Fuel 10k on How To Approach International Business Development

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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 things right. And in the food industry, there are a hell of a lot of things that can trip you up. But the thing is, they are mostly things that don’t need to trip you up if you know about them in advance, if someone explains to you how something works, or points something out to you that has often gone wrong for them in the past.



Something I’ve done throughout my career is to have collected a bunch of seasoned food entrepreneurs who I have built lovely relationships with, and whom I can call out of the blue to ask them who the best distributor in Germany is for Chilled, what margin I should expect to give to Spar in Switzerland, or whether sampling in Carrefour is worth the investment.



One such person is Barney Mauleverer. Barney cut his teeth in the food and drink industry during the first 5 years of early stage Innocent Drinks. In his last role as European Manager he headed up a new international strategy at Innocent to scope out new opportunities in Europe. In 2006, Barney left innocent to seek a more entrepreneurial route of his own and set up Fresh Marketing with his school and uni mate Alex Matheson.



Fresh Marketing is an international business development consultancy and distributor. It was founded on spotting new innovations in food and drink that often emerge in the US and then head ‘East’. Product types include smoothies, premium crisps, cereal bars, flavoured popcorn and breakfast granola. Fresh Marketing has been involved in the overseas development and distribution of some of the UK’s fastest growing consumer food and drink brands including Innocent Drinks, Eat Natural, Burt’s Chips and more recently Candy Kittens, Deliciously Ella and a number of other high potential start-up brands. Fresh Marketing currently supplies over 40 international markets!



in 2013, Barney and Alex launched their own protein boosted breakfast brand FUEL10K. FUEL10K is now stocked across all the major UK retailers and many convenience and food service customers. Self-funded from the start and with a brilliant team of 19 FUEL10K turns over £12m at retail sales value.







Listen to Barney share his 20+ years experience on how to approach international business development, how he felt saying No to 2200 stores in the USA, how long his upcoming deal in Australia took to close and much, much more…