A business offering a service like no other is booming in Bridport, moving to a bigger premises and offering even more.

Gorilla Canning started in a unit at St Michael's Trading Estate has now expanded its stock and warehouse and can now be found at Gore Cross Business Park.

The idea behind the sustainable business came from Pete Bechervaise while he was working with friends in London at their street food company.

"We were trying to use all sustainable packaging, so getting rid of plastic and looking at different alternatives," he said. "We wanted to serve fresh drinks but you could only get plastic cups and the more environmentally versions weren't that brilliant. It turned out cans were the most sustainable drinks packaging.

"We thought it would be brilliant to can our own drinks but nothing at that time existed to enable us to do that, so we dropped the idea. We stopped doing that business and I was trying to think about what to do next and I thought of this.

"The idea was to let businesses sell takeaway drinks in cans, it's more sustainable than all the alternatives and the technology you need to do it is a can steamer, a machine that puts the lid on aluminium cans."

Pete designed a prototype can steamer, tested it with a few initial customers and it proved to be popular.

He moved back to his hometown of Bridport and started his new business venture.

Pete added: "Places like St Michael's don't exist in London, so where we don't need footfall customers, we need good engineering suppliers, relationships with local manufacturers, and even if I wasn't from here, Bridport would have been a good town to choose."

In January, Gorilla Canning was able to expand and move to Gore Cross Business Park, as well as develop a second canning machine, which is being launched in May.

Gorilla Canning was a lifeline during lockdown for Bridport-based cocktail bar DarkBear, which was able to deliver cocktails to customers' homes.

Lloyd Brown of DarkBear said: "It absolutely saved us, Pete reached out and asked if we would like to borrow a machine in lockdown, and without it we would have certainly gone under.

"Locals really took to the canned cocktails and it was really uplifting to drive round on a Friday and deliver to everyone from Axminster to Dorchester.

"Now we are back open, we offer the cans to take away from the bar as well as delivering locally and posting UK wide."

The company has also supported national and international clients, including Diageo, which owns Johnnie Walker Whiskey and as well as the canning machines, Gorilla Canning can also provide personalised cans with customers' branding.

The name Gorilla Canning is due to Pete's love of wildlife.

He said: "For a long time I've had a fascination with natural history and wildlife conservation, so the name was always going to be animal related. Since founding the company we've said that as soon as we are able to, we would like to contribute to conservation in some manner. In May we will be donating 5p from every can sold to two charities that work on Gorilla habitat conservation in Uganda."

To find out more, visit gorillacanning.com