Our story
It started with a rolling table and a frying pan.
A family-run carp bait company from Southampton: unique recipes, fresh eggs, and the finest ingredients.
Just like vegetables, we steamed our boilies.
Five years on
Hear it from Ben & Tom
How it started, what we did differently, and where ParkerBaits is going next.
Where it started
Two brothers, one pot of savings
Ben Parker’s grandad got him fishing, and bait became the obsession. Mum and Dad never fished, but they soon knew all about the bait. Whenever they went out, Ben had a rolling table, boiling homemade baits in a frying pan and stinking out the house. Mum used to go nuts.
His brother Tom was the technical one, always on the computer and good with numbers.
Both brothers ended up working at the same theme park, Ben for 15 years and Tom for nearly 10. Great jobs, but not as happy as they could have been. They wanted a business they could call their own. Driven by passion. Every month they each put a couple of hundred pounds into a joint pot, without knowing yet what it was for.
Then Covid put them both on furlough. With time on their hands, they went on long walks and kept coming back to the same idea. Ben had the bait, and he was already filming fishing vlogs. Tom had the head for business. They could make this work.
In 2021, the pot bought their first machine, handmade in the Netherlands, and ParkerBaits started in Tom’s garage. Ben went full-time first, and Tom followed once the orders took off.
That garage is now a factory in Durley, with bigger machinery, a great team, and a massive drying container.
This facility now processes hundreds of orders every week, which are sent across the UK and also to 100+ Parker Baits stockists.
Timeline
How we got here
From a rolling table to over 100 shops
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Early days
A rolling table and a frying pan
Ben’s grandad gets him fishing. Whenever Mum and Dad go out, the rolling table comes out, and the house fills with the smell of homemade bait.
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2019
The Parker Brothers press record
Ben filmed his sessions and put them on YouTube as the Parker Brothers.
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2020
Lockdown walks
Covid puts both brothers on furlough. Long walks turn into long talks, the talks turn into a plan, and every spare pound goes into the savings pot for one thing: our first bait machine.
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2021
Parker Baits is born
In June, the company is formed, our long-awaited machine arrives from the Netherlands, production begins in Tom’s garage.
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2021
Going Full-Time
Ben leaves his job to roll bait full-time, and our first unique product, the Match The Hatch Wafter, follows.
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2021
Testing the ingredients
We tested countless ingredients, blends and flavours, refining each recipe until we found the perfect combination.
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2021
Open for orders
In August our website goes live and the first orders come in, packed by hand in Tom’s garage.
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2022
It takes off
About a year in, the orders take off. We hold our first Open Day.
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2023
Our First Trade Show
On the stand at The Big One Show. Two days of show deals, bait chat and meeting anglers face to face.
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2023
Magic Beans launch
The launch of Magic Bean Wafters quickly made it one of our most popular products.
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2023
New Events
We began running social events at Linear Fisheries, where we set a new Oxlease Lake record with a catch weighing 48lb 7oz during one of these events.
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2024
Shelf Life launches
Enough of you told us you only got a corner of the freezer, so we launched shelf life: the same recipe and fresh eggs as our freezer bait, ready to keep in the car or the garage.
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2025
600 at the Open Day
We’re on the stand at the Trade Shows, CineCarp TV spends a day at the factory for The Industry Explored, and 600 of you come to the Open Day.
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2026
Five years on
From Tom’s garage to well over 100 shops and fisheries around the UK, including Angling Direct, Total Fishing Tackle, Todber Manor and Linear Fisheries.
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Today
Still rolling
Bigger machinery, the same family, and every batch still on a ten-day cycle from roller to bag. Next up: expanding again.
Doing it differently
Two baits. No shortcuts.
Boilies were everywhere, so we knew we had to do something different. We steam our bait instead of boiling it, and we dust every bait we make rather than just rolling a boilie and bagging it.
Our first unique product was the Match The Hatch Wafter, in OG Fish and OG Fruit & Nut. Five years on, it’s still one of our top three best-sellers every month.
We kept the range to two baits, one fishmeal and one fruity birdseed. That’s all a carp angler needs, and two baits is what we can keep exactly right, batch after batch.
OG Fish
Squid, octopus and hot chilli, including fishmeals like LT94 and CPSP90. Robin Red gives it that famous deep red colour.
OG Fruit & Nut
Chocolate-orange, peanut and coconut flavouring, including ingredients such as tiger nut meal and peanut flour. When crushed, it smells remarkably like a Snickers bar.
