Pip & Nut: Passion project to supermarket hit

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. There's no such thing as luck in business. You as an individual, as the founder of the business, will be the one to make those opportunities and being active in the way that you do so. That's Pip Murray, founder and CEO of the all natural nut butter brand Pip and Nut. You may well have seen its jars on your local supermarket shelves. You know, early doors with Pippa Nutt, I had an idea and I made it tangible by taking my products to market stores to initially test the product with our consumers. And it was at those markets where a Selfridges buyer came by and suggested that I come and speak to her about the brand.

1:19Getting that listing in Selfridges was fundamental in the initial starting of the brand and launching the business into retail. And I give that example because I truly believe that you make the opportunities for your brand And by being out there, you know, speaking to people, building your network, it's not just luck that got you those opportunities. So be active at every stage of your journey, making sure that you're maximising every opportunity in front of you in order to kind of build that luck around your business.

1:50I'm Dougal Shaw and this is the Business Leader Podcast. In this episode, we're meeting Pip Murray of Pip and Nut. have come to her HQ in Shoreditch, London, which is in a very trendy building, a former tea warehouse, renovated with a minimalist design. It's like you've stepped into a fancy interior design magazine. Pippin Nut launched in 2015 and now has retail sales of more than£25 million and employs more than 30 people. It's best known for its range of peanut butters, though it does almond butter and a range of other products now too. In this episode, we're going to take a detailed look at how Pip Murray has scaled her nut butter business from a side hustle on her kitchen table to the shelves of most of the major supermarkets.

2:32Her challenger brand is now taking on much bigger established rivals on the shelves. We'll also learn how she tackled crucial issues like expanding her product range with failures and successes along the way. But she began by telling me what inspired her to start her business in the first place back in 2013 when she was in her mid-20s.

2:56So the idea for Pippa Nut very much came from my own sort of love of the product if I'm honest. I never worked in food and drink before I started the business so I was a consumer of peanut butter. I absolutely loved the stuff at the time when I first had the idea I was doing lots of marathon running. So nut butter is like a great thing to have on like sort of toast or on your cereal just before you go for a run because it's rich in protein. So it was always like my go-to but fundamentally I loved it because it just tasted incredible. but back about 10 years ago when I first had the idea for the brand, the products that I could get my hands on in supermarkets, they were either quite Americanised or nearly all of them had palm oil in, which for someone like me, I'm quite a health-conscious, but it's a sustainably-minded consumer I really disagreed with.

3:43And I just felt that there was a real opportunity with this product. The ranges on shelf, whilst they were OK, there wasn't anything particularly innovative. There was nothing in the way of kind of natural things like almond butters or different flavours. And I guess it was a category that I just felt in the supermarket been completely overlooked for quite a long time. And yet was still very much bang on trend when you think about all the macro trends around protein and health and naturalness and sustainability. It kind of felt like there was an opportunity to be able to take it on to another level.

4:13So, yeah, a combination of a few things. Like for me, it was a love of the product. I just ate it naturally as a consumer. but to I guess a dusty category that needed reinventing and and just an opportunity to bring it to life with a brand that was a kind of more of a lifestyle brand and one that kind of used innovation and flavor as a way to kind of get into people's hearts and minds. So at the time you were working in kind of theater productions in science education so were you doing this in your spare time in the kitchen coming up with recipes that sort of thing? Yeah I mean I was coming at food and drink completely green I knew absolutely nothing about the industry whatsoever and as you said I was working in the kind of creative sector in theatre so I didn't even really know what a P &L profit and loss even stood even stood for as an acronym let alone what it actually was so yeah it was I think for me I've you know always have and even now to be honest like focused on the product first and yeah I was running the that was setting up the business alongside my day job at the time and literally had a blender develop the products and you know initial first samples in my kitchen and I think you know it took me from that initial kind of idea which I just sort of shared with you to get it into retail took about two years so that kind of stage of kind of building kind of like the supply chain and establishing what the brand would look like and what the products would ultimately be for getting into retail took probably far longer than I ever anticipated it to be but there were quite a few kind of steps along the way obviously having the idea is the first one but the most important thing is actually starting and doing something and so me for me that the way I felt was most um natural to me to kind of start was literally I took it to a market store so I created the products in my kitchen I then made say 200 jars at a time and I'd take them down to Maltby Street down in South London which is a market food market and I literally trialed it gave it a go and got it tested with consumers as early as I possibly could do and for me that was like an early stage kind of minimal viable product or kind of kind of sense checking with consumers with real people is this even something that anyone would buy do I enjoy it and it starts to give you a bit of a flavor I guess for what it would actually be I guess later down the line so did you change things as a result of feedback yeah I think it definitely showed me like small little nods towards like a what kind of preferences people had around kind of flavors and products certainly like bits of the recipes like ingredients feedback that people gave me that kind of also made me kind of tweak things but I think more than that I think it just showed me just like the what my gut feeling was which is like people have a weird like a weird obsession with peanut butter they find it quite addictive and it's quite a fun playful kind of slightly permissible indulgent product and it was something in the way that consumers of people reacted to it that gave me the confidence I think to make the leap so I think it was more for me like validating that it was a good idea as well as also tweaking kind of the actual products themselves.

