Brand Growth Heroes

In 2016, Tenzing was the first Natural Energy drink to be launched on to the UK market, and for the past few years, it has been the LEADING Energy drink in terms of growth, and is (at time of recording) turning over between £5-6M in UK retail sales. It's founder, Huib van Buckel has an illustrious career in Energy Drinks, including 8 years at Red Bull, where he was Head of Marketing for Holland, U...

Not happy with the alcohol free beers on the market, Luke Boase spent 741 days in research, travelled over 7,500 miles and brewed nearly 60,000 litres of beer before he came up with what he calls the definitive alcohol free lager, which he called Lucky Saint. The  multi award winning 0.5% pilsner launched in the On-trade in October 2013... And after only a year, Lucky Saint. was listed in over 150...

If you’re thinking about building the kind of food business that creates its very own category, where it continues to win for years to come, then you need to listen to this episode where we interview Cullen Allen, co-founder of Ireland’s original insurgent food brand, Cully & Sully. In this interview, you’re going to learn what an obsession with product really means; the common mistakes that C...

Hello everyone! In celebration of hitting 10.5K downloads, welcome to the first UPDATE episode of Brand Growth Heroes podcast, where I'm going to spend just 5 minutes or so telling you what you can expect over the coming months. I'm really excited to share some big launch news right at the end, so don't go anywhere just yet! First of all, I can't believe that it's nearly 18 months since the first...

So here’s a question for you: Which grocery category of non-edible products do you shop making increasingly careful choices around the products’ ingredients, choosing your favourites based on something very akin to flavours, looking for additive free or organic options, and even buying different versions of the product to cater for different members of the household? For me, there are quite a few...

Across the Western world, the Carbonated Soft Drinks category is experiencing real transformation… thanks to the sugar backlash, the resulting sugar tax and the fight against plastic. I recently heard that the majority of fizzy soft drinks sold in the supermarkets now contain no or low amounts of added sugar, which really surprised me. For a category that has been built on the white stuff for over...

The case study in Category transformation that is on everyone’s lips right now is Oatly . But did you know that Oatly has been around for 30 years in the Dairy Alternatives Category? It’s only really in the past 5 years that something has changed massively, at least in the UK market. In 2016, Oatly’s UK revenue was around £6M, but this year they are looking at hitting around £75M! If you want to k...

Mark Mulhern is a Brand Performance Coach with a spectacular CV in brand advertising and through-the-line Marketing investment. He’s worked agency-side for the past 20+ years managing advertising accounts worth £100M of pounds and dollars, for clients such as Mars, Unilever, McDonalds, Amazon, Virgin and Sainsbury’s. If you’ve listened to the first few episodes of Series 1 of Brand Growth Heroes,...

How many of us eat chocolate or other cocoa-based products without realising – and this is deadly serious – that we could be unwittingly funding child labour and even child slavery in West Africa? Almost a year ago, we interviewed Ben Greensmith, the UK country manager of Tony’s Chocolonely, and we heard how this amazing company is trying to change the cocoa industry and eradicate child labour and...

It’s tough times out there for many brands. Even for the lucky ones who are seeing an increase in sales due to the current situation, future plans are up in the air and investment in growth is on pause, with so much depending on how things pan out over the next few months. We wanted to find out what’s happening in the world of investment & funding for brands with big growth plans: have most pu...

Buymie was conceived when Founder Devan Hughes learned that the £9bn online retail grocery industry in UK & Irl, was loosing over £300M per year…and he reckoned it was therefore ripe for disruption. Buymie is a mobile-first, on-demand grocery delivery platform enabling consumers to order any grocery or household item from local stores using their mobile device, and get them delivered in as lit...

In Episode 5 of Series 1, we spoke to Sam Dennigan, founder of insurgent frozen brand STRONG ROOTS , which offers tasty plant-based food designed for busy lives. Sam promised to come back on the show and update us on how their impending launch in the USA went…which he does in this episode. Shortly after we recorded our update, Covid 19 hit, so we recorded a further section on how the current crisi...

We’re going to spend the next few episodes exploring how growing Food & Bev. businesses are coping with the current crisis, the kind of help they need, and some of the resources available to help them.  In this episode we’re talking to Jason Gibb , one of the co-founders of Bread & Jam . Once an annual business festival for Food & Beverage entrepreneurs, now Bread & Jam is helping...

