Megan Rossi and Jon Walsh: grocery’s odd couple on never selling out

Jon Walsh got in at 4am on the night of this year’s Grocer Gold Awards. “Let’s just say I was a little bit tired and emotional,” he laughs. But the over-zealous celebrations were well deserved. A rare double win in SME Brand of the Year and Entrepreneurs of the Year for Walsh and his co-founder Dr Megan Rossi was the culmination of six years of hard work on their gut health brand Bio&Me.

“There’s a lot of awards out there, but only two or three really count, and the Grocer Golds is one of them,” says Walsh. “It’s changed the way retailers look at us. Our reputation in the food industry has gone up.”

The self-confessed “odd couple” met back in 2018, when industry veteran Walsh was at Meadow Foods and selling dairy products to Leon, where Rossi was developing a gut health range. “I remember thinking: ‘This guy’s really annoying’,” Rossi laughs. “But I knew he’d get a deal done. He was so persistent. I thought: ‘If I go into the food industry those are the skills I’ll need.’”

Australian nutritionist and dietician Rossi had become “obsessed with the gut” since losing her beloved grandmother to bowel cancer. Having found online fame as The Gut Health Doctor after moving to King’s College London, Rossi had been thinking about launching into the food industry. “I was very much a scientist,” she says. “I had the idea, but no clue how to get into retail, manufacturing, all that jazz.”

“There’s been so many health claims that weren’t true. Bio&Me is my way of saying sorry about Sunny D”

Walsh jokes that he turned up like “a knight in shining armour”, before admitting the “biggest thing” that got him interested was Rossi herself – her expertise, passion and, perhaps most importantly, her credibility. It’s a word the pair return to again and again. Credibility is one of the key factors, they say, in the brand’s success. Rossi says Kellogg’s and Nestlé had approached her about potential gut health ranges. “You got offered a lot of money,” Walsh chimes in.

“But it got quite clear they just wanted my name for brand slapping vs actually being able to change the formulation,” Rossi says. “I couldn’t be a hypocrite and say something was good for the gut when it wasn’t.”

Rossi’s attention to detail led to numerous “not quite arguments” while the pair were working on their own product. They went through 42 versions of Bio&Me’s first recipe. “I knew we needed to hit a certain price point so it would sell, but I was also certain that if we stood by these principles people would believe in the brand and healthcare professionals would come on board,” Rossi says. “I think that’s now one of our core USPs: so many healthcare professionals believe in the brand because we haven’t sold out. Having credibility is so important nowadays, more than ever before, and I think that’s really helped us.”

“Well the brand has proven it, hasn’t it?” adds Walsh. “The great British consumer, God bless them, is pretty cynical. There’s just been so many health claims that weren’t true. I used to work on Sunny Delight for Christ’s sake. So, you could say Bio&Me is my way of saying sorry about Sunny D.”

Mission-led brand building

The brand quickly struck a chord with buyers. Within a year of the pair starting to work together in January 2019, Bio&Me was listed in Booths, Planet Organic and Waitrose, with Sainsbury’s following soon after. Revenues hit £20m in its latest yearly figures, and it’s now stocked in more than 50,000 stores.

So, what’s their secret? Rossi thinks “being a mission-led brand” is key to their success. “What makes you work 14 or 15-hour days? For me, it’s knowing we are legitimately helping the masses improve their gut health, which we know is connected with mental health, heart health and more. But it also filters down to the team, who feel like they really are helping people.”

Walsh points out the team also owns 10% of the company. “So, if at any point there is a sale, they would all benefit. And I love that,” he adds. “There’s a reward for them because they’re doing the hard work, so they deserve it.”

Walsh also feels “the world’s changed quite a lot” in recent years. Retailers were “very wary” about startups because “so many let them down on the supply side”. This meant Walsh and Rossi were grilled on whether they could really do it. “We were told a lot: ‘If you let me down, I will never forgive you.’”

When that side of things goes well and targets are hit, “all these growth plans come out” and “it’s incredible”, reveals Walsh. “Nowadays, I think retailers realise they can differentiate themselves through challenger brands, so the pendulum has swung. Our timing was very good, but there’s a message in there about bloody hard work and how you’ve got to do the basics right. If you let them down, you’re out, and it’s your own fault.”

Rossi and Walsh also admit their timing was perfect for the health trend and that GLP-1s will be “good for us”. But brands like Bio&Me were also visionary in their own way – not too many were talking about gut health back in 2019, after all.

“When we launched, gut health was a bit ‘too science’. People were like: ‘You guys are talking about poo and farting, and you’re a food brand. What is this? It doesn’t sound mass market.’ But we were resilient, we kept with our key messages like plant diversity, and it gained traction as the science education came through from us and from others,” Rossi says.

As ever, though, the question of price rears its head when discussing whether these health gains are attainable for “everybody”. Bio&Me and Deliciously Ella offer the most expensive granolas in Tesco, for example, in terms of price per kg.

“If I start to sound violently defensive, then kick me,” Walsh laughs. “But our rates of sale in Tesco are close to double those in Waitrose, and we’re very proud of that. We sell really well in Asda and Morrisons. We do have what I would call a small premium because we’ve got better ingredients than anybody else. But bloody hell, have we worked hard to keep that as small as we can. We started off at £3.75, and in seven years we’ve moved to £3.95. We’ve seen big competitors put through three or four price increases in that time.”

The next year will see overnight oats and a new kefir join the Bio&Me roster in November, as well as “a more sciencey launch” in a new category in Q1 next year, according to Rossi. There’s also “two markets where we’re very well advanced” for international launches in 2027, says Walsh, one of which “you might be able to guess from Megan’s heritage”.

When asked where they would like the brand to be in 10 years’ time, Walsh looks at Rossi and gives a jokey sigh: “She’s going to say every country in the world…”

His business partner duly obliges. “My dream is to leave a legacy with Bio&Me – for it literally to be in every single country,” Rossi says. “That means at some point we’re going to need to team up with a big food company. People always ask me as a scientist if I’d do that. But I know we need a big company to get us into all those countries. We really want to take on Kellogg’s and show them: you should have listened to me!”