Makin Mighty Challenger Growth Podcast: Retail, sales and commercial thinking for underdog food and drink brands.

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Jason Gibb has spent ten years running the room that most UK food and drink founders eventually end up in. He co-founded Bread & Jam in 2016 after a decade running his own food business, and since then he has watched thousands of brands try to get from good idea to real commercial growth.

So he has a decent view of where they get stuck, and he does not soften it.

In this episode he walks through the three walls he sees again and again. At £1m, the founder is the business and cannot duplicate themselves. At £5m, it is delegation and cash, and whether you can hire heads of department you actually trust. At £10m, the risk flips: you have got the systems, and now you are quietly turning into a steady SME while the thing that got you there fades out.

He is also blunt about margin. A lot of brands are launching on weak margins with a plan that says scale will fix it. Jason has been doing this ten years and says he has never really seen that happen. Simon's position is similar: launching low is fine, as long as you can point at exactly where the improvement comes from. Blind hope is not a strategy.

There is a good chunk on retailers too, why buyers are not the demigods founders make them out to be, what they are actually under pressure to deliver, and why the half hour you spent two weeks preparing for was a diary slot to them.

And a genuinely good answer on being stuck that has nothing to do with spreadsheets.

In this episode...

- The three walls: what actually stops brands at £1m, £5m and £10m, and what changes at each one
- Why weak margins rarely fix themselves at scale, and the only version of "launch low" that holds up
- The LinkedIn problem: why raise fast, scale fast, worry about profit later has warped how founders think
- Humanising the buyer: what retailers are measured on, how little time they have for new products, and why "they're just rude" is usually wrong
- What retailers still do not understand about underdog brands, including founders who have not paid themselves in years
- Why it is completely fine to build a £500k or £1m business and stop there
- The brands Jason thinks are quietly doing brilliantly
- Being stuck in your work is not the same as being stuck in your life

Guest details...

Jason Gibb, co-founder of Bread & Jam. He set up Bread & Jam in 2016 with his co-founder Tara, after running his own food business (an olive oil brand, started 2004) for ten years. Bread & Jam runs events through the year for UK food and drink founders, where brands can meet buyers, investors and other founders. This year they ran the Breadwinner Competition, an investor pitching competition: hundreds of brands applied, 42 pitched live on stage, and the winner walked away with £70k of services in kind plus investment from angels. In 2027 they are running Bread & Jam Festival in March and FMCG Week in the autumn.

Links, offers & contact details...

- Bread & Jam events: Bread & Jam Festival

Makin Mighty...

Makin Mighty helps underdog food and drink brands sell like the big players do. Twenty years in FMCG, six of them inside a £16bn food business, now working fractionally with founders who are outgunned commercially and done with bad support.

Stuck and not sure what to fix first? Email Simon and ask for the **MOT Lite**. It is free, it is a short set of straight questions, and you get back a clear read on the biggest thing holding you up.

If you want the full picture, the **Mighty MOT** is the proper commercial health check. Around half an hour of your time, and within a week you get back the three things costing you most, what to do about each one, and an honest read on whether you need outside help at all. £795 + VAT at mightymot.com, and £495 + VAT when you run it again six to twelve months later.

Follow the show so the next episode lands when it goes live.
LinkedIn: Simon Greenwood-Haigh | LinkedIn
Web: makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

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Fliss Newland left Mondelez, the business behind Cadbury and Maynards Bassetts, and took over a small vegan sweet brand called Veggie Bears. She rebuilt it as Wild Thingz: natural fruity gummies with half the sugar, a Venus flytrap on the front, and the energy of a Haribo rather than the apologetic look of a health brand.

Two years in, the thing she keeps coming back to is how much cheaper it is to get things wrong now than it will be later. Her line to her team is that if they are not making mistakes, they are not swinging big enough. Test on packaging, test on messaging, learn while a wrong answer still costs you very little.

The commercial spine of the conversation is pricing and what founders choose to measure. Wild Thingz uses premium ingredients and has deliberately not let that turn into a premium shelf price, launching a more competitively priced range this year to meet shoppers where they actually are. And when Simon asked what founders overrate, she did not say marketing or packaging. She said distribution, or more precisely, shouting about distribution instead of watching rate of sale and repeat.

