the baton on to our team. We aren't going anywhere soon, but this provides long-term security of the business and allows the team to take Phat onto the next phase. Empowering the team gains real ownership for everything we do. Wanting our great team to benefit from their hard work and commitment also allows us all to share in future success and maintain all that is great about the brand and our products."
That's the heart of it, really: the team now has a genuine, permanent stake in where it goes next.
And the B Corp thing — how does that fit in?
The EOT wasn't a standalone move. It came hot on the heels of us becoming a certified B Corp — which, if you've not come across it, is a proper independent audit of how a company treats its people, its community, and the planet, not just how much profit it turns.
"Becoming a B Corp was a way to fully align our business ethics to the B Corp movement. We are now part of a globally acknowledged accreditation that looks at every aspect of our Phat business — looking at how we prioritise people, planet and sustainability at the core of how we operate. Becoming an EOT dovetails with the B Corp principles and further shows that we are 'walking the talk' and not just making statements about our intent. People are at the core of what we do, and both the B Corp accreditation and EOT now work in harmony. We now say: ‘‘eat well, have fun, do good."
— Paul Clark, Phat Controller
Put the two together and you've basically got proof of how we do things (B Corp), backed up by a guarantee of who it's all for (the EOT). Which lines up nicely with what we've been banging on about since day one:
Eat Well. Have Fun. Do Good.
Some of the stuff behind that isn't just words on a wrapper, either:
To gain the necessary accreditations to becoming a B Corp there are stringent requirements that need to be demonstrated and a scoring system to ensure everything aligns to these principles.
Some of the key drivers in us ensuring our brand ethos stays true to these requirements are :
● British Red Tractor-assured meat, and Vegetarian Society-accredited veggie/vegan ranges
● Sustainable packaging across the board
● Our partnership with the World Forest Organisation since 2019 — 31,000+ trees planted, over 6,000 tonnes of CO₂ offset, and a whole classroom built in Kenya, funded by sales of our vegan range
Now the people responsible for all of that get to keep steering the ship. Feels right.
We're in good company
Turns out we're not the only ones in food and drink going down this road. A few others worth a mention:
● Riverford Organic Farmers — the veg box people went 74% employee-owned back in 2018. Founder Guy Singh-Watson has been vocal about wanting to protect the business's values for the long haul rather than sell out.
● Wilkin & Sons (Tiptree) — the jam and preserves legends from Essex have run on an employee ownership model for years, and it's a big part of why they've kept their quality and heritage intact.
● John Lewis Partnership — yes, the department store — but they also own Waitrose, making this one of the oldest and biggest examples of employee ownership in UK food retail, going all the way back to 1929.
Closer to home,
· TUGO - a pizza operator who also work in foodservice, became a EOT in 2026.
Within our food sector and the UK this is still a small but growing club. And the thread running through all of it? Food businesses built on care and craft tend to do best when the people doing the actual work have real skin in the game.
What's next
Twenty years in, Phat is now owned by the people who answer the phone, send the orders and support our customers. They stand behind every single pasty that goes out the door and is served across the country, both within our foodservice customers operations and to customers ordering our Phat at Home service. Add B Corp status into the mix, and it's about as clear a statement as we can make about where we're headed — and who it's really for.
Here's to the next twenty years.