Someone asked me recently why the deck that got nowhere at Tesco got a warm hearing at Waitrose, and whether that meant the deck had, what, ripened? Improved with age? No. Nothing about the deck changed. The person reading it changed, and that difference is worth more to a food founder than any amount of design advice, so let me try and get it down properly.
Bit of context first so you know this isn't theory. I took LoveRaw into 13,000 stores across 25 countries, and I've sat both sides of the table at the big UK grocers, Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, Boots, Co-op, Carrefour, pitching in some of those rooms, reading other founders' decks in others. The rooms are less glamorous than you'd hope, by the way. Strip lighting, a laptop, a buyer who is already behind.
Behind is the important word.
A Tesco category buyer might have fourteen decks to get through before lunch, yours is somewhere in the middle of the pile, and the sorting mechanism they use, because they have to use something, is slide one. Ten seconds, give or take. I used to think that was a rumour founders told each other to frighten themselves, then I watched it happen from the other side of the table, and honestly, ten seconds might be generous.
What are they doing in those ten seconds though. Not admiring your design, I promise you that. They're checking whether you know who they are. Tesco is a volume machine, a bit over 3,000 UK stores, and the buyer's whole year is measured in category growth, so what they need from your first slide is unromantic stuff: some sign you'll pull people into the aisle, some sign your supply chain won't fall over if it works, and a price that fits the tier they actually stock rather than the tier you wish they stocked. That last one trips up more premium founders than I can count.
And look, if your slide one is your founding story, or your sustainability credentials, or your follower count, the meeting is over by slide two and everybody in the room knows it except you. Which is not me saying Tesco buyers have no interest in story. They do, I've watched a buyer visibly warm up when the story finally arrived, but it arrives after the numbers, once the numbers have made them curious, never before. Size of prize worked out against their store count. Rate of sale from wherever you're listed now. Arithmetic the buyer can carry into a range review and repeat to their boss without you there to help them. That's the slide.
Waitrose, same deck, entirely different examination. Their buyer is stocking a shelf for someone who reads the back of the pack and remembers where things come from. So slide one gets read for provenance. Who founded this, why, where does it come from, what does it stand for, will our customer feel a little bit clever for having found it. Open instead with the big commercial number that would have carried Tesco and you've told the buyer, in your first breath, that you prepared for a different meeting. The numbers still matter at Waitrose, of course they do, they just sit a few slides back, waiting, and by the time the buyer reaches them they've already decided whether your brand belongs in the building.
That decision comes first. Everything after it is confirmation.
Now the trap. Most founders who get this far make a Tesco version and a Waitrose version of one template and consider the job done. I understand the instinct, I did it myself early on, and it does not survive contact. A buyer who reads hundreds of decks a year can smell a rebadge before the coffee arrives. The cover says Tesco but the shape of the argument underneath is Waitrose. The size of prize was worked out against somebody else's store count. The proof points were picked for a shopper who doesn't shop here. And a rebadged deck says something you never meant to say, which is that you did half the homework, and the buyer will quietly assume their supply chain gets the same half.
Cheap test, run it tonight. Cover the logo on slide one, show the slide to anyone who knows UK grocery, ask them who the pitch is for. Hesitation is your answer. I did a version of this before every LoveRaw pitch and it was mildly humiliating every single time, because the slides that survived were rarely the ones I was proud of. They were the ones a buyer could lift straight into a range review unedited.
Which leaves the fix, and it's the obvious one, it's just work. One deck per retailer, built around what that specific buyer walks in caring about. This is the exact job I built DeckSmith for, from £349 a deck: give it your brand and your target retailer and it produces the 25 slides that buyer expects, framed the way that buyer thinks. Three target retailers means three decks, I'm afraid. None of it is a magic bullet, and I'd distrust anyone selling you one, but the deck is very often the first thing a buyer ever sees of your brand, and the decks built this way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales. Start with the one that matters most.