In this episode

• Why pivoting is the job rather than a failure, and how to do your learning while the stakes are still low
• Rate of sale and repeat rate over distribution, and why founders shout about the wrong number
• Premium ingredients without a premium price, and the unsexy cost of goods work most brands skip
• Why she stopped positioning Wild Thingz against the category leader, and what she does instead
• Taking a niche vegan brand mainstream without leading on what is missing from the product
• Why taste is the most underrated thing in food and drink, and the most skipped
• Building a business around flexible working, trust and the motherhood penalty
• TikTok Shop, shiny objects, and knowing when your customer simply is not there
• Where to start when you have a good product and no momentum

Guest details

Fliss Newland, founder and CEO of Wild Thingz. Former Mondelez International executive. Took on an existing vegan sweet business and relaunched it in January 2025 as Wild Thingz, making natural fruity gummy sweets with around half the sugar of a standard bag. Team of five. Stocked on Ocado via the Ocado Roots programme, Amazon, Whole Foods Market, WH Smith travel and Asda Express.

Links
Wild Thingz: Low Sugar Sweets Kids Go Wild For | Wild Thingz

Makin Mighty
Makin Mighty helps underdog food and drink brands sell like the big players do. Twenty years in FMCG, six of them inside a £16bn food business, now working fractionally with founders who are outgunned commercially and done with bad support.

Stuck and not sure what to fix first? Email Simon and ask for the MOT Lite. It is free, it is a short set of straight questions, and you get back a clear read on the biggest thing holding you up.

If you want the full picture, the Mighty MOT is the proper commercial health check. Around half an hour of your time, and within a week you get back the three things costing you most, what to do about each one, and an honest read on whether you need outside help at all. £795 + VAT at mightymot.com, and £495 + VAT when you run it again six to twelve months later.

Follow the show so the next episode lands when it goes live.

LinkedIn: Simon Greenwood-Haigh | LinkedIn
Web: makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

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Emma and Kenny started Hip Pop in a kitchen in Manchester, making kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut and fermented chilli sauce for market stalls. Today the brand is in Sainsbury's, Tesco, Co-op, Waitrose, Morrisons and Boots, plus Bidfood, Brakes, Matthew Clark and LWC, with a growing business across Europe.

Getting there took two name changes, a full repositioning out of kombucha, and one very bad few weeks in 2023 where a broken canning line nearly took the whole thing down at exactly the moment they were launching into Sainsbury's.

The problem they kept hitting is one a lot of founders will recognise. Retailers were not saying no to the product. They were saying no to the category, because they already stocked a kombucha brand. Emma and Kenny decided that if the category was the blocker, the category had to change. Booch & Brine became Booch & Brew, then Hip Pop, and the brand repositioned as a mainstream soft drink with better ingredients rather than a specialist ferment. That gave them permission to sit in much bigger spaces on shelf.

Simon also gets them into the bit most founders never talk about publicly. The move that fell through at the last minute. The polytunnel on a farm that an insurance broker pointed out could be broken into with a pair of scissors. The canning line that ran for an hour and then went down for eight. And the £300k line that arrived from Calgary in three weeks because a supplier decided to help.

If you are sat with a brand that is not quite working, or a category that is holding you back, there is a lot in here you can use.

In this episode...

- Why retailers saying "we already have a kombucha brand" was a category problem, not a product problem
- How Hip Pop repositioned as a mainstream soft drink and what that opened up commercially
- The name test that killed around 200 options, and why trademark availability in the UK and US shaped the final choice
- Choosing to be good at one thing, and dropping the kimchi, sauerkraut and chilli sauce to do it
- Bringing in advisors who know more than you do, including Grenade co-founder Juliet Barrett, and how a peer intro made that happen
- What actually happens when a national listing and a factory move land in the same month
- Why making everything yourself is running two businesses at once, and how Hip Pop moved to co-man while keeping the ferment in house
- The hires that turned it into a proper operation
- Their advice for founders who suspect the brand they launched is not the brand that will win

Guest details...

Emma, co-founder of Hip Pop. Emma started making fermented drinks and foods after returning from time in America, originally to help Kenny with his gut health. She created the kombucha that became the first product, came up with the Hip Pop name, and led the brand through two rebrands.

Kenny, co-founder of Hip Pop. Kenny was the original customer before he was the co-founder, swapping diet soft drinks for something easier on his gut after years of IBS. Described by Emma as the connector in the business, he drove the strategy of bringing experienced advisors and operators into a young company.

Neither founder came from a food and drink background, which shaped how they built the business.

Hip Pop is a Manchester based soft drinks brand making fizzy pop with real fruit, fibre and live cultures. It began life as Booch & Brine, then Booch & Brew, before relaunching as Hip Pop. Stocked in Sainsbury's, Tesco, Co-op, Waitrose, Morrisons, Boots, Bidfood, Brakes, Matthew Clark, LWC and a long list of independents, with a growing international business across Europe.

