A taste of home thanks to Shrewsbury entrepreneur

It's hard to feel sorry for British expats sunning themselves in exotic foreign climes.

While we toil and labour back in the lashing rain of a very English sort of drought, they fill our Facebook timelines with pictures of themselves swanning about on Australian beaches, or in bars where you can grab a crisp, cold beer for a mere scattering of pennies.

But all the sunshine and apparent carefree happiness in the world doesn't stop them coming out with the occasional gripe. More often than not, it tends to be about Marmite.

Now a Shrewsbury teenager is coming to their salvation.

Katie Smith set up Tastes Marvellous last year to send food packages to people living in foreign countries who are missing the unique delights of British cuisine.

From sending Bisto to Thailand to selling Marmite in Massachusetts, she enjoyed such success shortly after setting up in October that she had to take the site down during December so she could catch up on a backlog of demand and put processes in place to make orders flow more easily.

Now, aged just 18, she expects the company to turn over £600,000 in its first year of trading as expats across the globe come head for her website to get access to all their favourite home comforts, and last week she won British Independent Retailers Association's Young Retailer of the Year Award.

She said: "I spent three years in Saudi Arabia between the ages of four and seven because my dad worked on irrigation out there. We used to go to Tesco and get our Bird's custard, our jelly and our shepherds' pie mix from there when we were back, and that's where the ex pat idea came from."

Her family moved back 11 years ago, and she attended Shrewsbury High School until last summer, when she went to Loughborough University to study economics.

Three weeks later, though, and Katie was back in Shropshire, having decided she had no desire to finish her university studies, preferring instead to launch tastesmarvellous.

co.uk as a subsidiary of her mother's company, cookware shop Cooking Marvellous.

It took off fast, and she now has her first member of staff working specifically for her company.

"I was always dilly-dallying about going to university, but all my friends were going," she said.

"I never really wanted to go, it was always in the back of my mind that I would come back and do something like this.

"It's great fun. I spend every single working hour doing it. I started putting things on the website, and it instantly went crazy. Now we are getting up to about 100 orders a day.

"It's all the very British brands – Marmite, Bovril, PG Tips, all the things I missed when I was living in Saudi Arabia.

"My dad travels a lot for his job, and says to me that his friends all miss Yorkshire Tea. It's about putting those types of products on.

"Food is such an emotive topic that every order we get comes with a story – people saying things like their gran used to use this particular Yorkshire pudding mix and they can't get it.

"It started when a woman in Thailand ordered a cake tin from Cooking Marvellous, and asked us to send her a packet of Bisto as we were sending the package. It sort of snowballed from there, turning it into what it is now."

America and Australia have been the most active locations for orders, although some have come from within the UK, mainly from people who wanted to send packages abroad but didn't want to put them together themselves.

Europe, and in particular France, has also proved a common destination for her food packages.

One particularly hungry expat in Saudi Arabia ordered 40 boxes of Curly Wurly chocolate bars, 10 boxes of Pot Noodles, plus a tin of Tate & Lyle treacle.

Brown sauce, sachets of powder to make into cooking sauces, and Minstrels chocolates have proved to be similarly in-demand products for Brits abroad.

The process involved is simple – she picks up goods from local shops, apart from popular products which are shipped in direct from suppliers including Unilever, Kraft and Mars.

While similar businesses do exist elsewhere in the country, Tastes Marvellous works in smaller shipments, meaning expats don't need to build a 10 kilogram box of goods to justify getting their fix of yeast spread.

So, with the experience of living abroad and going without her favourite goods already behind her, what would Katie order if she was looking at the company from the other side of the fence?

You can almost hear her lips smacking when she says: "Curly Wurlys. Maybe some Milky Way Stars. That's what I'd have, plus a jar of Marmite."

And she's away: "It's little treats, mainly. Lots have Colman's sauce sachets – it's a taste of home. I'd like parsley sauce to have with haddock – delicious."