From community food to Prime Eats, how Kanndiss Riley is cooking up a free-from food revolution
For Kanndiss Riley, food has never simply been about what is on the plate.
Long before her Caribbean-inspired pies began appearing in shops, the Thanet entrepreneur was using food to bring people together through her social enterprise, NBE Fitness. Now, from Kent’s first Innovation Kitchen, she is turning that community-minded approach into a growing food business with ambitions for supermarket shelves.
Kanndiss has been running NBE Fitness (based on her nickname Notorious Big Energy) for six years. What began with personal training and fitness classes developed into a much broader programme of activities for people who might otherwise struggle to find accessible opportunities, including people living with chronic illness, disabilities and long-term health conditions.
Food was always part of the equation.
“Essentially, I always thought that food was important,” she says. “So anything that I did with NBE, I tried to provide some kind of sustenance while we’re doing the activity.”
The idea was to create a space for people to come together and enjoy holistic wellbeing on an accessible platform. So she drew on her knowledge as a carer, as a disabled person and her training in wellbeing, chair fitness and dance skills to build a range of activities offering hundreds of free sessions.
That philosophy eventually developed into supper clubs exploring more food and nutrition. One event, for example, focused entirely on mushrooms, with mushrooms featuring in the starter, main course and dessert.
But Kanndiss was also thinking about people with specific dietary needs.
“We’re looking at these different elements of culinary need and also looking at what can we make that’s fun and free-from and tastes really good,” she says.
The idea began to prove itself commercially almost by accident. The problem was that Kanndiss subsequently lost access to her kitchen. Then, in 2025, she was dealing with the death of her father and trying to work out what came next.
It was at that point that Daphne Besseling from the newly-established EKC Innovation Kitchen got in touch.
The £250,000 facility in Broadstairs was created by East Kent Colleges Group to give small food businesses access to professional equipment and technical expertise that would normally be prohibitively expensive. The kitchen opened in 2025 and is designed specifically to help entrepreneurs develop recipes, test products and scale up production.
For Kanndiss, the timing proved transformative. She arrived with an idea, a need for somewhere to cook and a growing realisation that her food could become something much bigger.
Then came the pies.
A friend tasted one of Kanndiss’s gluten-free creations and immediately wanted more.
“I’m like, oh, it’s gluten-free, so you don’t have to worry that it’s not a guilty pleasure,” she recalls. “You can actually enjoy this.”
When her friend discovered the pie was also free from egg and dairy, the reaction was immediate: “Wait, what? Can I get 500, please?”
Word spread. Another customer tried the pies. Then someone working in environmental health suggested Kanndiss consider getting her kitchen professionally approved.
Kanndiss knew she did not want to turn her home into a commercial kitchen. Instead, she went back to Daphne.
By October, she had completed the necessary food hygiene work, developed packaging and labelling and learnt how to turn her recipes into something that could actually be manufactured.
She laughs. “Until then, I was a typical Afro-Caribbean woman. I did measurements by eye, by the smell. ‘Oh, it needs more salt.’”
Manufacturing, she discovered, does not work that way.
“You must know what goes into this. It can’t be, like, just wing it.”
Working with the Innovation Kitchen team, Kanndiss learnt to professionalise her recipes and processes. The next test came quickly: the Margate Mushroom team needed food for the Spore Festival, and Kanndiss’s mushroom pies fitted the bill.
Suddenly she was making 180 pies instead of six.
“It was learning to take my recipe from, as I said, little home-baked goods that I knew how to make six and scale it up to 180,” she says.
That process has become a key part of the PRIME EATS story.
Kanndiss describes the business with the strapline ‘no stress, good food’, a philosophy rooted in her own experiences of dietary restrictions.
“Eating out with allergies can be stressful,” she says. “You’re always double-checking labels or waiting for a special menu. I wanted to make that experience easier for others through my food.”
PRIME EATS is built around Caribbean-inspired flavours while also catering for customers looking for free-from options. Its pies range includes flavours such as Saltfish & Jackfruit and Curry Goat, while the vegan range includes Mushroom & Spinach, Irie Jerk pie made with jerked tempeh, vegan gravy and caramelised onion, and a Sweet Peach pie.
The business produces some 200 pies every two weeks, supplying chosen local shops, making deliveries and attending markets and events.
The pies are stocked at The Grain Grocers and the African House Market in Ramsgate, while Kanndiss continues to seek additional independent retailers.
The technology behind the production is just as important as the recipes. Kanndiss’s pies can be cooked, baked and blast-frozen, allowing them to be transported and stored frozen for extended periods. She says the products have already travelled as far as Texas.
The Innovation Kitchen has also introduced Kanndiss to a side of food production that particularly appeals to her: the science.
“I think also where the Innovation Kitchen sparks me as somebody who worked in tech is the tech that you can do, is the innovation, is the way that food melts with science,” she says.
It is an interesting second chapter for someone whose childhood was shaped by cooking. Kanndiss’s father was a chef, while her mother enjoyed foraging, and she remembers making mulberry pies and apple turnovers with ingredients gathered locally.
She eventually pursued technology rather than food, fascinated by the rapid changes in computers. Now, she finds herself combining the two worlds.
PRIME EATS is still closely connected to the social mission that came before it. Kanndiss’s Soul Food Fridays initiative has provided meals and knowledge for people from underserved communities, with the project currently paused while she searches for a suitable venue.
In the meantime, the commercial business is growing. Kanndiss’s next major goal is to secure her own production premises.
“At the moment, you know, we produce everything at Innovation Kitchen and then we move it to our storage unit, and it’s just so hard having two places,” she says.
She hopes to have her own kitchen by 2028, potentially sooner, where she can manufacture and store everything under one roof and work towards full gluten-free certification.
Beyond that lies a much bigger ambition and Kanndiss has already spoken with Ocado and says she wants PRIME EATS eventually stocked by major supermarkets.
The challenge will be scaling without compromising the principles that brought the business into existence - food that is accessible, carefully produced and, above all, enjoyable.
“I want people to have no stress,” Kanndiss says. “I want them to have confidence in us being ‘free-from’.”
For now, that journey is being cooked up batch by batch in Broadstairs.
The ambition may be national, but the recipe remains rooted in community.
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