7:11A big breakthrough for any food retail product like yours is getting a listing and you got one at Selfridges I think but for people who don't know how do you go about trying to get that listing in the first place? Well it's funny it's my point about you know the most important thing is actually starting to do something and being active when you first have the idea because Selfridges actually they spotted me at the markets when I initially was just doing kind of basic trading they sort of said you know when the buyers said oh come out come and come find me when you're ready to kind of talk to me in terms of when the products are ready for retail and so that was my in um so I was kind of fortuitous but I think by being active and by putting yourself out there uh you know in in front of people then you're more likely to kind of get in front of buyers now you're not always as fortunate to just have something so kind of happenstance as someone walking by your stand and saying come and reach and talk to me but But, you know, there are lots of means and ways of getting in front of buyers.

8:03And I think that's where building your network, asking favours of friends and anyone that you know in the industry of like, does anyone know the buyer at Selfridges that they can give me an intro or not even an intro, just give me the email. And that's your starting point. So there's always a way, but it does require, I think, doing some of the heavy lifting up front. So that's interesting. You kind of got talent spotted, like in the music industry, but at a food stall in London. Plenty less glamorous, but yeah. you also got funding of course you need funding you've got some angel investment and some crowd funding as I said I was set up the business or setting up the business for two years and just before I launched the business just before I launched the business properly into Selfridges I did a small kind of crowdfunding fundraise to kind of get the initial first volumes first production complete and then give me a bit of a runway for the first year to kind of get out into the market funnily enough I did actually speak to lots of angel investors and I remember at the time getting a lot of rejections or sometimes even worse just no replies and I turned to crowdfunding because I felt that okay I was struggling to find you know one or two investors to put in a hundred grand into the business from their own kind of like you know own pockets but I did have a lot of interest for people maybe wanting to do smaller amounts like five ten k and I kind of felt like well perhaps I'm so early stage and as an individual having never worked in food and drink with no business experience perhaps I'm not the most ideal investment if I was kind of looking looking at it objectively so I kind of turned to the crowd because I felt actually maybe I can crowdsource the funding for at least the first funding round and ended up raising about 120 ,000 on crowdfund in 10 days from about 70 investors everyone from my dad right the way through to you know classic armchair investors who are just giving something a bit of a punt so yeah it wasn't necessarily the what I thought I would do in terms of raising funds I always had my mind of like initially angel investment that's where I'll go but for me crowdfunding was a really great way of getting funds fast whilst also spreading risk across lots of people um follow-on runs and subsequent runs have been through more kind of traditional routes but yeah that was like my first tranche of cash we know how difficult it is for female entrepreneurs to get venture capital funding we've seen all the statistics it's kind of you know less than three percent or something of female-led teams that are able to get it do you think that was part of it did you see other similar food ventures led by men who perhaps having more luck or it's not even luck I think there is a natural unspoken bias that that happens in potentially some conversations there are more men I've met over the course of raising money than women and so naturally I think perhaps you know the rapport building that you need in those first early rounds which is often the main way that people sort of sense check whether they're going to put money in is whether or not you know do I back the entrepreneur themselves so whilst I couldn't give you a statistic or like maybe concrete evidence because it's more unspoken than that I think it is sometimes harder when more often than not you know you're you're meeting people who maybe don't look as quite like you if that makes sense but um equally if I was sitting on the other side of the table having someone that was very early stage and who had very little experience I also do understand why maybe in that moment I probably wasn't the most attractive investment even though the idea that I had and and the vision for the brand that I had I felt was really exciting so it's a really hard thing to tease out.