Links & offers...

Buy Naturally Refreshing Drinks | Hip Pop
20% Off Code: HIPPOPMIGHTY

Makin Mighty...

Makin Mighty helps underdog food and drink brands sell like the big players do. Twenty years in FMCG, six of them inside a £16bn food business, now working fractionally with founders who are outgunned commercially and done with bad support.

Stuck and not sure what to fix first? Email Simon and ask for the MOT Lite. It is free, it is a short set of straight questions, and you get back a clear read on the biggest thing holding you up.

If you want the full picture, the Mighty MOT is the proper commercial health check. Around half an hour of your time, and within a week you get back the three things costing you most, what to do about each one, and an honest read on whether you need outside help at all. £795 + VAT at mightymot.com, and £495 + VAT when you run it again six to twelve months later.

Follow the show so the next episode lands when it goes live.
LinkedIn: Simon Greenwood-Haigh | LinkedIn
Web: makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

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Getting on shelf is hard. Staying there is harder, and it is the bit nobody talks about.

Stu Macdonald started ManiLife after meeting the Argentinian family who have grown his peanuts since day one. A decade on it is one of the most respected brands in its category, made in its own facility because it genuinely cannot be made in a normal peanut butter factory. Stu is also unusually straight about the fact that ManiLife was stuck for the first eight years.

In this conversation he explains what actually keeps a brand listed, why he now tells early-stage founders to start smaller than they want to, and the counterbalance he wishes he had hired years earlier.

In this episode...

- What keeps you on shelf: relationships, data and storytelling, and why the buyer needs tools to convince the people above them
- Why it is harder to reverse a bad story from 800 stores than build a good one from 50
- The production constraint that nearly killed ManiLife and then became the reason the product is good
- Founder energy without operational counterbalance, and what eight years of that costs
- Burning out after a record year, and why working harder had stopped working
- Overrated: brand marketing with no permanence. Underrated: a genuinely good finance and ops thinker, early
- "Are you raining into a bucket or onto porous soil?"
- Great product, no momentum: the 1,000 true fans route, and what that looks like in D2C and in retail

Guest details

Stu Macdonald, founder of ManiLife. Started the brand roughly a decade ago as the UK's first provenance-led peanut butter, working with the same Argentinian growing family since day one. ManiLife is produced at its own facility in Shirebrook using a process developed by accident in a rugby club kitchen. Stu stepped back from day to day running of the business after appointing an ops and finance director as MD.

Links, offers & contact details...

- ManiLife: ManiLife - The Peanut Butter People | Natural, Delicious Peanut Butter
- Discount code: MakinMighty20
- Product Simon recommends in the episode: ManiLife Deep Roast

Makin Mighty

Makin Mighty helps underdog food and drink brands sell like the big players do. Twenty years in FMCG, six of them inside a £16bn food business, now working fractionally with founders who are outgunned commercially and done with bad support.

Stuck and not sure what to fix first? Email Simon and ask for the MOT Lite. It is free, it is a short set of straight questions, and you get back a clear read on the biggest thing holding you up.

If you want the full picture, the Mighty MOT is the proper commercial health check. Around half an hour of your time, and within a week you get back the three things costing you most, what to do about each one, and an honest read on whether you need outside help at all. £795 + VAT at mightymot.com, and £495 + VAT when you run it again six to twelve months later.

Follow the show so the next episode lands when it goes live.
LinkedIn: Simon Greenwood-Haigh | LinkedIn
Web: makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

Send us Fan Mail

Series 2 starts on Tuesday 6 October.

The podcast has a new name. The Challenger Sessions has gone, partly because it was trying a bit too hard for a man sat in a small office in St Helens, and partly because it told you nothing about what the show is actually for.

The first series finished five months ago. Since then Simon has been working with brands, sitting in buyer meetings, building sales plans, negotiating and getting things wrong, which is where most of the material for Series 2 came from.

Series 2 goes deeper into the things that actually decide whether a food or drink brand grows:

- How to approach buyers, and why nobody replies to your emails
- What retailers actually say yes to
- What happens after you get the listing
- Negotiation, pricing, distribution and rate of sale
- The commercial decisions founders have to make before they can afford a proper sales team

Founders, buyers and operators, plus plenty of Simon telling you how he thinks this stuff works. You are very welcome to disagree.

New episodes every Tuesday for twelve weeks, starting 6 October.

Follow the show and the first episode will land on its own.

**Makin Mighty**

Makin Mighty helps underdog food and drink brands sell like the big players do. Twenty years in FMCG, six of them inside a £16bn food business, now working fractionally with founders who are outgunned commercially and done with bad support.

