William Gordon-Harris has stepped down as chief executive of Knoops, the British premium drinking chocolate and coffee chain, after more than three years in the role. He first joined the business in 2019 as executive chairman and took the chief executive position in 2023, overseeing domestic expansion, international launches and multiple investment rounds.
The departure appears in World Coffee Portal’s monthly round-up of senior appointments across the industry, which is a useful document to read in sequence rather than as isolated items. The same series this year has recorded a leadership reset at Costa under Coca-Cola, a new global talent director at Pret, and a drive-thru operator in Colorado assembling a growth team from former chief executives of other chains.
Read as a set, those entries describe an industry moving executives between brands at a rate that says something about where everyone thinks the growth is.
The Knoops story has a particular shape worth isolating.
In early 2025, the company made four senior appointments at once. Jo Brett, who spent 22 years at Pret A Manger including nearly five as US president, then led Hotel Chocolat Saint Lucia and ran Starbucks for the Alshaya Group across the Middle East and North Africa, joined as chief operating officer. Kai Hepworth, previously operations director at Marston’s, Costa Coffee and Bill’s, became UK managing director. Andrew Gerrie, formerly chair of Hotel Chocolat, came in as chair, and Martin Long, former chief executive of Game Group, joined as a non-executive director.
Gordon-Harris’s own comment at the time was that their choice to work at Knoops should be taken as a clear signal that the company was set for high-paced global growth. The stated ambitions were more than 120 UK sites by 2028 and a longer-term notion of 3,000 globally.
Eighteen months later, the person who recruited all of them has stepped down.
There is nothing sinister in that sequence. It is one of the most common and least discussed arcs in entrepreneurship, and it usually looks like this: a founder-operator takes a business from a handful of sites to a real brand, correctly works out that the next phase requires a different set of skills, goes and hires people who have run much larger things, and then finds that the company he has built now has a management layer that does not need him in the way it once did.
Doing that deliberately is an act of discipline. It is also, for most founders, a slow and uncomfortable discovery, because the hires that make the business bigger are precisely the hires that make the founder’s role smaller.
The question worth asking well before that point is simple and rarely voiced. If I hire the person who can do the next stage better than I can, what exactly is my job the following year?
There are good answers. Chairman. Product. New markets. The thing nobody else can do.
The answer just has to exist before the hire, rather than after it.
Source: World Coffee Portal, “Coffee industry senior appointments: September 2026”
