The last founder who asked me how to get into Tesco came through a friend of a friend, the way most of them do, an email that opened with I've got a friend who could really use your help and went on for four paragraphs before it got round to asking me anything. I remember thinking, somewhere around the second read, that I've given this answer so many times now I could probably sing it. It lands every couple of weeks, wearing slightly different clothes each time. How do we get in. Who do we talk to. When is the range review, and how would I even know when it is. Is there a trick, a handshake, someone's cousin? There isn't, or if there is then nobody ever taught me it, so this is me writing the long version out properly, once, somewhere I can point the next person at.
You should probably know what my version of the answer cost me before you take it. I co-founded LoveRaw. We got to 13,000 stores across 25 countries in the end, but the pitches that started it all were heavy on story and light on everything a buyer actually needed, and I'm including the Tesco meetings here, conducted in rooms considerably less glamorous than I'd dressed for. I talked about founding, about mission, about why the packaging looked the way it did, while polite people flicked past those very pages hunting for numbers. A string of friendly rejections followed, friendly being somehow worse. It took most of them before I understood the flicking. Or, more honestly, before I stopped taking it personally long enough to notice what it was telling me.
So the first thing she got back, before I'd got anywhere near her actual questions, was the thing I most wish someone had said to me plainly at the start. A Tesco buyer is paid to grow a category. That really is the whole job, there are a bit over 3,000 UK stores hanging off those range decisions, and none of them keeps a shelf spare for interesting newcomers, so the question underneath any meeting you ever get, the one nobody says out loud, is whether your product will grow the category or just shuffle money sideways off something they already stock. My early decks did not so much as wave at that question. Most decks founders send me now still don't. I try to be gentle about it. Mine took years.
Then the calendar, which is where I watched her deflate a little. Everybody deflates at the calendar. Tesco buys through category teams, ranges change at range reviews, and a pitch that lands three weeks after your category has reset will get a friendly come back next time no matter how good the samples are. No appeal. The shelves are set and you wait, sometimes for months, which is nobody's favourite paragraph in this piece. She asked, reasonably enough, how you're even supposed to know when your category resets, and the honest answer is that you ask. You just have to ask. You ring people. Other founders in the category, your wholesaler, the trade press, because the date exists and people know it, and finding it out is worth more than a month of polishing the deck.
It happens to be a strange moment to be asking, in a good way. The whole estate has been working through a reset called Fit for Growth, category after category redone, and the detail I still can't quite get over is that suppliers were handed a written brief, a Fact Pack, saying what each category wants on health, on sustainability, on price. When I was pitching you guessed at half of that, or you bought coffee for somebody who had guessed slightly better than you. Now it's on paper. Founders still turn up without having read it, which baffles me more than anything else in this piece, so I told her to get hold of the brief for her category before she touched a single slide, and I would tell you the same.
As for the doors in. The official one is RangeMe, where Tesco takes new supplier submissions, and the folklore says black hole, and the folklore is wrong. Buyers scan it ahead of reviews. What dies in there is thinness, a profile with two phone photos and some rounded-up numbers reading like a business held together with tape, and since sorting the serious from the hopeful is a large part of a buyer's week, the upload deserves the same care as the meeting itself. Real photography, a full line listing, figures you would happily defend across a table while your samples melt in front of you. Which, if you make chocolate, I can tell you from experience they will.
There's also a door that didn't exist when I was pitching, the Accelerator, which Tesco launched in 2024 in place of the old Incubator, and of which I am slightly jealous. A small cohort gets a year of mentoring, a dedicated innovation buying team and a genuine chance of ending up on shelf. You apply through RangeMe like everybody else. The last cohort came to thirteen brands, thirteen, out of everyone in the country who applied, and she pulled a face at that number, and I understood the face. I still told her to fill the form in. The application drags out of you the exact numbers a buyer would have demanded six months later anyway, and there are worse things than being made to do your homework a bit early.
And there's the door almost nobody remembers, which is Booker. Tesco has owned it since 2018, and underneath sit Premier, Londis, Budgens and Family Shopper, symbol stores in their thousands before you start counting the independents and the caterers. A listing there earns you real rate-of-sale data from tills inside the Tesco family, and I tried to be plain with her about what that is worth. I have watched till data change the temperature of a room in under a minute. I have never once watched a forecast do it, however handsome the spreadsheet.
We got to the deck last, which felt about right. The deck is the least of it, and also, these days, the bit I spend my working life on. A buyer gives the file about ten seconds before deciding whether you understand them, ten seconds being roughly what I'd believe on a good morning, so the arithmetic goes first, size of prize worked against their store count, rate of sale at the price tier they actually stock, some sign the supply chain survives success. The founding story I used to spend whole meetings on still belongs in there, just several slides further back than my younger self wanted. I've written elsewhere about why Tesco rejected yours, so I won't do the whole sermon twice.
The numbers to know cold, though, since she asked for a list. Units per store per week from somewhere with actual tills, and I'm not fussy whose, independents, another retailer, your own subscription base. Your cost price. The margin Tesco makes at your shelf price, then the same sums again at a promotional price, because the buyer runs all of it in their head while you are still mid-sentence, and the first time you watch that happen it is genuinely unnerving. An honest look at trade investment, the listing fees and promotional allowances and the rest of it, before anyone else takes the look for you. I have seen one over-ambitious promotion nearly empty a young brand's bank account, and the founder in question would rather you learned that from here. And capacity, the question founders hate. What happens to production when a few hundred stores order at once? If you don't know, say so in the room, then go and find out.
The last thing I said, by then a very long way down a reply neither of us had planned on, was about expectations. Nobody starts in every store. A first listing is normally a trial, one format or one region with a review point attached, and what your rate of sale does in those stores decides everything about the conversation afterwards. I've come to find that oddly freeing. The meeting was never about winning the whole estate, it's about winning the trial, and a trial is a much less frightening thing to plan for.
That's the reply, at proper length this time. The product I can't help with, that part was always hers, and yours. The deck is different. There's no magic bullet in any of this, and I'd be wary of anyone selling you one, but the deck is very often the first thing a buyer ever sees of your brand, and a first impression in that room is an expensive thing to get wrong. DeckSmith takes your product and your numbers and shapes them the way a Tesco buyer expects to read them, arithmetic first, story where it belongs. The decks I've built this way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales between them, which is the only evidence I have that the shape of the thing matters as much as I think it does. And if the discounters are on your list as well, the Aldi guide is here, because that door works nothing like this one. Honestly, it's a different building.
