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The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Anniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more.

A few weeks ago I went skiing. And yes, I spent half the chairlift rides thinking about business finance.

I know. Peak relaxation.

But the thing is, when you’re stuck on a slow-moving chair with nothing but mountains and time, your brain fills the silence. 

And mine kept looping back to the same question: how is business fundraising going to look in ten years?

Right now, a lot of business owners raise money reactively. Timing tends to be a response rather than a choice.

The pattern's painfully predictable. Cash gets tight. A payment runs late. Growth flatlines. Payroll suddenly feels heavier than it did three months ago.

Then - and only then - the pitch deck gets excavated from the depths of Google Drive. The investor calls begin. The scramble is on.

And just like that, you've just turned capital into a fire extinguisher instead of fuel.

That's the mindset we're trying to pass on to SMEs coming to FundOnion - helping them see fundraising as something you prepare for rather than something that rescues you. 

I think that's the general direction we’re moving in anyway. As people get more clued up on finance, the whole dynamic changes:

Grenade's story is a perfect example. When their money arrived, it didn't plug a gap. It amplified momentum that was already building.

Today I’m unwrapping Grenade’s ~£200M success story and pulling out the business lessons behind the headline.

1/ Grenade repositioned protein from niche gym food to everyday snacking by using confectionery-style packaging and flavour names, making it appeal to commuters and office workers, not just fitness enthusiasts.

2/ They built frequency and habit into the model: small, repeat purchases across multiple daily occasions (mid-morning, afternoon slump, on-the-go) created reliable sell-through that retailers actually wanted.

3/ Before raising serious capital, they proved the fundamentals: steady revenue growth, margins that held as production scaled and widening retail distribution across major UK chains.

4/ A ~£72m private equity stake came only after the numbers were undeniable - predictable sales, proven cashflow, repeatable patterns quarter after quarter.

5/ Mondelēz International eventually paid ~£200m for majority ownership because Grenade had built defensibility through brand equity, retailer relationships, supply chain reliability and a product embedded in daily routines.

6/ The lesson: capital works best when it amplifies existing momentum, not when it plugs gaps.

I saw someone eating a Grenade bar on the tube the other day. The wrapper caught my eye - it was brightly coloured and it had a big, bold logo. 

It didn’t look like diet food to me. It looked like a treat - the kind you grab because you want it, not because you’re forcing down 20g of protein before leg day. 

That wrapper marked the mainstreaming of protein.

For years, protein products lived in a very specific retail corner. Beige packaging. Aggressive typography. Gym culture cues. The unspoken message was: this is for people who track macros and enjoy punishment.

Grenade took a different approach.

It borrowed from confectionery, using bright colours, flavour-led naming like “Caramel Chaos” and indulgent imagery in its visual language.

In other words, it sat comfortably next to chocolate bars rather than segregating itself in the “sports nutrition” aisle.

That shift mattered more than it seemed.

Once you’re selling energy bar to commuters, office workers and students - people who want something sweet with a functional benefit - you’ve moved from a niche category into everyday behaviour. 

The purchase stops being “a gym decision” and starts being “a snack decision”.

And snack decisions happen a lot.

They’re small, low-friction purchases. You don’t run a spreadsheet before buying a bar. You reach for what feels familiar. When that decision repeats across thousands of people daily, scale starts forming naturally.

In Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), growth comes from:

Retailers obsess over this. Their world revolves around sell-through. How fast does it move once it hits the shelf? Does it keep moving next week? And the week after that?

Grenade well and truly earned its shelf space. 

People tried it once, then kept coming back. Not because of clever marketing or influencer hype, but because the product actually delivered on the promise. Tastes good, feels indulgent, happens to have protein.

That repeat behaviour is what retailers notice. Reorders started flowing in. Listings expanded. Distribution grew across Tesco, Sainsbury's, WHSmith - the big players that actually move volume.

It’s at this point where a lot of brands completely mess it up: they get excited and lose focus. They launch ten experimental flavours, three new product lines and suddenly nobody remembers what made the original thing work.

Grenade stayed in their lane. New flavours, sure. New formats, occasionally. But always within the same core logic: indulgent, functional, familiar.

That discipline is what made the scale happen. Consistency can feel boring, but it's what separates a viral moment from a sustainable business.

So what did Grenade’s success ultimately come down to?

Strip away the flashy branding, and you're left with something unsexy but essential: the fundamentals were rock-solid.

Revenue grew steadily. Margins held as production scaled. Costs behaved predictably as volume increased. The unit economics made sense in the simplest terms possible: buy well, sell well, repeat without breaking what's working.

I love a good brand story as much as anyone. Community, culture, hype - it all has its place. But eventually, investors stop nodding along to your vision and start asking about the spreadsheet. ARR, MRR, adjusted forecasts. If the core model's broken, none of that narrative magic saves you.

The numbers don't lie.

