Karen Daniel is a 58-year-old woman from Worthing, Sussex, who runs a greengrocer business called Souk, which provides fresh vegetables and fruit to people in the Worthing area. Every Thursday and Friday, Karen delivers the boxes of British and exotic produce right to her customers’ doors.

According to Prowess, there are 1.6 million self-employed women in the UK, and 2.74 million self-employed men. Women comprise 37% of all self-employed workers, up from 27% in 2007.

Around 10% of women are self-employed compared with 16% of men.

One man band

Karen ran an international food shop with her husband until they separated, leaving her to run the business alone.

“My business was also my home, since we lived above it. When you have no clue what you are doing, being in that situation sends you into fight or flight mode. Plus, I had the added stress of looking after my parents.

“Everything became about the business. We had very little money, and my landlord was not a very pleasant man. He tried to intimidate money out of me, as did other suppliers.

“I didn’t have much to do with ordering stock. I ordered from my suppliers; I didn’t order from my husband’s suppliers. I didn’t know anything about fruit and veg when we separated. Because that was his business before we even met. When I met him abroad, his family business was fruit and vegetables.

“So I had to learn, and I had to learn quickly,” says Karen.

When Karen did her first buy-in in London, she quickly realised that women were treated like second-class citizens. Because of this, she dropped any wholesalers who had treated her with disrespect in the past.

“I used to go to the market wholesaler to buy yoghurt and stuff for the greengrocer business. I’d go in there, and I would be at the front of the queue waiting to pay, and men would just push in front of me, and nobody would say a word – not unless I spoke up first. Even now, three or four years later, you see very few women there in the market. Very few,” Karen tells The Optimist.

“I just had to get on with it”

Due to personal and financial issues, the greengrocer did not have the time or the choice to try to work elsewhere. She was trying to support herself and her teenage daughter simultaneously. Her daughter was doing her A Levels at college then, so she had to keep going and figure something out.

She kept the original business going for over a year until she could not handle it anymore. Due to an increase in expenses during COVID, the old business became unsustainable. After running it by herself, Karen took her new greengrocer business online in 2022.

“I did not go bust, but the company was dissolved, and I started the veg box company. I started something new, so obviously it was all tiny at the start. I started by working out of my mum’s garage,” says Karen.

According to Creditsafe, a credit checking agency which tracks 430 million businesses worldwide, 30,199 companies in the UK were involved in some kind of insolvency action in 2023, which is 52% higher than in 2021.

“I started doing deliveries, but I cut out meat, groceries, and everything else, and just focused on fruit and veg. I grew it from 15 to 20 boxes weekly to about 50 to 75. I also used to do the odd farmer’s market. Then, I was given another opportunity to sell from the shop on a market-style basis on a Saturday morning. 

“Then, in July last year, I was offered the opportunity to take a concession in another shop, which has much more footfall. I have gone there and now sell fruit and vegetables, eggs, a little bit of preserves, and that sort of thing. That is how I’m growing it. So now I have a retail arm, plus I also have the online business,” says Karen. 

“Don’t give up”

“I still have moments where I think ‘I can’t do this. I really can’t do this’. But now, in the last few weeks especially, I can see that things are turning around,” Karen expressed.

“How long can you give yourself to try and make something successful? You can keep trying or give it up as a bad experience.”

The greengrocer expressed that she wants to have a better social life. She is working on making money back for her pension since she ‘ploughed it’ into her last business. 

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Karen has a support network that has helped her out when she needed it most. She gives a lot of credit to her daughter, Jasmine, for helping her with the greengrocer business as much as possible. When Jasmine finished her A Levels, she gave up a year of her time to help the business before she started university.

“Jasmine has been a brilliant support. My mum was a bit of a support as well. She wanted to help where she could. After my dad died, I had to step aside from the business for a little while to sort things out there. My main obstacle has never been the business itself, necessarily. The obstacles for me have been one thing after the other, problem after problem after problem. You overcome one, and then something else hits you in the face.

“But, when I first started going to the market, I had a very good friend who’s also got her own business. I used to supply her with fruit for her – I still do. She’d come to the market with me every week. I had another lady who came and just did boxes for me for a year or two. She’d just turn up every week and do deliveries for me. She never asked for anything,” Karen tells The Optimist.

According to the ONS, the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages rose by 7.0% in January 2024. This was the tenth consecutive month of falls in food inflation, down from 8.0% in December and a recent high of 19.2% in March 2023, the highest annual rate seen for over 45 years.

Being in this industry has made Karen a resilient yet sceptical person.

“I will not buy, let’s say, a box of mangoes without opening those mangoes and checking every single one. When I started going to the market by myself, I used this agent that my husband bought quite a lot from. I realised I didn’t know what I was doing. So I said to them, ‘Look, for a month or so, I want to go and do all my own buying, and I will come back to you once I know what I’m doing and where I want it to come from. Then you can do it and you can take your cut.’ So I said, ‘I’ll still buy stuff from you, but I want to buy it myself. ’ So, because we’d been buying from them for some time, I ordered a couple of boxes of stuff, and a box of Turkish cabbage.

“I loaded everything into the van and had no reason to think anything was wrong. Every other item that I bought was fine with everybody else. But then I went to put these cabbages in the fridge and found out they were all rotten. They had been hollowed out, and they were all black underneath,” Karen says, frustrated.

Due to negative experiences like this, Karen rigorously checks produce from suppliers she has not worked with in the past to avoid significant loss of produce and cash.

Karen says: “If I could tell myself anything when I started working solo in the greengrocer industry, it would probably be to ask for more help. There is nothing wrong with reaching out to people, or applying for grants like the start-up grant for women. It’s a silly thing. Because I could have been in a completely different position, you know, and if somebody was in my position personally, I would say to get all the help you can get.

“I love it. I love everything about it, even if it doesn’t always come across that way.

“If you’ve got a dream, go for it. But make sure that you’ve got a good support network.”

For more stories about people overcoming career struggles and reshaping industries for the better, check out out careers section.