The thinking behind the system.
Free to read, written from the supplier side of the desk. Start anywhere; they stand alone.
Getting into Coles is not the goal. Surviving your first range review is.
Winning the listing feels like the finish line. It's the entry fee. Around half of new grocery products don't survive year one, and it's decided at the review, not the pitch.
The seven numbers a buyer checks before your meeting
Your buyer forms a view before you finish your first slide. They check the same seven numbers, in roughly the same order, and most founders only prepare for two of them.
The margin you keep
A $5.99 product returns its founder about 89 cents. Here is the arithmetic that produces that number, and why the buyer already knows yours.
Your buyer is not a gatekeeper. They're an employee.
Fifteen years across the table taught a duller and more useful truth than the dragon myth: buyers have a scorecard, and your pitch either helps it or it doesn't.
The meeting is the delivery
The most expensive myth in food retail is that listings are won in meetings. They are won before them, and merely collected in the room.
Yes, if. Negotiating with people who negotiate for a living
Category managers negotiate daily, with training. Founders negotiate occasionally, with adrenaline. Closing that gap requires no talent at all. It requires a small system.
Growing broke: the promotional trap that eats good brands
There is a way to fail in supermarkets that looks exactly like succeeding, right up until it doesn't. It has a rhythm consistent enough to narrate from memory.
The second product problem
The debut gets all the care, and it works. Then success skips steps, and the range extension sails into a review it doesn't survive, taking the hero product's credibility with it.