Stuck and not sure what to fix first? Email Simon and ask for the **MOT Lite**. It is free, it is a short set of straight questions, and you get back a clear read on the biggest thing holding you up.

If you want the full picture, the **Mighty MOT** is the proper commercial health check. Around half an hour of your time, and within a week you get back the three things costing you most, what to do about each one, and an honest read on whether you need outside help at all. £795 + VAT at mightymot.com, and £495 + VAT when you run it again six to twelve months later.

LinkedIn: Simon Greenwood-Haigh | LinkedIn
Web: makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

Send us Fan Mail

What do retailers actually want from challenger brands — and what gets you ignored instantly?

In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Chris Otto, who spent nearly 20 years at Co-op in buying roles and leading buying teams across frozen, impulse and grocery.

We get into:

•  what “challenger” really means from a retailer perspective 
•  why challenger brands matter to retailers (innovation, energy, relevance, younger shoppers) 
•  what gets a buyer’s attention vs the red flags that get you filed away 
•  how busy buyers really are (new supplier volume + existing supplier workload) 
•  what successful challengers do operationally and commercially once listed 
•  how to think beyond the first 6–12 weeks and build incrementally over time 

If you’re pitching retail — or trying to stay listed — this is essential listening.

Link:
 www.makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

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AI is everywhere in sales right now — and most of what people are doing either turns into spam, or it’s so complicated nobody uses it.

In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Craig — founder of Cheesies and a commercial operator/consultant turned AI practitioner — about how challenger brands can use AI to sell more without losing their human edge.

We cover:

•  why sales is one of the safer career paths in an AI world (and what will actually change) 
•  the biggest misuse Craig sees: generic inputs leading to generic output 
•  a practical “start here” setup (Claude Pro, global instructions, connectors, and better prompting) 
•  how to keep AI outreach human, on-brand, and believable 
•  what Craig learned building Cheesies: focus on a single audience and spot early traction signals 
•  what he’d do differently if starting a brand today with AI agents from day one 
•  Craig’s new venture, The Expedition, helping FMCG leaders integrate AI properly 

Link:
 www.makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

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Getting listed is exciting. Staying listed is the hard bit.

In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Ja and Jag, founders of Superfoodio, about what really drives rate of sale once you’re on shelf.

They share practical, founder-level tactics on:

• why availability is the first battle (and how brands get caught out)
• early retail mistakes you only learn the hard way (including a barcode issue that nearly got them pulled)
• what they do first in a new retailer to drive volume
• activations that actually shift units (not just look good online)
• building store colleagues into brand champions when you can’t be everywhere
• how packaging becomes your salesperson when you’re not in store
• why improving 1% at a time through data and feedback loops keeps momentum going

If you’re a challenger brand trying to win once you’re in retail, this is gold.

Link:
 www.makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

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How do you make a 200-year-old heritage brand behave like a modern challenger — without losing what made it famous?

In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Josh Daly, who helped take Grey Poupon from being “in the wilderness” to behaving like a brand with a clear point of view.

We get into:

• why Grey Poupon got delisted (and why that was actually useful context)
• how to spot duplication and pull away from the incumbent
• what was sacred (product quality, the jar) vs what had to change (tone, audience, comms)
• fast, scrappy insight gathering (farmers’ markets, real conversations)
• the tactics that moved the needle: a challenger campaign, relevant creators, merch, and smart use of data
• what Josh would do more of, less of, and avoid completely

If you’re trying to modernise a legacy brand or sharpen differentiation in a crowded category, this one will land.

Link:
 www.makinmighty.com

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]

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Early-stage founders often try to rush to “perfect” — perfect branding, perfect plans, perfect decks — before they’ve sold a single unit.

In this co-hosted episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh and Scott Cramner unpack what “good enough” really means for challenger brands, and why perfection is often just procrastination dressed up as strategy.

We cover:

• why selling early beats endless planning
• where you can compromise (and where you absolutely can’t)
• why big brands still launch products that flop, even after loads of testing
• the difference between being “rough and ready” vs being careless
• a useful mental model: “precisely wrong vs roughly right”

If you’re building a challenger brand and feeling pressure to look bigger than you are, this episode is a reset.

Link:
 www.makinmighty.com 

If you found this useful, please share it with someone building a food or drink brand who’d get value from it.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok or Instagram for clips and extra insights: just search for @MakinMighty

And if you’ve got a question you’re wrestling with right now (brand, growth, retail, positioning) email it in. We’re collecting real questions from founders and we’ll use those to shape future episodes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time

[email protected]