Grwth

The home of ambitious brands - we have three parts to our business:

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Co-Founder

British Roundnet

British Roundnet is the National Governing Body for the sport of Roundnet/Spikeball in Britain

Member Board of Trustees

JWB Consulting 

I work with disruptive fast growth brands in the FMCG space, ranging from pre-revenue to £100M+ businesses. I advise on all areas of business strategy, brand, sales, marketing, operations, and fundraising. Clients include the likes of allplants, Grind, Tenzing, Graze, Taster, Biomel, Trip, Total XP, Fussy, Papier to name just a few.

Founder

Ugly Brands Ltd

Co Founder

graze.com

Retail Specialist Launch Consultant 

Tenzing Natural Energy

Specialist Launch Consultant

Vita Coco

Various Roles

Gourmetiz

European Food Scout

Experienced Founder, Entrepreneur, Investor, Advisor in the Consumer space. Trustee at British Roundnet.

Launched the MNC FMCG Challenger 50 at 9am this morning and literally broke the internet! 🤦‍♂️ Trying again now... (download the full report from link in comments) 

These brands are picked based on strict criteria. They are the top 50 brands that are:

•Under £100M RSV in UK retail 💰 
•In at least 20% growth YoY for at least the last 2 years 🚀 

In the report we assess, analyse, and rank them as the crème de la crème of the UK FMCG scene. 

All brands in this report are, by definition, the best of the best - but the top 10 based on our unique indexing system are as follows:

1. Au Vodka 🥇 
2. Geary's Bakeries | Jason's Sourdough 🥈 
3. Biotiful Gut Health 🥉 
4. The Gym Kitchen 🏋 
5. TRIP 🏖️ 
6= Vita Coco 🌴 
6= Pip & Nut | B Corp 🐿️ 
8. Mockingbird Raw Press 🧃 
9= Mutti 🍅 
9= Shaken Udder Ltd 🐄 

Some interesting observations by exception:

•These 50 brands average 48.9% growth YoY 📈 
•Challenger brands now account for 16% of total basket 🛒 
•24% are B-Corp ♻️ 
•38% have a female founder/co-founder ♀️ 
•88% are ‘clean label’ (rather than UPF) 🍏 
•54% are still independent 🫡 
•76% are British brands 🇬🇧 
•The oldest brand was founded in 1867 👴 
•The youngest brand was founded in 2020 👶 
•The brand in the highest growth (by a mile!) is Buzzballz, LLC / Southern Champion Sazerac UK Sazerac Company 🚀 

The report will inevitably be divisive, but I welcome any feedback, questions, challenges, and builds. There is a clearly defendable selection criteria and set of definitions and FAQ’s which should explain how we have come to these conclusions and rankings. 

Please find the link to the full report in the comments 

What do we think? Any surprises? 

I’ll be pulling out interesting observations and snippets from the report on LinkedIn over the coming weeks. 

A huge thank you to all that were involved in bringing this together, most notably NielsenIQ, Tracksuit, Beauhurst, Jake Higgins, Sam Murray, Dylan Palmer, Hattie Ward, Rachel H, Henry Whorwood, Dan Fleming, Leanne Tomasevic, Nicole Segal, Natalie Chandler, Max Willson, Patrick Barrett and Natalie Linder.

Joe Benn

Director at MNC. Exited Founder, Investor & Advisor. Trustee at British Roundnet.

"How do we know where to spend our marketing budget?" 

I must have had 20+ versions of the same conversation with FMCG challenger brands in the last few months. I literally had another one today (you know who you are 😉) 

My answer is always the same - which is there is no cookie-cutter approach. But I believe it’s imperative that you understand where your brand is in its lifecycle and in my opinion, one of the best measures for this (especially for grocery-first brands) is to think about two key metrics: 

•Weighted distribution (speak to Rachel H)
•Prompted brand awareness (speak to Dan Fleming)

With these two simple numbers, I argue any marketing team should be able to very quickly define exactly what their media approach needs to be.

