I've sat on the buyer's side of the table at every major UK grocer, and I've pitched from the founder's side too, taking LoveRaw into 13,000 stores across 25 countries. One pattern killed more of those pitches than everything else combined. A founder walks in with a single deck and hopes it works for everyone.
It doesn't. The reason is on slide one.
Slide one is a buyer test
Buyers open your deck and decide in about ten seconds whether you understand them. That sounds brutal. It is. A Tesco category buyer might have fourteen decks to get through before lunch, so slide one carries the message the whole meeting depends on: I know what you care about, I've done the work, and I won't waste your hour.
Get it wrong and the next 24 slides are furniture.
What Tesco wants on slide one
Tesco is a volume machine. Just over 3,000 UK stores, a commercial team paid to move units, and a buyer whose year is measured in category growth. The person scanning your deck is asking three questions:
- Will this brand drive footfall?
- Can the supply chain handle the velocity?
- Where's the price-volume sweet spot?
Open with your brand story, your sustainability credentials or your Instagram following and you've lost the room by slide two. Tesco buyers do care about the story. They get to it once the numbers have earned them the right to be curious. So lead with size of prize, calculated against their store count, at the price tier they actually stock. Show your rate of sale from wherever you're listed today. Make the arithmetic theirs, and make it easy to repeat to a boss.
What Waitrose wants on slide one
Waitrose is a story retailer. Their buyer is curating a shelf for a shopper who reads labels and remembers where things come from. Different person, different questions:
- Does this brand deserve to be in our store?
- Will it tell the right story to our customer?
- What's the sustainability angle?
Lead the Waitrose meeting with the hero stat that would have won Tesco and you've just told the buyer you don't know who they are. Slide one here is brand, founder, mission, sourcing. The commercial data still lives in the deck. It waits its turn, a few slides back, until the buyer has decided your brand belongs in the building.
The tell buyers never miss
Most founders try to solve this with a "Tesco version" and a "Waitrose version" of the same template. Better than one deck. Still obvious. The cover says Tesco but the framing says Waitrose. The size of prize was computed against the wrong store count. The proof points were picked for a different shopper. A buyer sees hundreds of decks a year and clocks a re-badged template before the coffee arrives. What it says to them is that the founder did half the homework, and half the homework is what the supply chain will get too.
A deck that wins Tesco isn't a deck that wins Waitrose with the logo swapped. It's a different deck. Different commercial framing, different proof points, different language, different size of prize.
Run this test on your deck tonight
Cover the retailer logo on slide one and show the slide to someone who knows UK grocery. Ask them one question: who is this pitch for? If they hesitate, so will the buyer, and the buyer hesitates with their budget. I ran a version of this before every LoveRaw pitch. The slides that survived it were never the prettiest ones. They were the ones a buyer could lift straight into their own range review.
The fix
Build one deck per retailer, each shaped around what that buyer walks in caring about. That's what DeckSmith does, from £149 a deck. Tell it your brand and your target retailer and it builds the 25 slides that buyer expects to see, framed the way that buyer thinks. If you're pitching three retailers, you need three decks. Start with the one that matters most.