11:35But I guess that's been my experience that I guess there's just not as much balance in the boardroom when it comes to kind of raising capital. And I think sometimes that can hinder your ability to be able to build connections or to build that kind of sense of trust or understanding, which is maybe a little bit more friction if you're sort of not the same gender. And then crowdfunding kind of nicely gets around that because it is a bit more democratic and it kind of repeats that rapport that you're already finding in the food markets. Yeah, exactly. And I think there's something great about food on crowdfunding because I think food is a really tangible thing.

12:07You can understand how that business model can scale. You can understand it, especially if you eat the product yourself. So I always think food and drink brands do well on crowdfunding for that reason because they are such a tangible business and they're a tangible path to an exit if that were your goal. Pip and Nutt hit the shelves of Selfridges in 2015 and by 2016 was achieving annual revenues of£3 million. So it started to get good traction. But of course, that is only the start of a long, difficult journey. Tell me about some of the different strategies for scaling once you've established this successful brand.

12:48First of all, how did you find new customers when you're trying to obviously go beyond the kind of food market level? for me you know your distribution your you know the stores that you're selling through are a big part of like building your brand and being really mindful about how you build your brand through retail I think is critical in those early stages of a kind of food brand and what I mean by that is that you know we launched into Selfridges that was our first customer and then we used kind of the success that we achieved in Selfridges to then sell into Whole Foods we then worked on establishing Whole Foods and we use the case study of Whole Foods to then sell it into a cardo and it's those sort of building blocks where you slowly build the case to kind of the retailers as to why your brand is you know something that that deserves the space on shelf and I do think there's a kind of key thing about particularly when you're building a food brand from the ground up is like being conscious about you know you're more likely to perform well if you understand who your demographic is who is it that you're actually targeting and think where are they probably shopping and you know for us we were targeting kind of health conscious uh sustainably minded at that time slightly younger audience so naturally kind of led kind of our kind of focus on distribution um and I think as well if you're trying to create hype around your brand like being seen in like the best retailers or the hippest gym around the corner or the really cool cafe and being on the menu of you know that that place it as well like helps establish your brand as a premium brand that is sort of um and also gives cues as to what you kind of stand for which for us was about being natural and and real and and delicious you're not trying to target a kind of very general audience and thinking we'll pay for this advertising it might hit you know eight percent of people you're really targeting it much earlier on yeah i think you're being really specific about who you're going after and just not going too broad and why too fast because you're you know in my instance i for the first few years right i still now run the business on on a relative of shoestring budget so you have to be really mindful that the more stores you're in the more you know national your distribution is the more money you're going to need to be able to support that listing because people always say that the start of you know that you've you've nailed it when you've got into Tesco but actually the job starts when you land on the shelf then you've got to get the pool through then you've got to get consumers actually picking it up and you've got to you've got a relative short amount of time particularly when you get into national retail to actually demonstrate that you're working.

15:15And the main way they look at that is through what's your rate of sale per store per week. And if it's too low, you'll be out before you even know it. So that's what I mean. Build your brand with a focused approach through distribution and don't go after everything and everything because you'll end up spreading your budgets too tight and you'll end up not being able to get enough consumers aware of your brand in enough time to be able to then get the pull through on shelf. Getting that live data about customer behaviour is crucial so you can iterate your offer and scale your business. The large retailers themselves recognise the value of that data and many charge brands to access it.

15:53They see it as a commodity. Such is the cutthroat world of retail. Retailers like supermarkets need brands like Pippa Nutt so they can offer the variety customers want. But they also know there is fierce competition to get the visibility their shelf space offers. It's a delicate balance of power. But of course, as brands like Pippin not grow, they get more leverage in the relationship. Growing also means the responsibility of hiring more people for your team.