The intersection of these numbers (especially within the context of your competitors) is the answer to the classic existential question that all founders and senior marketers constantly wrestle with.

It's really just a clean way to measure accurately Byron Sharp’s ‘Mental Availability, Physical Availability’ theory from ‘How Brands Grow’ but in a way that is affordable and scalable for challenger brands. 

We’ve done a deep analysis of this in the MNC Challenger 50 report being released on Friday - in short, until your weighted distribution is above 20%, it’s very unlikely to make sense to be doing major ATL activity such as OOH or TV. Your distribution is just too low and spending money driving awareness is going to be wasteful if potential customers can’t get hold of the product. On the flipside, if your distribution is over 30% (or even 40-50%) then at that point I would argue it’s dangerous and wasteful to not be supporting with strategic awareness driving media

The majority of the more successful UK challenger brands (£15M+ in RSV) have a promoted awareness within a national representative sample of between 20-40%. But if your awareness is too high, and your distribution doesn’t support it then you’re throwing money down the drain.

If you can get the balance right between these two critical numbers, this is where magic efficient growth lies 🚀

Most common things that early stage brands often get wrong:

•Creative 
•Channel Selection 
•Format Selection 
•Reach vs Frequency 
 
I don't have space to get into all of those on this post but feel free to drop me a note if you want to discuss. 

Thanks to The Grocer (link in comments) for covering this, and look out for The Challenger 50 for much more of this sort of nerdy stuff!

6 months ago, I dropped a post about UK challenger brands - and it went completely bonkers.

It was a ‘gut-feel’ take on the FMCG challenger landscape. I pulled what data I could from places like The Grocer, but honestly, most of it was me making educated guesses based on experience and pattern-spotting in the market.

The response was wild.

Thousands of comments and messages rolled in - some from people delighted to be included, and some from people fuming to have been left out. I was really not expecting it to be so divisive. And because I had no true data source, it was tricky for me to say exactly who should or should not be in the list. 

Fortunately, that post caught the attention of Tracksuit, NielsenIQ, and Beauhurst - who all reached out to explore how we could build a proper, data-backed version of the list with transparent criteria and definitions.

So after 6 months of work, conversations, modelling, and analysis…this Friday I’ll be dropping the MNC Challenger 50 FMCG 2025 report (edited - I had said Thursday, turns out I don’t understand what an embargo is 🙄)

This is not a subjective list of ‘cool’ brands.
This is a data-backed analysis of which brands are genuinely delivering challenger-level growth and disruption across retail performance AND brand metrics. 

Some of the names won’t surprise you.
Some absolutely will.

Huge thank you to everyone who helped pull this together - especially Jake Higgins, Sam Murray, Dylan Palmer, Hattie Ward, Rachel H, Henry Whorwood, Dan Fleming, Leanne Tomasevic, Nicole Segal, Natalie Chandler, Max Willson, Patrick Barrett and Natalie Linder.

The relationship between prompted awareness and weighted distribution is one of the more revealing analyses in the MNC Challenger 50 

The logic is straightforward - brands growing mental and physical availability at a similar rate (shout out Byron Sharp) sit close to the trend line (it’s no surprise that 6 of the top 7 brands are pretty much bang on-the-line achieving efficient levels of growth (Au Vodka, Geary's Bakeries | Jason's Sourdough, Biotiful Gut Health, TRIP, Vita Coco, Pip & Nut | B Corp - only The Gym Kitchen sitting slightly below but it’s marginal). 

Those above the line have awareness outpacing distribution - suggesting retail expansion should be the priority (particularly looking at the likes of DASH Water, HECK!, Pooch and Mutt etc.) 

Those brands below the line are distributed more strongly than their levels of brand awareness - a strong signal to invest in brand-building (particularly looking at the likes of Merchant Gourmet, Crosta Mollica, FOREST FEAST, Mockingbird Raw Press, Bio&Me I B Corp, MOTH Drinks - B Corp™, MOJU, St. Ewe Free Range Eggs | B Corp etc.) 

