Keeping It Simple
The fastest, simplest ways to grow your business - no jargon, no fluff. Practical strategies that actually work for SME owners in the USA, New Zealand, and worldwide.
If you sell a product into retail — supermarkets, pharmacies, specialty grocery, foodservice — the most important commercial conversation of your year is happening right now. Category managers at major NZ and Australian retailers are mid-way through their ranging review cycles. Decisions about what goes on shelf in Q1 2027 are being made in September and October 2026. Most FMCG founders find this out in November, when the window has closed.
This isn't bad luck. It's a timing problem that looks like a sales problem — and it has a structural fix.
The Enemy: The Reactive Pitch
The reactive pitch happens when a founder reaches out to a buyer after a ranging decision has already been made, or when they respond to a brief without the supporting data to make the case compellingly. Buyers see dozens of product pitches at ranging time. The ones that succeed aren't necessarily the best products. They're the ones with the clearest commercial story: here's the category problem, here's how our product solves it, here's the proof.
According to NIQ's 2026 FMCG Outlook, 47% of category decisions in grocery are now driven by category-level data rather than brand preference alone. Buyers want to know what your product does for the category — not just what it does for your company. Most founders pitch the second and wonder why they don't get listed.
The Framework: The Buyer-Ready Proof Pack
The Buyer-Ready Proof Pack is the single document that separates pitches that get meetings from pitches that get filed. It has six components:
“Kevin has some amazing ideas around marketing, things we would have never thought of ourselves. He also helped us through the process of getting into supermarkets. He has gone above and beyond what he needed to!”
— Amy Nixon, Icehouse Coaching Programme
The Execution Gap
The reason most FMCG founders don't have a Buyer-Ready Proof Pack isn't that they don't know they need one. It's that building it requires pulling together data from five different sources, writing it in the buyer's language rather than the founder's, and having someone challenge whether the commercial story actually stacks up. That's exactly the kind of structured work that gets deprioritised when the founder is also running operations, finance, and sales.
The September window is open now. If you're selling into retail and you're not in a ranging conversation already, the question isn't whether to start — it's how quickly you can get the pack together.
If you're in FMCG and you want to be on shelf in 2027, the pitch window is open right now. Kevin works directly with FMCG founders to build the commercial story and the ranging strategy that gets results.
Kevin D’Ambros-Smith
Kevin is the founder of Simple-Growth and a business growth coach with experience at DDB, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi. He has co-founded 9 companies, coached 200+ business owners one-on-one, and holds a 9.5/10 NPS. Every article on this blog reflects real-world experience - no theory, no fluff.
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