16:23And in those early stages as well, you're doing this all for the first time, you don't have the experience. So how did you go about hiring and even deciding what kind of roles to hire? yeah I think in the early days for me it was about having more about sort of the attitude of people necessarily necessarily lots of experience having said that I did have you know at the time an investor who's still our main shareholder now or investor who kind of helped and coached me and had lots of industry experience so I think you can support yourself and the business through sort of a bit of scaffolding around the size by having sort of industry experts and you know people that can do those intros or help you out when you're you're not so sure on the really complex stuff but really then the you know the first couple of years is a lot of like heavy lifting and doing and so people that are hungry that are willing to be a bit flexible in terms of maybe they're a salesperson but they're willing to help out the marketing events that you're doing and you know pat the boxes in the office if you're doing something for a consumer event so someone that's sort of a bit fluid and and and ultimately just believes in what you're doing and just gets it and almost doesn't think twice about like you know the work that they're doing it's more about getting the job done and I think then slowly you start to build slightly more specialist people in so for instance when we won Sainsbury's which was at the end of our first year of business it was our first major national retailer and that's when you start to be like okay we need to get a little bit more specialisms in supply chain or you know we need more kind of experience when it comes to sales to kind of really help develop and grow that account So I'm a big believer in sort of building a team slowly, using kind of outsourced functions where you can to keep nimble and lean, but then making sure you really do have the right kind of inputs coming from a kind of board or, you know, non-exec or, you know, even just a mentor coach in the industry to kind of give you the experience if you don't have it yourself.

18:14the other thing when you're growing is that obviously you're a kind of challenger brand and you've got much larger established companies who you know people say they'll build a moat around themselves to protect themselves so did you kind of encounter that and did you and if so did you have any strategies to work around it yeah absolutely I think um you know larger brands particularly in food and drink but anywhere anywhere really you know they will be aggressive when they start to see brands sort of chipping away at their share or kind of taking space from them. I would say that bigger brands take a long time to react.

18:49And so there's quite a long time where you, I think, can go unnoticed and just be a bit stealth about your way of kind of building your brand. And for me, developing a really distinctive brand and the packaging that was associated with that was one example of that where Pippinart is a really kind of playful brand. It It looked like nothing else on the shelf when we first landed. It was really disruptive. And ultimately, even just having that footprint on shelf made consumers more likely spot us because our brand was so different from everything else that was available on shelf. So the key thing, I think, particularly when it comes to kind of brand and brand positioning is make sure you don't follow all the category conventions.

19:29Be actively different and actively disruptive in your approach because it's that which will get you noticed. is particularly you think people walk down the aisle and they have probably two seconds most people are autopilot picking up what they're normally going to buy every every week so you have to really sweat every asset you have and your advertising space on the shelf is your most valuable advertising space so use that um but then the second thing around kind of how do you like kind of get people aware of your brand and get into the hat like hearts and minds of your consumers when you've got no budget i think again the power of being a small business is that you've got you know for us we're very like on trend we're really fresh and different brand particularly in those early days so we used to get things away that I know other bigger business would have had to pay for like we'd do events with Nike or Lululemon you know big running events where we'd serve up like nut butter on toast to all the runners after finishing their 10k and sometimes we even got paid to be at those events as if we were a caterer other times we we weren't charged at all to be there whereas if we were like a Coca-Cola or a Unilever you'd have to pay a partnership fee of some form.