Very important to state again, ALL 50 of these brands are doing an incredible job and putting in best-in-class levels of performance - but it’s interesting to look at this data if you're thinking about growth. Worth bearing in mind, as I stated in The Grocer last week, there is no cookie-cutter approach to media for challenger brands so happy to talk to anyone about the optimal approach. 

Much as this data is fascinating and hopefully informative, there’s a few things to call out within the data set:

•Mature brands - older brands naturally have higher brand awareness and hence the formula becomes less true for the likes of Filippo Berio UK, illycaffè, Mutti, Pastificio Rana 
•DTC - the sales/distribution data does not capture DTC sales and so if you were able to capture that data accurately it might explain some of the anomalies e.g. Dash and Pooch and Mutt have very strong DTC businesses boosting their brand awareness yet not showing up on the distribution axis
•Owned Retail - the likes of COOK Trading Ltd and Daylesford Organic are also unusual in that they own their own retail stores which are not captured in the distribution numbers, skewing their placements on the graph. 
•Category maturity - you could argue, that if you are premiumising very mature categories like eggs or pizza you can get away with lower brand awareness as a lot of the conversion is done at shelf. 

So much more to say, but I’m out of word count…drop your comments/questions/challenges in the comments and I’ll respond 🤝 

Thanks to NielsenIQ and Tracksuit for the data as always 🙏 

Link to full report in the comments👇

Delighted to publicly announce our first investment from MNC Ventures - native is a unique student media and marketing platform that provides unparalleled access to Gen Z🧑‍🎓

The headlines on native:

•Exclusive media partner to 150+ university campuses in the UK🇬🇧 
•1.6M+ direct student reach🎯 
•Work with the likes of Lloyds Banking Group, Post Office Ltd, BEAUTY BAY, PureGym, Domino's, Gopuff as well as many challenger brands and local businesses™️
•Unique and exclusive access to the ‘elusive Gen Z consumer’🙋‍♀️
•US tests underway with several high-profile universities🇺🇸

Founder Nick Musto started a side hustle whilst at university, which led him to realise the entire student ecosystem was broken and that it needed fixing. Student Unions are responsible for all commercial activity that takes place on campus…BUT they are often under-funded and under-staffed meaning they’re scraping by without maximising their revenue potential. They also operate independently of each other, making it very challenging for brands and advertisers to focus their spend on universities directly. Native is the connecting network that powers campus culture and can untap the commercial potential of universities💰

It short, they do this across 3 main areas:

•Students - a one stop shop for university social life across events, societies and so much more🎓
•Campuses - driving student engagement, increasing commercial revenue, and providing valuable behavioural data to improve student retention for the university🏫
•Brands - delivering easy access to millions of students via a data driven advertising platform across both physical and digital media and on campus events™️

We were delighted to invest into native last year alongside some of our most respected friends from the investment community including the likes of RIANTA CAPITAL LIMITED, MAHR Projects, Bridford Group, VGC Partners 🤝

For MNC, native’s ability to provide a unique media offering made it a natural first investment from our fund and we’re incredibly excited to work closely with Nick to scale what we believe is a huge opportunity 🌎

If you’re a brand or agency from my network who is keen to understand how you can very effectively and efficiently reach 1.6M+ students in the UK then I’ll happily introduce you to the native team. 

If you’re an exciting consumer or consumer tech business raising money at late Seed or Series A stage, we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks The Media Leader UK for the coverage - link to article in the comments

Let's be honest, what people REALLY want to know is how these brands stack up against each other! 

A necessary caveat: inclusion in the Challenger 50 is already a huge achievement - this is already the 'Champions Leauge' of UK FMCG. 

The brand ranked fiftieth is still outperforming 99% of the market. The list is a celebration first, a competition second.

With that said, performance varies - and the data allows us to stack these brands against one another across multiple dimensions.

