Getting into Coles is not the goal. Surviving your first range review is.

Somewhere in Australia this week, a founder will get the email. The buyer said yes. National ranging, hundreds of stores, the thing they have worked towards for three years. They will celebrate, and they should.

Then the clock starts. Because roughly half of new grocery products don't survive to their first anniversary. The supermarket doesn't decide that in the pitch meeting. It decides it at the next range review, with your scan data on the screen and your buyer defending or deleting you in a meeting you are not invited to.

I have watched this cycle from the supplier side for fifteen years. The brands that make it treat the listing as the entry fee. The brands that don't treat it as the finish line.

Here is what the finish-line brands get wrong.

They spend everything getting in. The listing itself is expensive before you sell a unit. Pipeline fill means supplying stock to every store, often around one and a half cartons per store, before a dollar comes back. Add promotional commitments, and in many categories a listing allowance, and year one can consume more cash than the previous three years of farmers markets and independents combined. If the pitch budget and the survival budget are the same budget, that is the whole problem.

They stop selling after the yes. On shelf is not the same as off shelf. A new product in week one has no shoppers looking for it. The brands that survive fund the first twelve weeks like a launch campaign: a promo slot as early as the buyer will give one, off-location display if they can get it, demos, social pointing at stores. The scan data from those first weeks becomes the story the buyer tells at review. You are writing that story from day one, whether you mean to or not.

They don't watch the number that decides everything. Rate of sale. Units per store per week. Your buyer watches it. The category manager above them watches it. If you are not pulling your scan data weekly and reacting when a state or a store cluster goes soft, you will learn about the problem when it is already a deletion conversation. By then the review papers are written.

They mistake the review for a formality. Range reviews come around once or twice a year in most categories. It is a re-pitch. Your product is compared against every other line on that shelf and every new product asking for its space. Walking in with "sales are okay" is walking in unarmed. Walking in with a growth story, a promo plan for the next period, and evidence you are bringing shoppers into the category is how incumbents keep their space.

None of this is a reason to avoid the majors. A supermarket listing is still the biggest single growth lever available to an Australian food brand. But the maths is honest even when the excitement isn't: the listing gives you shelf space for six to twelve months. What you do with the cash, the promo plan and the scan data in that window decides whether you are a brand or a case study.

Buyers don't list products. They list businesses. Make sure the business is built for year one, not just for the meeting.