Scarred Stag began on the hardest road I've walked — and with something I only saw clearly once I was on it.
I grew up in Jersey, close to the island's farms. It's part of the culture here to know where your food comes from, to understand the whole process, and to respect it. That was always in the background of my life. But I can't claim I spent my childhood thinking about waste — that came later, and it came the hard way.
For as long as I can remember, my life was sport. I swam competitively from a young age, training full-time and eventually reaching finals at the Commonwealth Games, representing Jersey. When that chapter came to a close, I moved into mixed martial arts — a new challenge, a new discipline to throw myself into.
Then, in 2023, a head kick in an MMA session changed everything. I suffered a brain injury that left the entire right side of my body paralysed. I couldn't speak. I couldn't feel my own limbs. I couldn't spell my own name when they tested me. For a while, no one could tell me how much of myself I'd get back.
What followed was the hardest thing I've ever done. I had to relearn how to move, how to speak, how to walk. Slowly, and then not so slowly, it came back — walking, then running, then swimming again, then speaking normally. I returned to university and finished my degree with First-Class Honours. The body and mind I thought I'd lost, I rebuilt.
Through all of it, I became obsessed with one thing: how we fuel recovery. If I was going to rebuild myself, I wanted to understand exactly what my body needed to do it. That obsession with nutrition is what led me back to the farms — and to my cousin's, where I watched some of the most nutrient-dense parts of the animal, the organs, being thrown away as waste.
That stopped me cold. Here was food as good as anything for rebuilding a body, coming off Jersey's own farms, going in the bin. The island respects its produce as much as anywhere — and still, the best parts were being lost, simply because we'd fallen out of the habit of using them.
Scarred Stag came out of that moment. It's built on a simple idea: that Jersey produces some of the finest beef anywhere, that its overlooked parts are far too valuable to waste, and that they're worth turning into something honest and well-made. Nose-to-tail, the way it used to be.