Guest article by Sophie Corcut, Food Retail Sustainability Manager
In this guest ‘long read’, Sophie Corcut describes how retailer accelerator and incubator programmes have potential to be a launchpad for challenger brands, but often reinforce existing market trends. For real change, investment and resources must benefit companies capable of business success and driving a healthier, more sustainable food landscape – so UK shelves aren’t just filled with more ‘bubblegum crisps’.
When I worked for Spinneys’ Dubai, a premium supermarket chain in the Middle East, the company launched its ‘Business Incubator Programme’. It was a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style ‘elevator pitch’ opportunity for ‘challenger brands’ (young, innovative and values-led businesses) to make it onto the shelves of a big retailer.
For the successful challenger brands – I’ll refer to them as ‘winners’ – the scheme would remove all the typical barriers to entry for a new company, such as ‘listing fees’ (required for getting new products set up on supermarket systems, into warehouses, on to shelves, marketed, and so on) and provide longer-than-average stocking guarantees, giving brands enough time to raise awareness and grow sales. On top of this, the winners received additional mentoring, guidance and training, to give them the best chance of growing and scaling within, and perhaps beyond, the retailer.
The driver behind Spinneys’ Incubator was to create a new pipeline for on-trend products to attract customers through a unique and distinctive offering. But there was also a much-emphasised sustainability angle. The Business Incubator was Spinneys’ way of contributing towards community development, ‘food security’ and ‘resilience’ for the UAE. Due to the size and peculiarities of the UAE market, Spinneys’ programme did help genuinely tiny startups (some still making products at their kitchen tables) scale into successful brands listed in other supermarket chains, such as Zahra’s Kitchen (nutritious ready meals) and The Botanist (natural cleaning products).
Many winners scaled successfully, but many didn’t make it beyond the first year and were delisted. For Spinneys, therefore, there was a fair amount of risk being taken on with its Business Incubator. Valuable shelf space, time and investment was effectively being donated to the many brands that didn’t make a significant return in the long-run.
In 2024, five UK supermarkets – Tesco, Iceland, Co-op, Ocado and Waitrose – launched similar schemes, all with subtly different framings and focuses. Some use the term ‘Incubator’, signalling support for earlier-stage businesses, and others use ‘Accelerator’, emphasising support for more established brands.
Most of the retailers allude to their programmes’ wider community and/ or sustainability aims, such as supporting the growth of: “new, values-driven” UK- based businesses. There is an implication that these programmes can bridge the gap between huge retailers and small startups – tackling the notoriously complicated feat of stocking products from smaller, local makers.
Waitrose’s ‘BrandsNew Programme says its aims are: “Helping agile new producers … grow and develop to their next level.” Tesco’s ‘The Accelerator Programme’ commits to “championing up-and-coming and values-driven brands that actively give back to communities”, and The Co-op says it is “… committed to creating value in our communities…innovation, provenance and supporting local businesses is important to our members and customers.”
These programmes are indeed an exciting opportunity to tackle the ‘square-peg-round-hole’ challenge of sourcing, marketing and selling small, local challenger brands in supermarkets. Whilst supporting local food businesses, the programmes could also deliver more sustainable products into our national food landscape. Take Wildfarmed, for example (a Tesco winner), which uses only regeneratively-produced flour in all its bread and baked goods. The Tesco programme has enabled the brand to reach more people and arguably create further demand for regenerative practices.
The UK’s food landscape still skews towards ultra-processed, higher-impact foods, supplied by global food companies. According to the UK government’s 2024 Food Security Report, ultra-processed foods accounted for 51% to 68% of total dietary calorie intake in the UK, with higher consumption among children, young adults, and lower-income households. Urban Health’s 2020 assessment of the nutritional quality of 50% of the UK’s packaged foods and drinks found that 69% of supermarket products failed to meet a “healthy” standard based on the Healthy Star Rating system; 85% were deemed unsuitable for marketing to children per the World Health Organisation’s Euro nutrient profile model. And a decreasing proportion of top-selling UK grocery brands are UK-owned.
