The real reason food and drink launches fail to connect

The question your flavour brief never actually answers

There is a moment I return to again and again when I start working with a new food or drink founder. I have read their brief. I understand their brand positioning. And then I ask them, gently but directly: who did you build this for?

Not for your brand. Not for your investors. For the actual person who is going to put this product in their mouth on a Tuesday morning or after a workout or instead of a coffee. And the silence that follows that question tells me everything I need to know.

If you are heading into a new launch or revisiting a product that has not quite landed, this may be the most important thing you read before you sit down with a flavour house. And if you would rather talk it through first, you can book a free discovery call here — it takes thirty minutes and it is a genuinely useful place to start.

Most flavour briefs are written in the wrong direction

When food and drink brands build their flavour direction, they almost always start from the same place: what this product needs to say about the brand. Premium. Considered. Natural. On trend. And look, I am not saying those things are irrelevant. They absolutely have a place in the conversation.

But they cannot be the conversation.

There is a real and important difference between asking "what flavour fits our positioning?" and asking "what does my consumer actually need from this product at a sensory level?" What are they looking for when they reach for it? What would make them reach for it again? Does the direction we have chosen actually serve that?

Those questions are not interchangeable. And the gap between them is part of the reason 76% of new food and drink product launches in the UK fail within their first year.

The marine collagen brief I was worried about from the start

I worked with a client who was developing a marine collagen drink. They came to me with a thorough, well-considered brief: botanical, sophisticated, elegant. It reflected their brand beautifully.

And I was still worried.

Because beneath all of that positioning sat a product with a significant fishy, musty base note. And the brief said nothing about it. By the time we dug into consumer feedback, the picture was clear: people had been trying to find workarounds for months. Mixing the product into coffee, stirring it into juices, hunting for anything that would mask those off notes. Every round of testing gave exactly the same answer. People simply wanted to be able to drink it. That was the whole brief.

Until that problem was addressed, the beautiful positioning had no foundation to sit on. Both things can absolutely be true at once — you can build a premium product and write a brief that solves a real consumer problem. But you have to start with the problem. If you are heading into development and something feels off about where your brief begins, a free discovery call is worth having before you go any further.

When fixing one thing quietly breaks another

There is a more layered version of this that I want to share, because it is one I am working through right now with a client. A vegan omega-3 product had already done the hard work of masking the fishiness with a spearmint flavour. Sales were reasonable. Consumer complaints about off notes had quietened down. On paper, the brief had been answered.

But the spearmint was so intensely cooling, so heavy with menthol, that consumers could not eat or drink anything for hours afterwards. Most of them were taking it first thing in the morning, a few drops on the tongue, and then trying to get on with their day. Only they could not have breakfast. Could not face a coffee. The flavour profile had outlasted its welcome by several hours.

So the brief had solved the obvious problem without anyone ever asking: what does this product need to feel like for the person using it every single day, at that specific moment in their routine? Does the flavour match what they feel when they reach for it?

That question was never in the brief. And that is exactly where the next problem was hiding.

Why asking consumers to choose a flavour gives you the wrong answer

This is something I experienced directly at McVitie's, and it stayed with me. We would invest significant resource into consumer research asking people what new flavours they wanted from the next biscuit launch. Chocolate, caramel, vanilla. Always some variation of those three. Every single time.

The development team would work to build those briefs. Samples would come back. Nothing landed. It was a real cost in time and money for everyone involved. And this was happening at McVitie's scale, with serious budget behind it.

The issue was never the consumers. When you put a list in front of someone and ask which flavour they would like, they will naturally gravitate towards what they already know and already enjoy. But familiarity is not the same as fit. Those flavours may not work in your product. And they may not reflect what your target consumers genuinely want from your category.

What you actually need is a much wider picture of how they experience food and drink. What do they buy regularly, not just in your space but across their whole shop? Do they order the same thing every time at a restaurant, or do they push themselves to try something different? Do they reach for bold flavours or understated ones? These details reveal whether someone wants something classic or something new, whether the category is giving them what they need or quietly boring them.

When going against your category is exactly the right call

I worked with a client on a pre-workout range. When we mapped out the category together, it was almost uniformly the same story: blue raspberry, cherry cola, bubble gum, colours that looked like they had arrived from another dimension. Everything anchored in confectionery.

But when we spent time with the athletes my client was developing for, a pattern emerged. Many of them had actively avoided pre-workout products because of those very flavour profiles. Too artificial. Too sweet. Not what they wanted before they trained. What they were looking for was something fresher, juicier, more natural. Something no one in the category was offering them.

That space existed precisely because everyone else had assumed the category code was fixed. It was not. Their target consumers had been waiting for someone to do it differently.

Following your category is sometimes the right move. But it should be a conscious choice backed by evidence, not a default.

One honest question before you write your next brief

Before you talk to a flavour house. Before you sit down with your co-manufacturer. Before anything else is locked in. Ask yourself whether you have actual evidence that the people you are building this for will keep choosing it.

Not because it fits your positioning. Not because it performed well in a flavour list survey. Evidence that it matches something deeper about how they live, what they reach for, what they are not finding in your category yet.

Do they want something familiar or something new? Something gentle or something bold? Does the flavour profile actually fit how they feel, and what they need, at the moment they use your product?

If the honest answer is no, the next step is not to brief a flavour house. It is to understand your consumer more fully, not by asking them which flavour they would prefer, but by understanding their broader palate and habits and where the category is quietly failing them.

Flavours are always more complex than they appear. Your brief does not have to be.

If you want to make sure your next launch starts from the right place, I would genuinely love to have that conversation with you. Book a free discovery call here and we can work through it together.