Accelerating the growth of healthier innovation
About the programme
The Good Food Programme is building a healthier future for the food and drink industry by accelerating the growth of progressive challenger brands. Our free accelerator will offer ten founders up to £15k of equity-free funding and two years of practical brand and business support delivered by industry experts.
Amid a cost of living crisis, accessing healthier, tasty and affordable food and drink is becoming increasingly challenging. Healthier foods are nearly three times as expensive per calorie as less healthy foods. Alongside our partner, Impact on Urban Health, we recognise that agile challenger brands have the power to drive change, making healthier food options more accessible, particularly for families on lower incomes.
With 80 years of brand-building expertise, our team of entrepreneurs specialises in building category-defining products that consumers love. Our proven MissionMap process guides entrepreneurs in defining consumer needs, building profitable business models and delivering business growth.
Meet the cohort
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We worked with the Behavioural Insights Team to develop a tool that helps us determine how much more or less healthy products are according to calories, fat, salt and sugar content. The focus is on making healthier eating as easy as possible. Our tool can be applied to Food technology ventures.
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This new programme follows a successful pilot that ran from 2020 and culminated in 2022, where 13 healthier challenger brands underwent an accelerator programme and/or received funding via the Good Food Fund. The pilot demonstrated that challenger brands could offer healthier, tasty, affordable products and grow into successful businesses. Examples:
// The products offered by the pilot brands contain 42 fewer calories on average compared to core rivals, with many undergoing reformulations during the programme to reduce sugar, salt and fat contents.
// Nine out of 13 brands are now HFSS compliant.// The brands have collectively raised £6.5million in the programme's first year, with seven securing supermarket listings. Revenues also increased by over half (63%) in the first 12 months of the scheme.
// Just under half have already achieved affordability. For instance, one brand's products were reformulated to deliver a healthier product with a 56% price saving to consumers.
Our funding partner
The places where we grow up, live and work impact how healthy we are. Urban areas, like inner-city London, have some of the most extreme health outcomes. Alongside their vibrancy and diversity sit stark health inequalities. Impact on Urban Health, want to change this and believe that we can remove obstacles to good health by making urban areas healthier places for everyone to live. They invest, test, and understand how cities can be shaped to support better health. Impact on Urban Health is a part of Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation.
