What 22,000 brands reveal about how small food brands actually grow

If you run a small food brand, there is a piece of research worth sitting with before you spend another dollar on marketing.

It comes from Kantar, which tracks how more than 22,000 brands grow across markets and categories. Buried in that data is a finding that runs directly against how most founders are told to build a business.

We tend to assume growth is a reach problem. More eyeballs. More followers. More impressions. Get in front of as many people as possible, and some percentage of them will convert. It feels intuitive, and it is exactly what every platform selling advertising would like you to believe.

The data says something different, particularly for smaller players.

For small brands, depth beats breadth

What the research points to is that for brands without scale, the bigger growth lever is not reach at all. It is brand equity, a genuine, meaningful connection with a core base of people who actually care.

Not the widest audience. The deepest one.

This is worth pausing on, because it inverts the usual advice. A small brand competing for reach is competing on the one dimension where it will always lose. You cannot outspend a multinational for attention. What you can do is mean something specific to a defined group of people in a way a multinational structurally cannot, because scale forces broadness and broadness dilutes meaning.

The brands most often held up as marketing case studies understood this long before the data caught up.

What connection looks like when it’s done well

Red Bull did not grow by announcing that it sells energy drinks. It built communities around the things its people already cared about sport, music, gaming, extreme athleticism and became inseparable from those worlds. The product is almost incidental to the identity.

Coca-Cola operates on a similar logic at a different scale, embedding itself into daily rituals and cultural moments until the brand is attached to a feeling rather than a formulation.

Neither of these companies is primarily selling a beverage. They are selling emotional connection, and the beverage comes along with it.

The instinctive founder response to this is that it requires a budget nobody reading this has. That response is understandable and, according to the research, wrong.

Why the effect is often larger for smaller brands

The finding that should encourage founders is that the equity effect is frequently stronger for small brands than large ones.

The reasoning holds up when you think it through. A small, loyal base that genuinely connects with what you are doing is worth considerably more per person than a large audience that feels nothing in particular. Those people repurchase without prompting. They tolerate a price premium. They tell other people about you, which is the only form of reach that costs nothing and converts at a rate paid media never matches.

They also give you something more valuable than volume, which is permission. A base that trusts you will follow you into a new SKU, a reformulation, a price rise or a category extension. An audience assembled through reach alone will not.

So the questions worth answering before you chase reach are narrower and harder than “how do we grow awareness?” Who is this product genuinely for? What do those people actually care about, beyond the product itself? Does your brand, as it currently exists on shelf and online, speak to any of that?

Where this intersects with what you’re allowed to say

Here is the part that matters commercially, and it is the reason I am writing about marketing research on a regulatory blog.

When a small food brand tries to differentiate, the reflex is almost always to reach for a functional claim. Something about gut health, energy or immunity, printed on the front of pack, doing the work of standing out.

That instinct creates two problems at once.

The first is regulatory, and it is more constrained than most founders expect. Under section 1.2.7-18 of the Food Standards Code, no health claim can be made at all unless the food first meets the nutrient profiling scoring criterion, which catches a surprising number of bars, shakes and snacks before the claim itself is even assessed. Special purpose foods are the exception. Beyond that gate, what you can say depends entirely on which type of claim you are making. A general level health claim must either appear in the general level health claims table or be self-substantiated through the Schedule 6 systematic review process and notified to FSANZ. A high level health claim, anything referencing a serious disease or a biomarker of one, including blood cholesterol and blood pressure, has no self-substantiation pathway at all. It must already sit in the high level health claims table, and getting a new one added means an application to FSANZ, not a report you commission yourself.

That difference is the difference between a claim you can build a launch around and one that will take years, if it is available to you at all.

The second problem is strategic, and it is the one the Kantar data speaks to. A functional claim is the easiest thing in your brand to copy. Any competitor with a similar formulation can make the same claim next quarter, including the pre-approved ones sitting in the tables for anyone to use. Meaning cannot be copied that way. The connection you build with a specific group of people, around something they genuinely care about, is the one asset in your business a competitor cannot replicate overnight.

There is also a compounding effect worth naming. Trust is the raw material of brand equity. A claim that gets challenged by a retailer, corrected by the ACCC or quietly walked back does not just cost you a print run. It costs you the exact thing you were trying to build.

The bottom line

Reach is the easiest metric to measure, which is why most founders optimise for it. Connection is harder to measure and slower to build, and the evidence suggests it is where small brands actually win.

Get clear on who your product is for and what those people care about. Build something that speaks to it honestly. Make sure every functional claim supporting that story is one you can actually defend.

The loyalty follows. The pricing power follows that.

Strong brand equity is built on trust, and nothing erodes trust faster than a claim you cannot back up when a retailer or regulator asks. Most food brands don’t discover a compliance problem until packaging is printed or a buyer flags it, by which point the fix is expensive and public. We’ve put together a free guide breaking down the six biggest mistakes food brands make with labelling and health claims, so you can pressure-test the story on your pack before it goes to print. Download the free guide here.