VoyageKC Features Brit Boy Street Food Founder Chris Thomas
How a lost business, two redundancies in the same afternoon and an 18-month-old son turned into a British pie company in Kansas City.
Brit Boy Street Food ·
VoyageKC ran a long interview with Chris in October 2025, and it covers ground we’d never really put on our own website — mostly because it isn’t the comfortable version.
Read the full interview on VoyageKC →
The bit most people don’t know
The usual founder story goes: loved cooking, followed the dream, opened a business. Ours had a harder middle.
Chris and Lizzie ran a promotional marketing company together for more than ten years. Covid took it. They both went and got corporate jobs — as it happened, at the same company.
Then, just before Christmas, they were both let go within minutes of each other. No warning, no reason given.
Brit Boy exists because of that afternoon. As Chris put it to VoyageKC: “when life gives your lemons, you make sausage rolls”.
Where the cooking came from
Chris’s mum was a home economics teacher, which explains rather a lot. Cooking was in the house from the start, and it stayed a hobby for decades — right up until it had to be something else.
He came to the States on a soccer scholarship in 2007 and started cooking properly at college to save money, working from what his mum used to make. Everything on our menu still traces back to that.
It’s self-funded, and it’s a family
Two things from the interview worth stating plainly, because they explain how we operate.
There’s no investor. Brit Boy is being run entirely from Chris and Lizzie’s own savings. No loan, no outside money. Lizzie took a commission-based sales job at the same time we launched, partly to look after the family and partly to keep this going.
And they did it with an 18-month-old. Which anyone who has had a toddler will recognise as an act of either courage or madness, and possibly both.
That’s why we’re careful about growing at a pace we can actually stand behind. There’s no runway to burn.
What we’re building towards
Chris told VoyageKC where this is heading: the frozen section of your grocery store.
That’s the ambition. Right now you order online and collect at one of our pickup spots around the metro, or we ship it overnight anywhere in the fifty states. The next step is shelves.
The protein numbers in the interview are worth repeating too — 55 to 72 grams a serving depending on which pie, because the filling is meat rather than a thin layer of it under a lot of pastry. More on why our pies have no crust.
The advice bit
Asked what he’d tell someone starting out, Chris’s answer was about consistency rather than ambition — that the moment you take your eye off quality, you lose customers, and a lost customer doesn’t come back.
Which, from a man who lost one business and started another, is worth listening to.
The full interview is on VoyageKC. More about where we came from on the about page.