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We have a confession to make: we love watching Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank. And in particular, we love watching food and beverage pitches for investment on these TV shows – combining our passions for food and business in one very entertaining packaging.
In case you haven’t seen them – we’re talking about reality TV shows where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas live to investors, in the hope of securing funding and mentorship to scale their businesses.
And while they make for easy weeknight watching, they’re also packed with valuable lessons that F&B entrepreneurs (and even well-established brands) can learn from.
Here are four of those lessons – illustrated by pitches we’ve seen on TV.
Enjoy.
One of our more recent favourites, the Bold Bean Co. won investments not by doing something new – but by taking something everyone has in the back of their kitchen cupboards, and making it exciting again.
The product? Beans. White beans, chickpeas, queen beans – with more varieties to come. Beautifully packaged in expertly branded glass jars, these are premium beans; prepared to taste delicious, and with product information that emphasises their health value.
They’re much pricier than your average tin of beans. But they’re selling because they taste good and they’re marketed brilliantly.
The lesson? You don’t always have to create something new. Innovation can mean reinventing something old so that people want to buy it (and eat it) again. And when you do a great job of this, it can be seriously lucrative.
This is a Dragons’ Den classic – the pitch that has inspired hundreds of F&B entrepreneurs to take to the TV show in the years since.
The product? A Caribbean barbecue sauce.
This pitch was first aired way back in 2007, and it went viral. Jamaican-British chef Levi Roots pitched it with a song, and UK TV viewers are still humming it today, 17 years later.
Reggae Reggae Sauce, as a brand, owes much of its success to Levi himself: his personality shone through TV screens and made the sauce a cultural talking point across the UK.
The lesson? Personality matters. Branding isn’t just about packaging design, logos, or font choices; it’s about the who behind your brand; the character that consumers can connect with.
Full disclosure: this brand didn’t get an investment when it appeared on Shark Tank. But since then, Deux has gone on to achieve exponential growth.
The product? Healthy cookie dough. Developed in 2020 in the height of COVID-19 lockdowns, Deux took a long standing favourite product in the USA and adapted it for a more health-conscious market.
Made from plant-based ingredients and fortified with vitamins, the brand benefitted from a rapid surge in consumer attention after its appearance on the show. Deux is now stocked at well over 2,500 retail stores across the US.
The lesson? Exposure is good. Getting your products in front of consumers eyes isn’t easy – but if you can find a way to do that, and then to remain in the public eye for as long as possible afterwards, you can leverage the attention to grow your brand.
Ever had a Vietnamese coffee? It’s a strong drip coffee, traditionally brewed with a filter called a phin and sweetened with condensed milk. And one entrepreneur spotted a market for a Vietnamese coffee brand in the US – so she took it to Shark Tank.
The product? Vietnamese pour-over coffee with a signature sachet of condensed-milk creamer.
Actually, Copper Cow Coffee was already making millions of dollars worth of sales by the time it appeared on the TV show in 2021. The brand was offered an investment of USD $600,000 on the show, but the founder decided not to go through with the deal – but did benefit from the nation-wide exposure.
The beauty of the brand is that it takes a coffee-making ritual and makes it accessible to a mainstream audience – creating a scalable business. Its two-part sachet format is easy to package, ship, store, and use; but it retains the pour-over process, creating a coffee experience with retail potential.
The lesson? Don’t neglect your customer experience, even if you want to scale. Seek innovative techniques to offer products that can be sold to a mass market without taking away all the joy – add process and ritual to your customers’ lives.
If you’re like us and you have a secret obsession with business reality TV too, we know you’ve seen a few F&B pitches in your time.
Mark your calendars for our next newsletter on 15 November 2024. Is there anything specific you'd like to see covered? We'd love to hear from you! Click here to share your suggestions.
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