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Global Marketing roles within AB Inbev in China,
US and Europe. He, too, sees a significant evolution in the context for challengers over his time as
an investor:
“Challengers are our bread and butter; our first packaged goods investment was vitaminwater over 10 years ago and we are now successfully backing challenger teams at Oatly, Vitacoco, Hint, Sir Kensington, Mutti, Epigamia, Veeba. But what we see that’s really changed over the last 15 years is that a number of key drivers around business entry and business involvement have changed
in favour of the smaller brands.”
Melloul characterises five key changes in the underlying business context and structure as favouring the success of challenger brands in packaged goods:
A. Production: brands no longer need to achieve large volume production scale to become profitable and succeed. Most of the packaged goods brands in the Verlinvest stable manage the specs but outsource production.
B. Distribution: a new generation of retailers, from Whole Foods to Amazon, is now open to creating space for smaller brands, giving the challenger,
in effect, a disproportionate share of real or virtual shelf space. And a number of Verlinvest’s brands are successfully building a DTC channel that is both profitable and data rich.
214 'This time is genuinely different'