20:36You've got to build your distinctive brand for sure, but also you've got to experiment in order to grow and kind of expand your range a bit. So how did you go about that? You know, when you're small, and even at that time in the first few years, we'd be sampling in all of our stores, you'd be listening and watching consumers all the time and sort of seeing what they're doing. And, you know, you're really close to it. So you do have a good understanding of maybe opportunities there might be to kind of launch a different kind of innovation or you know flavor whatever it is are you doing that personally did you go to the tastings oh yeah I did honestly hundreds hundreds of tastings and selfridges whole foods holland barrett yeah um and it like it's great research because you at that stage really what you're trying to find is product market fit and so listening to consumers being at shelf sampling your product and getting that live feedback time and time again really starts to give you an understanding of a is it working or b is there something I need to change if it's not but I guess back to your earlier point yeah so we innovated quite fast and and um expanded kind of flavors and portfolios and there's definitely been things that have come out quite quickly so we had uh I remember I was in the states and I saw in the states they had a what they called squeeze packs which was kind of like a almost like an energy gel but with nut butter in so it was like a natural sort of snack if you guess a bit like if you spoon peanut butter from the jar you could instead have it as like a little shot if that makes sense I was like yeah that looks cool and they sold them in Whole Foods and Walmart and the brands out there so I thought let's bring it to the UK trials in the UK for a couple of years and that particular format just didn't work people didn't get it they didn't understand how they would eat it um you had a few loyal followers but more more often than not most consumers didn't repeat buy it and I think sometimes you've got to learn to like try something out and if it doesn't work pull it relatively quickly so it doesn't absorb too much time and yeah I guess as we've grown like there have been things as we've gone we you know we try to kind of expand into other categories at different points of our journey some and at the earlier stage it was wasn't particularly successful and I think we sometimes moved a bit too fast at times and try to do too much relative to the size of our team and the kind of capacity that we have so it's a balance isn't it between act really nimble and kind of moving fast and being responsive to then sometimes almost taking on too much and stretching yourself and not necessarily doing enough well if that makes sense almond milk was another example of that yeah exactly so in our sort of end of our third year we um launched a range of alma milks which was kind of around the time where you know nut milks and alternative milks starting to really boom across like the uk and globally um lots of reasons why they didn't work but you know we did end up pulling them quite quickly in the first year but some of the key things i think that why it didn't work is a we were just very early stages of business and we trying to push our you know share and growth in one category peanut butter so where we started whilst also then launching into a highly competitive space that was the alternative milks which was still nut based but drinks so kind of exactly so it the connection was there in terms of you know pippa nut we're all about sort of natural products that contain nuts essentially so that's where we felt the connection but i think we we jumped into a you know a pond a bit too big for us at the time and I think as well really understanding what consumers want from your brand you know nut butter it's all about kind of taste and flavor and it's quite like I said a permissible indulgence whereas actually we did notice that our brand resonance in the space which is a much more kind of functional kind of product and slightly less taste-led it just didn't resonate and yeah I think it just didn't work right from the get-go and you could see it quite quickly and i think that's sometimes the beauty of products is that you can normally see within the first six to nine months whether something has traction um and and therefore you can start to make decisions as to whether you think it's worth your time to kind of refine your product and get it right so that it does get that product market fit or pull it and take it off the shelf and take out the range in the last two years pip and nut has been expanding its range moving into healthy snack bars and also another product that it hopes customers will find a permitted indulgence, nut butter cups.

24:51These combine nut butters with chocolate. In 2024, they worked with Tony's Open Chain, moving their cocoa supplier to what it calls ethically sourced single origin chocolate, which is vegan friendly and contains no palm oil.

25:08Let's talk about some of the ones that have been successful, like the nut butter cups, which I think I just tried one just now you did what is it things like that which will allow you to grow the company rather than growing the core product you know we've got kind of a bigger portfolio of products now so obviously alongside of our range of nut butters we've got as you said a range of nut butter cups which is kind of like a confectionary if you like and then we've also got our range of oat bars that we launched over in the summer and we are making a big push into kind of snacking space and and I think there's a big opportunity for us to be able to do something brilliant in those categories.

25:45It's probably been for me, why is it, why have these products landed so well? And why have they given me the confidence that we can continue kind of to invest behind it? I think a big part of it is we're doing it at the right time, like our nut butter brand is pretty established, we're building off a really solid foundation in two quite competitive spaces. So we're not starting from ground zero. Do you think the in the short term, at least the opportunity for growth is in the UK or are you looking at other things I don't know acquisition abroad or just going into new markets yourself yeah that's a good question and it's something that we always tussle with is when's the right time to go international versus focus on the UK for us Pippenart it's just the brand resonates so well with the UK consumer and I think we sit in a really good position in terms of trends and what we're trying to do for consumers in the UK that we felt like the biggest opportunity for us was about expanding across multiple categories and really stretching the brand into spaces, like I said, snacking that are big categories in their own right and really focusing on doing that next.

26:47So those are our big growth levers alongside still taking share and establishing ourselves in where we started.

26:57You've been listening to Business Leader with me, Dougal Shaw, speaking to Pip Murray, founder and CEO of Pip & Nut. For more business case studies and masterclasses, please check out businessleader.co.uk. And if you like this podcast, don't forget to follow us wherever you listen so you don't miss future episodes. And if you lead a medium-sized business in the UK and are ambitious to grow into a large company, then you can also check out our Business Leader website to learn more about our membership offer.

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