This post started life as an email to a founder who wanted to know why Sainsbury's had ignored the deck that got her a second meeting at Tesco. My reply ran long, and since I end up typing some version of it most months, here is the tidied-up version. Not that tidied up. You'll cope.
I should be straight about something before any of it, because I was straight with her. Sainsbury's is a retailer I never actually pitched. LoveRaw ended up in 13,000 stores across 25 countries and the meetings I personally sat through were Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, Boots, Co-op, Carrefour, a lot of hours in those particular waiting rooms. Never that one. So the buyer psychology in this piece is mine, learned the expensive way, and the Sainsbury's particulars come from the public record and from founders who've been through the process and were good enough to talk to me about it afterwards.
Her mistake, and to be fair I'd probably have made it too at her stage, was treating Sainsbury's as more or less Tesco. Same meeting, same deck, swap the logo on the title slide, off you go. Except the customer walking round a Sainsbury's spends like a Waitrose shopper half the time and like everybody else the rest of it, inside a mainstream estate, more than 600 supermarkets, another 885 convenience shops, second biggest grocer in the country. And the business happens to be in a winning patch at the moment, grocery sales up 5.2% in the year to February 2026 if I've got the figure right, actual volume growth rather than inflation doing all the lifting, share gains sitting underneath it, and I know that reads like background colour you skim past on the way to the good stuff, but honestly it matters more than half of what's in most decks, because a buyer who is gaining share has a bit of room to take a punt on a small brand, while a buyer who is losing it can usually afford nothing at all, and you would much rather be sitting across the table from the first one.
Now the bit her deck never mentioned, the bit I'd have built the whole thing around. Taste the Difference went through £2 billion a year in February 2026, after growing 18% in a single quarter, and it's the fastest growing premium own label in the market. Their word for what gets a brand past that, and it's been in their public language for years, is incrementality, which boils down to a fairly brutal question, does this thing bring the category shoppers or spend it wasn't getting anyway, because if all it does is move money between products they already stock, why would anybody give it space. If your pitch amounts to Taste the Difference but a pound dearer, you're offering them something they already sell to themselves, at worse margin. The things that survive that comparison tend to be the things their development kitchen can't brief into existence in six months, a fermentation nobody else runs, a certification, a founder story with some actual weight in it, an odd flavour that turns out to work. If you can't name what yours is, I'd honestly put the deck down for a few weeks and go back to the product.
Ways in, then. There are three that I know of, and I'd rank them in a fairly definite order.
The category buyer is the main road, and I mean that in the slightly boring sense that most of the brands who actually get in, at least going by the founders I've compared notes with over the years, got in that way, whatever more glamorous route ends up in the press write-up afterwards. Sainsbury's used to run a thing called Future Brands, which launched back in 2018, and from everything I've read and been told it was a proper challenger programme rather than a press release with a logo on it, you got a named account manager, in-store support, actual shelf space, and the alumni list, Tony's Chocolonely, Beavertown, The Curators, tells you something about how seriously the thing was taken. Sauce Shop, to pick the example I keep coming back to, got ten of their sauces into as many as 521 stores through it, which for a brand their size at the time was a serious result. The old deal came with strings too, one being a 12-month exclusivity clause, a year where you couldn't take the range to the other majors, and I've heard founders grumble about terms like that but I read it the other way round, you don't bother locking in a brand you don't rate. Anyway, in 2024 the standalone team got folded into a bigger product and innovation structure, and the line since is that the commitment to small innovative brands carries on, which may well be true, but the working consequence is that your pitch now goes through the category buyer, inside the category plan, at review time, same as everybody's. Find out when your category actually reviews, which is not always obvious from the outside. A current supplier in the category will usually tell you the timing if you ask nicely enough, and then you aim at that window as best you can, because the same deck arriving three months after the reset, however good it happens to be, mostly just sits in a drawer until the whole cycle comes back round the following year.
Second, the form. There's a "becoming a supplier" application on the Sainsbury's help pages, and to their credit they say straight out that they can't reply to everyone who applies. Filling it in is worth an hour of your time, I think, on the grounds that it costs you nearly nothing and you never quite know, but if the whole plan rests on that form landing in front of the right person in the right week, you haven't really got a plan, you've got a lottery ticket with a supplier portal attached.
Third, and only if it applies to you, Thrive with Sainsbury's, a 16-week incubator for founders from underrepresented backgrounds, run with Foundervine and Mission Ventures. The early cohorts have actually made it to shelf, real products sitting in real stores that you could walk in and pick up, which, if you've watched as many incubator schemes quietly fizzle out after the photo day as I have, is a rarer outcome than it ought to be.
Whichever way in, a warm route beats a cold one, always has done. Trade shows, founder networks like Bread and Jam, a supplier who'll vouch for you. When I look back at which of my own decks actually got read properly, and I mean read rather than skimmed and filed, it was nearly always the ones a person physically handed over, or forwarded on with a line of their own at the top, and hardly ever the ones that arrived cold with no voice attached to them, if that makes sense as a distinction.
On the deck itself, which is my actual trade these days. Rate of sale first, cold, units per store per week, named retailers, true store counts, no blended averages, a buyer can smell a blended average from the corridor. Margin next, and specifically a margin you can still hold at scale with the promo depth already baked inside it, and here's the thing nobody warned me about the first time either, the number you quote in that meeting is the number you live with for a long while afterwards, because going back in month three asking to renegotiate does something to how they see you, and in my experience it never fully undoes itself, however good your reasons were. Then supply, by which I mean BRCGS or SALSA either held or at least booked in, case sizes that still make sense when the order is for 300 stores rather than thirty, and a co-packer answer you have actually thought through before anyone gets round to asking the "what happens if it flies" question, because they will ask it, usually at the exact moment you were starting to relax. And the ask wants adult proportions on it. Nobody opens at 1,400 stores, or nobody I've ever heard of at any rate. A few hundred supermarkets, maybe a convenience trial, possibly online first, that's roughly the shape of a sensible opening ask, and it's worth remembering that Sauce Shop's 521 came off the back of years of graft in smaller places, not one good meeting on a good day.
I've written before about why the same deck dies at different desks, which, now I think about it, is more or less the question that whole email thread with her had turned into by the end. The Tesco guide is sitting there too if Tesco happens to be on your list, and that one, unlike this one, I can vouch for personally, having lived most of it.
And if you'd rather not build the Sainsbury's version by hand, this is the exact job DeckSmith was built for, a deck shaped around incrementality, their estate and their own-label reality, in minutes rather than a lost weekend. Decks built that way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales. None of which makes a deck a magic bullet, there is no such thing in this trade, but it is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of your brand, and that is worth an afternoon of your attention. Decks built that way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales. None of which makes a deck a magic bullet, there is no such thing in this trade, but it is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of your brand, and that is worth an afternoon of your attention.
