Goat Rodeo Goods: Meet the Founders

What started with a surplus of cucumbers and a Christmas market stall has quickly grown into one of Scotland’s most distinctive food brands. Founded by Kat and Lucy, Goat Rodeo Goods is built on bold flavours, a strong sense of personality and a refusal to take food too seriously. We caught up with the duo to talk chaotic beginnings, building a brand on their own terms, why a good pickle can go a long way, and of course... Dua Lipa's fridge.

We met in February 2023. Lucy was in the woods, next to a fire, cooking a whole lamb over it. That sums up Lucy pretty well. 

Before Goat Rodeo, Kat worked in publishing and as a food writer and photographer, and Lucy was a private chef with a background in business development + export for food startups. We founded Fodder + Farm together, a farm-to-table events company, and spent the next year cooking and hosting events together.

What brought us to Goat Rodeo was frustration - but not just with condiments. It was with food culture more broadly. Everything felt so worthy and serious and a little bit pretentious.There wasn't much room for people like us, who just loved food and wanted to have a laugh with it. We wanted to build something that actually represented who we were.

One day we were offered surplus cucumbers from a local Scottish producer. Way more arrived than we had really anticipated, and so we had to dig out the old thinking caps and get creative with flavour. Kat's American and had been missing a decent cucumber pickle for years, so it didn’t take much convincing to make them.That first batch sold out in weeks, and Goat Rodeo Goods was born.

Initially, it was going to be a side hustle to our farm to table event business Fodder + Farm. We made that initial batch of pickles and spice blends for our 2023 Christmas Market at the farm. They sold so well, we planned to do a slightly bigger batch the next year. Heading into August 2024, we still thought it was going to be a side hustle, but when that run of pickles (that we’d hoped would last the whole year) sold out in 6 weeks, we knew very quickly it was going to be all Rodeo all the time.

A “goat rodeo” is an American slang term for a chaotic situation that you just sit back and watch unfold. We are based on a goat farm (Kat lives on the farm) and, if you know anything about goats, you will know that they are unpredictable and always up to trouble. The name felt like a great way to honour both our roots here, as well as our love for fun and unpredictability. 

It really is a match made in heaven. Lucy has a strong vision for where the brand should go - both drawing from her experience working in fast moving food and drink companies previously, as well as her incredible natural talent with food. Her experience as a chef means she can lead NPD alongside driving the commercials for the business forward.

Kat comes from a publishing background, which means we are able to do all of our design and photography in house, really enabling us to build the vision for the brand exactly as we want it to be. She’s also a natural systems thinker, which has meant we can build strong foundations as we scale across the business. 

What makes it work is that we're wired completely differently - but more than that, we're each other's biggest fans. Lucy is thinking about what we make and where we're going. Kat is thinking about how we get there. We don't step on each other's toes and we don't have to explain ourselves to each other. When you find that in a co-founder, you don't let go.

While we have definitely refined it over time, we knew from the beginning we wanted something really colourful, really graphic, and very fun. We never want to take ourselves too seriously and we wanted something that really brightened up a dusty shelf. We really have put both of our personalities into the brand.

The name came first and once you've decided to call your business Goat Rodeo Goods, a certain amount of swagger is non-negotiable. It gave us permission to be bold - with the visuals, the product names, the copy, all of it. We leaned into it hard and we've never looked back.

We've sadly had to put Fodder and Farm on the back burner as Goat Rodeo has grown - not least because our event barn is now full of cardboard, spice tins and glass jars.

But Fodder and Farm is really where everything started. It was built around the same thing Goat Rodeo is built around: a love of generous, fun, unpretentious food and bringing people together around it. The frustration we felt trying to source exciting condiments for those events is literally what led us to make our own.

We'd love to bring it back one day. The soul of it runs through everything we do.

When we first started out, the aim was to source everything as locally as possible. We quickly learned that the manufacturing infrastructure in the UK has been degraded so badly by decades of underinvestment and prioritising the cheapest food possible that the equipment and suppliers required to grow the brand just simply isn't there.

So we've had to be pragmatic. For us, sustainability isn't a badge - it's a set of decisions we make every day, and sometimes those decisions are messy. We'd rather be honest about that than pretend we've got it all figured out.

In practice it looks like this: we source our cucumbers from British growers where we can, we work with local producers wherever the supply chain allows, and we're constantly pushing to reduce packaging and waste in production. But we also recognise that scaling a food brand responsibly sometimes means making trade-offs, and we'd rather make them transparently than hide behind marketing language. As we’ve grown it’s not always feasible for us to source local - or even British.  We are always thinking about the bigger picture. The more we build a business around fresh, seasonal produce, the more we advocate for how important it is and how much better it tastes, the more we help create a market for it. A rising tide raises all ships - and if GRG can be part of preserving fresh veg commercially viable at scale, that feels like the most meaningful contribution we can make.

And that extends to how we operate as a business too. We're a rural employer, we pay our staff properly and we take seriously what it means to build something in a part of Scotland where that matters. The rural economy needs businesses that invest in it, not just extract from it.

We think it's pretty impossible to be based here and not influenced by our surroundings.

As a nation the Scots are known for their great sense of humour, we like to think we’ve embodied a bit of that across our brand.

Kat - As a family, we are huge fans of the Mhor Group based up Callendar way. From their incredible sandwiches at lunchtime from the Mhor Bakery to killer Sunday brunch overlooking Balquhidder Glen at Mhor 84, just can never go wrong.

Lucy - Ooh Havn bakery in Bridge of Allen make the most phenomenal pastries!

Our salty b*tch kimchi salt actually originated from a batch of kimchi that was on the turn - fermented a bit too long and was turning quite sour. We just thought we'd try and see what would happen if we dehydrated it and made it into a seasoning. Now it's one of our biggest sellers. It makes no real commercial sense to ferment something for that long just to dry it down, but my goodness, is it delicious!

Honestly? We're probably the worst people in business at actually stopping to celebrate. There's always something next on the list. We've had some genuinely brilliant milestones - launching into Dobbies, getting onto the shelves at Oliver Bonas - and we were straight onto the next thing before the paint was dry.

The one that really gets us, though, is the team. Watching people who came to work for a tiny Scottish food brand actually become friends - hanging out together outside of work, genuinely investing in what we're building - that's the stuff that means something.

Oh, and getting spotted in Dua Lipa's fridge. That was pretty fucking amazing.

Early on, we outsourced our production to a third-party manufacturer based in Fife. It was a disaster. The quality was terrible. The communication was terrible. The entire batch was a write-off. In many ways, it was the best thing that could have happened because it taught us how important building our own supply chain is and how important resilience across the business is. But holy cow, we would never wish that stress on anyone.

More pickles, more fun, some exciting collaborations and fewer naughty goats. Definitely fewer goats.

Keep up with the Goat Rodeo journey by following them on Instagram, @goatrodeogoods! You can also grab some of the amazing Goat Rodeo Goods products in-store at our Stockbridge shop, or by heading to our online store.