Health is wealth: have gut-friendly brands and functional foods finally gone mainstream?

Just hours after Defra published its 10-point plan for healthier food, this year’s Bread & Jam Festival showcased that, for the food industry at least, health is most definitely wealth. 

Among the 700 brands in attendance at the festival – now the UK’s biggest event for challenger fmcg brands – function was king. Brand upon brand brought some kind of new health bonus, as founders raced to catch the eye of supermarket buyers or angel investors, all too aware of the public’s rising appetite for added health benefits.

That shift in focus may not be entirely voluntary. An early appearance from former food tsar Henry Dimbleby could not have held a starker warning of the changes needed to the food industry – something Defra’s plan hopes to address.

“The forces acting on the food system might be about to rip it apart,” he told the crowd, painting a ghoulish image of an industry that simultaneously obliterates nature and forces obesity on people without the time or money to avoid it, leaving five-year-old children with type 2 diabetes.

Still, Dimbleby offered hope in the form of the potential revolution offered by GLP-1 appetite suppressants, and rapid advancements in the study of both gut and soil health offered by AI.

For a crowd that might well be the future of the food industry, it could have not been more pertinent.

Health food vs healthy food

One sure trend was the shift in emphasis from ‘health food’ – medicinally packaged, heavy on the scientific credentials – to delicious food and drink that just happens to be healthy.

“We’ve really found that functional benefit is an add-on,” said Al Overton, partner at Wonderland Ventures, a brand consultancy for health, wellbeing and sustainability businesses.

“[Consumers] aren’t going to buy the product for the function, they’re going to buy it for the taste and experience. Then they feel better about the purchase – and are more likely to try it again because of the benefit.”

Well aware of that shift, entrepreneurs are actively trying to push their products away from niche placements on the ‘free-from’ or ‘healthy’ shelves and into prime retail estate.

“The most important thing is shop position,” said Giulia Berretti, founder of Sunny & Luna, an Italian fresh pasta brand made with 50% vegetables, which made it into the final of the Investor Pitch competition.

She explained that the company had intentionally decided to leave some of its health benefits – such as ‘gluten-free’ or ‘high fibre’ – off the packaging.

“We’re gluten-free, but we belong to the fresh pasta [aisle]. We’re not a ‘free-from’ product,” she said.

It’s a shift that Grenade co-founder Juliet Barratt also saw back in 2010, when the protein and supplement brand threw off the category’s old science-based branding with a bang.

“To start with, we did go into the sports nutrition aisles, and the sports nutrition buyers wanted to keep us there, because [our products] were selling like wildfire. But we wanted to be in mass-market food, in the confectionery aisle, and it was a little bit of a battle to get listed in the right places.”

Everyone wants more

Sunny & Luna was not the only veg-stuffed option at the show, with fellow challenger Slice of Life also making it into the final: the Tesco Ireland-stocked frozen pizza offers consumers three of their 5 a day thanks to its cauli-flour crust.

Both lost out to Belly Dance, a kefir soda whose founders wowed investors with their promise of six billion live cultures in each can, and an assurance that the drink could conquer market share from established drinks brands.

The value-add of these nutritional benefits – especially when there’s no compromise on taste – will play a key part in the downfall of ‘healthier’ reformulations. At least according to Cathy Moseley, founder of Boundless Activated Snacking, which specialises in fermented ‘activated’ gut-friendly crisps, nuts and seeds.

‘Better for you’ products will be a “thing of the past,” she said, dismissing reformulations that boast of less salt or sugar.

“For consumers, it’s not about ‘less’ any more. It’s about more. It’s like yoghurt: low-fat yoghurt is terrible for you, full of emulsifiers and sugar, because they’ve taken out the fat. Everyone wants more.”

It’s all part of the increasingly intense struggle to get off the ground as a start-up. And with over 1,100 guests at Bread & Jam, brands are locked in competition for a handful of listings, or the attention of an even smaller number of investors.

Over 260 brands pitched to 50 retail buyers; and of all those that applied for the pitching competition, just 36 were able to pitch on stage to the festival’s 20 investors. Outside the festival doors, the odds are much, much slimmer.

“It’s harder and harder [to be a FMCG founder], and at the same time more and more exciting,” said Fiona Fitzpatrick, host of the Brand Growth Heroes podcast and consultant to small brands trying to make it big.

“It’s quite difficult to just gently be on the scene and survive,” she said.

Whether or not they feel that pressure, Bread & Jam’s guests certainly had the confidence to match their ambitions. And if we’re going to meet Dimbleby’s vision of a healthier food industry, they’ll need it.