November 2026 - Jordy Wedding
The brands that break through in food and drink aren't the ones that shout loudest or spend most. They're the ones with an actual conviction, a real belief they're willing to hold and build around in categories otherwise built on sameness. In a supermarket aisle where everything looks and sounds identical, a genuine point of view is the rarest and most valuable thing a brand can own.
We work mostly with conviction brands so this is the pattern we see again and again. Here's why it matters more than budget.
The sea of sameness
Walk down any supermarket aisle and the striking thing is how alike everything is. The same reassuring words, natural, honest, crafted, premium. The same rounded, friendly design. The same tone of gentle enthusiasm. Every brand is fishing in the same small pond of safe signals, so none of them actually stands out. They just dissolve into a wall of pleasant nothing. Sameness feels safe to a marketer and is invisible to a shopper.
You can't outspend the giants but you can out-believe them
If you're a challenger brand, you will never win on budget. The incumbents have more money, more shelf space and more media weight than you'll ever match, so competing on sheer volume is a losing game before you start. What they usually can't do is hold a sharp point of view because they're too big, too cautious, and too worried about offending a slice of a mass audience. That is the gap. A smaller brand can believe something specific and say it plainly and that conviction cuts through in a way a bigger budget simply cannot.
Conviction is not a tagline
Worth being precise about what conviction means, because it's easy to fake. It isn't a punchy line on the pack or a mission statement nobody reads. It's a real belief that shapes decisions, what you make, what you refuse to make, who you're for and who you're happily not for. You can tell a real conviction because it costs the brand something. It turns some people off. A belief everyone comfortably agrees with isn't a conviction, it's a platitude and platitudes are exactly what the aisle is already drowning in.
The mistake challenger brands make
The most common error is losing your nerve and borrowing the category's language. A brand starts with a genuine, spiky point of view, then slowly sands it down to sound more like the established players, because that feels safer and more grown-up. It's the FMCG version of playing it safe, and it's fatal, because the moment you sound like the category you've handed back the one advantage you had. Your smallness only works when it comes with a bigness of belief.
Conviction is the thing budget can't buy
So if you're a food or drink brand wondering how to break through without the giants' money, the honest answer is that you break through on the one axis money can't win. Not by being louder or glossier or offering more of the same reassurance but by holding a clear, genuine conviction and building it into everything you make. It's the rarest thing in the aisle precisely because it's the one thing that can't be bought.
That's the work we care about most, taking a brand that genuinely believes something and making sure the world can feel it. If your brand has a real conviction buried somewhere under the safe version of itself, that's the thing worth building everything around.