To distinguish between them, we built the MNC Challenger 50 Ranking - a composite score based on five key performance metrics, each ranked 1–50. The aggregate determines overall standing.

Those 5 key inputs we chose are as below: 

•Retail sales over a 1 year period
•Retail sales growth over a 2 year period
•Weighted distribution
•Prompted Awareness 
•Year Founded 

This index ranking gives us a way of ordering these 50 brands and deciding who is showing THE most impressive levels of disruption. 

Any guesses who is going to come out on top based on those 5 inputs? Prize for the first person to guess the correct brand... 

Challenger 50 will be live tomorrow morning 🥁 

NielsenIQ, Tracksuit, Beauhurst, Jake Higgins, Sam Murray, Dylan Palmer, Hattie Ward, Rachel H, Henry Whorwood, Dan Fleming, Leanne Tomasevic, Nicole Segal, Natalie Chandler, Max Willson, Patrick Barrett and Natalie Linder.

So the big question - how did we pick the MNC FMCG Challenger 50?

The full report and the definitive ranking will be revealed on Friday, but I thought I'd tease out a few of the ways we've gone about selecting and ordering these 50 brands today and tomorrow... 

Let's be honest, any ranking invites disagreement. Some people will question inclusions, others omissions, others the weighting of particular metrics. That's the nature of the exercise - and, frankly, part of the point. 

What matters is that the methodology is transparent. The Challenger 50 is drawn from UK FMCG brands meeting two clear and indisputable criteria:

•Under £100M in RSV in UK retail 💰 
•At least 20% growth YoY over the last 2 years 🚀 

The dataset is provided by NielsenIQ and covers a fixed 52 week reporting period.

These are audited figures, accepted industry-wide. Not editorial selections or subjective judgments. 

That methodological foundation is what makes the analysis in the report meaningful.

It also surfaces some surprises. Brands make this list on performance, not profile - which means the Challenger 50 includes names that may be unfamiliar alongside others with considerably higher visibility.

A detailed methodology and FAQ section appears at the end of this report for those who want to interrogate the criteria further.

NielsenIQ, Tracksuit, Beauhurst, Jake Higgins, Sam Murray, Dylan Palmer, Hattie Ward, Rachel H, Henry Whorwood, Dan Fleming, Leanne Tomasevic, Nicole Segal, Natalie Chandler, Max Willson, Patrick Barrett and Natalie Linder.

Let's take a look at the top 12 brands from the MNC FMCG Challenger 50

We built a composite score based on five key performance metrics, each ranked 1–50. The aggregate determines each brand's overall standing.

Those 5 key inputs we chose are as below: 

•Retail sales over a 1 year period
•Retail sales growth over a 2 year period
•Weighted distribution
•Prompted Awareness 
•Year Founded 

This index ranking gives us a way of ordering the 50 featured brands and deciding who is showing THE most impressive levels of disruption. Top 12 as below: 

1. Au Vodka 🥇 
2. Geary's Bakeries | Jason's Sourdough 🥈 
3. Biotiful Gut Health 🥉 
4. The Gym Kitchen 🏋 
5. TRIP 🏖️ 
6= Vita Coco 🌴 
6= Pip & Nut | B Corp 🐿️ 
8. Mockingbird Raw Press 🧃 
9= Mutti 🍅 
9= Shaken Udder Ltd 🐄 
11. Crosta Mollica 🍕
12. Pastificio Rana 🍝

If you want to see where the rest of the 50 brands and where they rank you can check out the full report here - https://lnkd.in/egq2YKKn

What do we think? Any surprises? Do you agree with the index methodology? 

A reminder - these brands are picked based on strict criteria. They are the top 50 brands that are:

•Under £100M RSV in UK retail 💰 
•In at least 20% growth YoY for at least the last 2 years 🚀 

If you're interested in the underlying data, or want to see where your brand would rank, speak to Rachel H from NielsenIQ for the retail data and speak to Jasper Skinner from Tracksuit for the brand data 🤝

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