LISTEN AND RATE THIS EPISODE ON ITUNES HERE Listen to this episode on Spotify HERE If you’ve listened to the first few episodes of Series 2 of Brand Growth Heroes, you probably know that one of the themes we are exploring is the BRAVE decisions that food & Bev founders sometimes have to make. In this episode we’re talking to Paul Brown, CEO and Founder of BOL Foods , a fast growing chilled foo...

  LISTEN AND RATE THIS EPISODE ON ITUNES HERE Listen to this episode on Spotify HERE We’re going to spend the next few episodes exploring how growing Food & Bev. businesses are coping with the current crisis, the kind of help they need, and some of the resources available to help them. In this episode we’re talking to Jamie Mitchell, Founder All Together, an initiative offering CEO-CEO coachin...

In this episode, we're talking to Tom Szaky, the 38 year old founder of Terra Cycle, the world’s leading company in the collection and reuse of the non-recyclable stuff we all throw away every day . Think turning Colgate toothpaste tubes into school playgrounds, or enabling P&G to offer money off coupons to consumers in return for their dirty pampers, which are then recycled into new materials...

  LISTEN AND RATE THIS EPISODE ON ITUNES HERE Listen to this episode on Spotify HERE and on STITCHER here         If you’ve listened to the first few episodes of Series 2 of Brand Growth Heroes, you probably know that one of the themes we are exploring is the BRAVE decisions that food & Bev founders sometimes have to make.       Creating Tansformational Growth depends on getting a lot of thing...

Pippa Murray founded Pip & Nut in 2015, out of a passion for running and a love of nut-butter, but not finding exactly what she wanted on the market.   The range is now sold in more than 5000 stores and is the fastest growing nut butter in the UK. Last year, the company was named Fasttrack 100s "one to watch" and The Evening Standard has named Pippa as one of London's most influential people!...

Giles Brook, renowned CEO, Entrepreneur and Investor has built up probably the most superb CV in the food and beverage industry, not to mention a supurbe portfolio of investments.  Giles has been behind the growth of numerous insurgent brands – Innocent, Bear, Vita Coco, Pip and nut to name but a few. He is currently CEO of Vita Coco (for Europe Middle East and Africa) - which he launched over 10...

UGLY DRINKS was founded by best friends Hugh Thomas and Joe Benn in 2017. Coming from Vita Coco, they were concerned at the lack of healthy or unsweetened- options in the soda category for the average family. UGLY is a range of sparkling water that is flavoured but unsweetened, in brightly coloured, potentially iconic CAN, and is setting out to challenge the Ugly Truth behind Big Soda.     Ugly’s...

L'entretien originale avec Nicolas Chabanne (episode 9) en francais.   C'est Qui Le Patron est une marque alimenaire multi-catégorielle qui était créée et est gérée par des consommateurs francais, afin de garantir des prix équitables aux agriculteurs et aux producteurs. Elle a été lancée il y a 3 ans sur l'un des marchés d'épiceries les plus traditionnels, les plus inflexibles, les plus difficiles...

How do you grow a brand to €120M in sales in only 2.5 years, launching 30 products, and revolutionising more than a few grocery categories along the way? And how do you achieve household penetration of 11 million French households, with NO advertising, NO field sales, and very little traditional negotiation with grocery buyers? When you consider that this is happening in France - one of the most i...

How do you grow a Chocolate brand to €70m in Sales without ever spending a penny on advertising? How do you get into EVERY SINGLE Sainsbury's store in the UK at launch...and account for over 35% of Chocolate sales at Wholefoods UK within 16 weeks?    Listen to Ben Greensmith of Tony's Chocolonely tell us about THE most authentic and meaningful brand promise in Food and Bev - the serious attempt by...

Who manages to create and build not 1 but 2 insurgent food brands that transform categories and what shoppers expect from their supermarket aisle? That's right, James Averdieck of The Coconut Collaberative and GU Chocolate Puds! Listen to James describe the drivers of the transformational growth he has experienced with both his businesses, from the importance of having people with Food Industry ex...

Did you know that it's NOT a Coke or a Pepsi-owned brand that holds the title of the UKs best-selling functional drink, but an Irish brand called VITHIT! I really enjoyed talking to my old buddy and fellow-Irishman Gary Lavin, Founder of this super-charged, low calorie vitamin drinks range https://www.vithit.com. I’ve known Gary and followed VITHIT's progress for over 15 years, and  what really in...