How To Grow A Food Business with Relish Marketing

What do army ration packs have to do with baby food? Quite possibly, the answer to combining nutrition and convenience in a category that’s come under a lot of scrutiny recently.

Ed van der Lande was an officer in the Household Cavalry with a young family back home when he had a simple thought: if it works for a soldier, why couldn’t it work for busy parents? He wrote the first recipes himself while deployed overseas, based on the meals he cooks for his own children. The result is More Toddler Meals: tomato and cheese maca...

Cooking sauces have a reputation problem. For years the fixture's been written off as the bland, play-it-safe aisle that skimps on real flavour. Shoppers walk past on their way to a ready meal, because a jar just doesn't feel like it can deliver a proper katsu, a proper puttanesca, or a proper anything. So how do you change expectations and stand out?

Owen Potts, co-founder of cooking sauce and stock brand Potts Partnership, has spent nearly twenty years building the brand and range. Working from the belief that convenient shouldn’t mean flavourless, Owen and his wife Mi...

Helen Johnston spent decades leading British magazine publishing before a health diagnosis transformed her career. Learn how autoimmune illness, nutrition retraining, and two years of R&D led to SUCSEED - a functional food business built on organic, regenerative sourcing and real nutritional science. Discover what food founders can learn from her precision approach to product development, branding and positioning.

Built through nutrition training, expert collaboration, and careful sourcing from organic and regenerative farmers, SUCSEED combines seeds and herbs such as nettle, dandelion, ginkgo, and moringa into four versatile blends. Helen has grown the brand through trade s...

What if food, rather than supplements, was the first place to go when your energy is low, your body is struggling, and your immune system needs support? That's the founding philosophy of Oshomo's Mimi and Camilla, two friends who've created an amazing food business and scaled through farmers' markets.

Their food-as-medicine approach grew from cooking for Tibetan lamas and Ayurvedic doctors. After lockdown cancelled their restaurant plans, they pivoted to run at seven to eight London farmers’ markets each weekend, building loyal customers - including a top-secret list of high-profile, A-List celebrity clients.

They selling vi...

What does it really take to bring a genuinely new food category to market? Alex Epstein is the founder of Messy Face, a delicious, clean-label spread made from grape molasses and sesame tahini. His route to founding it took in business school, two software exits, a stint on The Apprentice with Lord Sugar, a failed hair care company, a decade building a business from a broom cupboard to a £300m sale, and one transformative moment in the unlikely setting of Utrecht.

In this episode, Alex talks candidly about what it actually feels like to launch a genuinely ne...

Anna Gorman never set out to start a food manufacturing business. After 20 years in hospitality, she opened a vegan café - two weeks before the first lockdown. However, it would lead her to create a product that Vegans simply love and many thought was impossible to get right.

With time on her hands, she decided to crack something notoriously difficult: vegan Yorkshire puddings. Seven weeks of trial and error later, she opened the oven to find they'd finally worked. What started as a menu item for her 30-seat café became a nationally distributed product when customers began as...

What happens when a doctor, an engineer, a financial controller and a farmer start a drinks business? How do you start a vodka brand when you don't know how to make it? How did their creamy, smooth potato-based vodka win a raft of awards before they'd even sold a single bottle?

In this episode, Jo Densley dives into the journey of Nine Tines, the premium spirit that's putting Yorkshire on the vodka map. Founders Gwen Bromley and Richard Smith (the doctor and the engineer) explain how their passion for Yorkshire's landscape and produce inspired them to craft...

The Marshmallowist was the UK’s first producer of gourmet marshmallows. Marrying innovation and indulgence, they’re like nothing you’ve ever tasted. Led by sisters Oonagh and Jenny Simms, their first stockist was Harvey Nichols, and they were soon featured in Vogue. They’ve joined The Hairy Bikers on TV, published a book, and this year were stocked nationwide as part of Marks & Spencer’s Mother’s Day activity. How have they done it?

Join Jo Densley as she explores the journey of The Marshmallowist, how they’ve built a team, and kept focused on inventive flavours and a...