Makin Mighty Challenger Growth Podcast: Retail, sales and commercial thinking for underdog food and drink brands.
Makin Mighty Challenger Growth Podcast is for underdog brands trying to win customers, grow sales and stop shouting into an empty room. Hosted by Simon Greenwood-Haigh, founder of Makin Mighty, it is a practical look at how selling actually works in food and drink. Retail buyers. Distributors. Negotiation. Pricing. Rate of sale. Commercial strategy. Getting listed, staying listed and knowing what to do when growth stalls. Expect straight conversations with founders, buyers and operators, alongside episodes where Simon pulls apart the sales processes big food businesses use and shows how smaller brands can use them too. Before starting Makin Mighty, Simon spent six years inside a £16bn food business. Now he works fractionally with underdog food and drink brands that need commercial firepower without building a full sales team. The basic belief behind the podcast is simple: sales isn't a dark art. It is a process. You can learn it. If you're still doing most of the selling yourself, start here. Follow the show so the next episode lands when it goes live. Work out where you're stuck and how to get unstuck: www.mightymot.com
Episodes
Getting on shelf is hard. Staying there is harder, and it is the bit nobody talks about.
Stu McDonald started ManiLife after meeting the Argentinian family who have grown his peanuts since day one. A decade on it is one of the most respected brands in its category, made in its own facility because it genuinely cannot be made in a normal peanut butter factory. Stu is also unusually straight about the fact that...
Series 2 starts on Tuesday 6 October.
The podcast has a new name. The Challenger Sessions has gone, partly because it was trying a bit too hard for a man sat in a small office in St Helens, and partly because it told you nothing about what the show is actually for.
The first series finished five months ago. Since then Simon has been working with brands, sitting in buyer meetings, building sales plans, ...
What do retailers actually want from challenger brands — and what gets you ignored instantly?
In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Chris Otto, who spent nearly 20 years at Co-op in buying roles and leading buying teams across frozen, impulse and grocery.
We get into:
- what “challenger” really means from a retailer perspective
- w...
AI is everywhere in sales right now — and most of what people are doing either turns into spam, or it’s so complicated nobody uses it.
In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Craig — founder of Cheesies and a commercial operator/consultant turned AI practitioner — about how challenger brands can use AI to sell more without losing their human ...
Getting listed is exciting. Staying listed is the hard bit.
In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Ja and Jag, founders of Superfoodio, about what really drives rate of sale once you’re on shelf.
They share practical, founder-level tactics on:
- why availability is the first battle (and how brands get caught out)
- early retail mistakes you only learn the hard w...
How do you make a 200-year-old heritage brand behave like a modern challenger — without losing what made it famous?
In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh speaks with Josh Daly, who helped take Grey Poupon from being “in the wilderness” to behaving like a brand with a clear point of view.
We get into:
- why Grey Poupon got delisted (and why that was actually ...
Early-stage founders often try to rush to “perfect” — perfect branding, perfect plans, perfect decks — before they’ve sold a single unit.
In this co-hosted episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh and Scott Cramner unpack what “good enough” really means for challenger brands, and why perfection is often just procrastination dressed up as strateg...
Loads of challenger brands describe themselves as “premium”. But premium isn’t a word you write in a strategy doc — it’s something you deliver, end to end.
In this co-hosted episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh and Scott Cramner break down the difference between looking premium and being premium — and why getting this wrong is one of the fastest w...
Founders love their origin story. Buyers don’t buy it.
In this co-hosted episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh and Scott Cramner unpack why brand storytelling so often falls flat in retail and commercial conversations.
We talk about:
- why relevance beats romance when you’re trying to sell
- why your brand is the sidekick, not the hero
- when storytelling does work (and what it...
A lot of founders blame the algorithm when their content doesn’t land. It’s a convenient scapegoat.
In this co-hosted episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh and Scott Cramner unpack what’s really going on: most challenger brands don’t have an algorithm problem — they’ve got a messaging problem.
We get into:
- why “going viral” is not a s...
Getting listed is not the win...it’s permission to start proving yourself.
In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh is joined by Jasmine Wheelhouse (CEO/“Pea-EO” of Taking the Pea) to talk honestly about the retail reality for challenger brands: getting a buyer’s attention, winning the pitch, and what it takes to stay listed once you’re on shelf.
We ...
Design matters. But design cannot rescue a product or business that does not deliver.
In this co-hosted episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh and Scott Cramner get into the uncomfortable truth founders need to hear: if you are using design to hide bigger problems, the market will find you out fast.
We talk about:
- why great branding cannot compensate for weak product experience (inc...
A lot of early-stage brands feel world-class before they’ve actually proven anything.
In this co-hosted episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh and Scott dig into a pattern we keep seeing: confidence that shows up before competence...and how it quietly kills momentum.
We talk about where overconfidence shows up first (hint: it’s usually not where founders think), why design ...
Most food and drink brands say they’ve got a tone of voice but walk down any supermarket aisle and you’d struggle to tell them apart.
In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh is joined by Kevin Karaca, founder of The House Outside, to unpack what tone of voice actually is, why so many brands play it safe, and how challenger brands can use language to create clarity, ...
Chilled is one of the toughest places to build a food brand and most challengers don’t survive it.
In this episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh sits down with Gaz Booth, founder of Holy Moly, to talk honestly about what it really takes to break through in a brutal category.
We get into the real story behind the brand, the early mistakes, what scaling actually teaches you, and t...
In this first solo episode of Makin Mighty: The Challenger Sessions, Simon Greenwood-Haigh breaks down what a challenger brand actually is and why most brands get it wrong.
It’s a short, honest look at the mindset that separates real challengers from the ones who only use the word in their pitch deck.
Simon shares the core truths he’s seen across the industry, the common traps founders fall into,...
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