Both share blood plasma, birdseed, cereal, and a superfood mix made just for us. None of these ingredients is new. The difference is the grade we buy and the balance we’ve used. Our unique spice blend for the OG Fish is incredible.
Around them sits the rest of the range: hook baits including our Magic Bean Wafters, Pellets, Flat Spot, Magic Dust, and ParkerParticles, prepared batch by batch by Turbo at Particle Paradise.
Our customers are an absolute priority. But the customer isn’t digesting the bait; the fish is. So the fish is our number one priority.
How it’s made
What goes into every batch
Everything that happens before a bag reaches you.
Mixed by hand, in-house
We make our own base mixes here in the factory, so we know every ratio in every batch.
Real eggs, shell and all
Class A whole eggs, never powder. We’ve gone through 10,000 in a single week, and the shell goes in too for calcium and crunch.
Steamed, not boiled
We lab-tested both from day one. A short steam keeps far more of the goodness in than boiling, and gives a softer bait.
Double-dusted
Once off the roller and again after the steamer, with unique blends similar to our Magic Dust. The baits bleed colour and leave a halo on the bottom.
Dried naturally
Depending on the time of year, we dry baits for a couple of days in our drying room, out of direct sun, ensuring they dry evenly.
Kept apart
OG Fish and Fruit & Nut never share trays, because some of our customers have nut allergies. Everything is cleaned daily.
Fresh, every time
Every batch goes from roller to bag on a ten-day cycle, just as it did in week one. That’s why the dates on our shelf-life bags are shorter than most.
Freezer or shelf life, same bait
Same recipe, same eggs. Shelf life just gets the smallest possible amount of bait preservative. Finding that level took over a year of mouldy batches and test bags hidden around Mum and Dad’s house.
Packed with care
Every bag is weighed by hand, barcoded and batch-numbered. Freezer orders leave on a next-day service and never on a Friday, and we reuse our egg boxes and recycle packaging with local businesses.
Tested, not guessed
We check our work
Early on, we sent our bait to a lab for the numbers (protein, fat, ash) and tuned the recipes until they were right. We’ve got a lake on site too, so we can put bait to the ultimate test and monitor real feeding responses.
That’s how we learned OG Fish is lower in fat than Fruit & Nut, which makes it the more digestible bait through winter, whatever the old rule says. Watching carp by drone, we’ve seen them clear one flavour off a spot and leave the other, then do the opposite on another day.
That’s why we’ll always tell you to try fishing both baits.
The community
From five orders to a thousand
In the early days we packed five to ten orders at a time, each with a little note: “Big love, Ben and Tom, enjoy the bait.” The first 20kg order got an excited phone call between the brothers.
About a year in, it took off. We were relentless with stories, vlogs and TikToks, jumped on TikTok Shop early and started a Facebook community group. Now 20kg orders will land every day, with a few hundred more on top, and on Mondays we walk into a thousand orders!
The community is what we’re proudest of, and there are no egos. Seasoned carper or just picked up a rod, big following or none, everyone’s welcome here.
Today you’ll find us in over 100 tackle shops across the UK, including Angling Direct, Total Fishing Tackle, Todber Manor and Linear Fisheries.
The team
The people behind the bag
Ben Parker
Co-Founder
Tom Parker
Co-Founder
Steve Blacklock
Head CREATIVE & COMMERCE
Theo Hill
Head Bait Production
Ian Rome
Head Operations
Jay Hockley
Media & Marketing
Toby Wheatley
Particle Production
Bob
Pellet Production
Isaac Henry
Fulfilment
Michael Sanderson
Fulfilment
Paula Henry
Fulfilment
Max Harris
Fulfilment
Neil
Production Operative
Plus the rest of the team, and our ambassadors out on the bank up and down the country.
More than just bait
Come and fish with us
The Open Day, our lake socials at Linear and the trade shows we’re at are all on the events page, with dates and tickets as soon as they’re out.
What’s next
Not running before we can walk
The bigger machinery is in, and we’re expanding again. Ask Tom where we’ll be in five years and he’ll tell you: a bigger factory, more staff, an even bigger community, and one of the biggest bait companies in the UK. After that comes Europe, where anglers and fisheries in Germany, France and Holland are already asking.
It’s the same bait and the same beliefs we started with. Thanks for backing us.