We reviewed 70 supermarket challenger brand programme ‘winners’ from recent rounds to help us answer this question. We considered, specifically, whether the winning brands are:
We did a ‘bubblegum crisps test’ as a sustainability litmus test: broadly asking, does this brand genuinely make the UK grocery landscape more sustainable in some way, e.g. positive nutrition, less packaging or regeneratively-farmed? For instance, a new, trendy crisp flavour or snack brand positioning itself as marginally ‘better’ than the rest would not pass the test.
There were some impressive winners offering exciting sustainable alternatives. ‘Fussy’ deodorant refills makes reusable personal care behaviours a reality (this is still a space with lots of room for innovation) and provides an alternative to ‘Wild’s popular refill products. There was one stand-out fairer and more ethical business: Blue Turaco, which is (remarkably) the first African farmer-owned coffee to hit UK shelves. These examples prove the potential of these programmes to drive significant change in our food and consumer goods landscape.
There were also a couple of healthy food-to-go options, including The Gym Kitchen and Urban Rajah, bringing good-tasting and healthy pre-prepared snacks and meals to the chilled foods aisle.
However, fewer than half passed our ‘Bubblegum crisps’ test. Why?:-
It is of course important to step back, and remember the purpose of such challenger brand schemes. Far from intending to change the world, they exist primarily to make supermarket shelves more exciting, appealing and relevant for shoppers. They do carry the potential to invest in communities and environments, but they fundamentally exist as a commercial platform. And these limits are understandable.
It is contradictory to the commercial logic of big retailers to take on financial or reputational risk, especially when it comes to food and drink startups where compliance risks can be undeniably weighty; health and safety, supply chain traceability, to name a few. It can be too administratively costly for a large-scale retail operation to list the small volumes produced by SMEs. And popular ‘bubblegum crisp’ type products have the great marketing sway and strong margins that retailers are looking for, versus less exciting but genuinely ‘better’ products. There admittedly needs to be a viable meeting point between the scale and objectives of a large retailer and their suppliers; the business model of a true startup and a huge retailer are often too far apart (square peg, round hole).
So how can we bridge the gap? How could the programmes continue to serve retailers’ bottom lines, whilst simultaneously achieving real sustainability outcomes? With greater bravery, for instance, could supermarkets introduce some sensible sustainability frameworks into their ‘winner assessment criteria’?
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Big Food Redesign Challenge is a strong example of what can be achieved with frameworks like the Circular Design for Food. It resulted in 141 new or redesigned products from 57 organisations in 12 countries that are designed with measurable sustainability benefits such as improved climate, biodiversity and soil health, and many are now entering the market.
There are so many possibilities and ideas to play with in this dynamic space. Tesco’s Innovation Connections scheme is a fantastic example of a programme designed specifically to facilitate sustainable transitions, and is focused on supply chain management. It connects some of the UK’s largest food producers with sustainability technology startups, such as bio-accoustic monitoring startup Chirrup.AI with Hilton, to help large scale producers better measure their biodiversity impacts. Is there something we could apply to food and drink products?
“… we find ourselves revisiting a bigger question: can a fight for shelf-space ever result in systemic change?”
To close, we find ourselves revisiting a bigger question: can a fight for shelf-space ever result in systemic change? Are we simply tinkering at the edges of a system wired against sustainability? Maybe. But we feel that any means of diversifying the UK’s shelves could help represent more makers, growers and help facilitate the nutritional transition we so badly need. In the tough economic times we find ourselves in, challenger brand programmes represent significant financial investment (Waitrose reportedly invested £2 million in its programme launch year). Money is important, but so is the time and effort dedicated to help companies grow.
We can’t help but question how these funds and resources could be shared with companies who have the potential to make a positive impact on retailers’ bottom lines, whilst transforming our food landscape for the better? So we don’t just end up with more Bubblegum Crisps…
We explored related issues around how we can create more diverse food environments in future as part of our Business Forum in 2025. For more information about our Business Forum, please click here.