Grenade pulled in a £72M stake deal early on. That level of capital doesn't show up for potential or vibes. It shows up when sales are predictable, distribution is expanding, and cashflow can be underwritten with actual confidence. Private equity backs patterns that repeat. Quarter after quarter, same story.

Grenade had those patterns locked in. 

Then Cadbury-owner, Mondelēz International, came in with the big swing - a majority stake for roughly £200M. Makes complete sense when you think about it. Global snacking conglomerates had been gradually building exposure to "better-for-you" categories because consumer behaviour was changing under their feet.

People still crave indulgence (society’s addicted to sugar, after all). They just want it to align with their goals now. Protein does that job perfectly.

By the time Mondelēz wrote that cheque, Grenade had already built the machine. It had retail presence across major chains, brand recognition that extended beyond gym bros, operational scale that could actually handle volume. It was a product that was well and truly embedded in daily routines.

The supply chain worked. International expansion was no longer a pipe dream - it was the obvious next move.

So when we look at it that way, the money Grenade raised wasn't there to save them or change what they were doing. It was strategic capital to execute their expansion plan: new markets, broader distribution, bigger scale.

Grenade sells neatly packaged protein bars. If you’re looking for funding, this is the neatly packaged version of the business lessons.

The first purchase gets attention. The second purchase builds a business.

Generating trials is the easy part. Launch with some noise, throw money at paid media, get a few influencers talking - you can get into someone's basket once without too much trouble. That proves curiosity exists, which is nice, but it doesn't prove much else.

What actually matters is whether they come back. 

Grenade became valuable when people stopped thinking about buying it and just started grabbing it. The bar wasn't some short-term fitness experiment they'd abandon after two weeks; it became their default snack, the thing they reached for without a second thought. 

That shift from deliberate choice to autopilot behaviour is where frequency kicks in, and in FMCG especially, frequency is everything. It's the entire engine.

Frequency only scales if your audience is actually broad enough to support it.

Grenade didn't just target gym-goers who care about macros - they repositioned protein as something mainstream. 

Commuters grabbing breakfast on the go, office workers hitting the afternoon slump, students looking for something sweet that doesn't feel like total junk. All of them wanted something indulgent with a functional edge, which immediately widened the addressable market.

Why does that matter? Because a broader audience creates more buying occasions. The product stops being tied to one specific moment (post-workout) and starts fitting into multiple points throughout the day. Mid-morning energy boost. Afternoon pick-me-up. Something to grab between meetings. More people buying across more occasions means volume grows without you betting everything on one narrow use case. 

You're not reliant on a niche anymore, and that's when scale actually follows.

Shopify can give someone a storefront in an afternoon. WooCommerce makes DTC straightforward. Amazon gives immediate access to millions of customers.

Those tools are incredibly powerful, but they're also widely available to everyone. Your competitor can spin up the exact same infrastructure by next Tuesday. So the real edge doesn't come from access to tools anymore. It comes from depth.

Grenade operated in a category where surface-level imitation is almost trivial. You can source similar ingredients, replicate flavours, redesign packaging to look just as good. What you can't easily copy is the stack of things that took years to build: brand equity that makes people reach for your product first, retailer trust that gets you prime shelf placement, supply chain reliability that keeps you in stock when competitors run out and repeat purchase velocity across multiple retail accounts that proves the model works. 

That entire stack is what creates defensibility, and defensibility is what reduces competitive risk - which is exactly what investors are looking for. They want businesses that become harder to displace the bigger they get.

Grenade built a product that matched where culture was already heading. Protein was creeping into everyday life, consumers were reading labels more carefully, and "high protein" was becoming shorthand for making a smarter choice without sacrificing enjoyment.

The bar balanced indulgence with a health benefit, and the branding made that balance feel culturally natural - like something you'd actually want to be seen eating. The key here? The branding only worked because the underlying behaviour was already shifting beneath it.

You see the same pattern with a brand I used to share an office with: Liquid Death. Yes, the branding is magnetic and the cans look cool, but the real genius was timing it perfectly with a broader cultural shift: younger people drinking less alcohol, sober-curious culture going mainstream, sparkling water becoming socially acceptable in contexts where it would've seemed weird five years ago. 

The logo grabs your attention, sure, but the zeitgeist is what carries the business forward. You can have the best branding in the world, but if you're pushing against the cultural current instead of riding it, you're just making your life harder.

Stories like Grenade look simple in hindsight. A buzzy brand. A big exit.

But there was a long run behind it - years of building, positioning, distribution and timing. Looking back, it’s easy to label it obvious or inevitable.

People like to think these outcomes happen quickly. I always come back to that quote: people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten.

If you're in year two or three of building something real and wondering when the momentum kicks in - this is exactly the kind of long-term thinking that separates exits from experiments. 

If you want to explore funding that supports that trajectory instead of just plugging gaps, my inbox is always open: [email protected]

Till next time,

James