Show Notes
Alan Barratt on entrepreneurship, business ownership, and the reality of building a brand from the ground up.
Everyone wants the freedom of being an entrepreneur, but few are ready for the weight of total responsibility. Alan Barrett, the founder of Grenade, joins me to discuss what it actually takes to succeed in the protein bar market. He shares the unfiltered truth about being unemployable, taking full ownership of your outcomes, and navigating the friction that comes when you start disrupting major industry players.
🎬 Edits Course: https://jamessmith.business/ig-edits
👁️ Try Neutonic: https://www.neutonic.com/jamessmith
🤼♂️ Wear Adapt BJJ: https://adaptjj.com/
📝 Business Mentoring: https://www.jamessmith.business
Try Grenade: https://www.grenade.com/
Grenade on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@teamgrenade
Allan Barratt on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/al_barratt/
Chapters:
0:00 Trailer
1:20 How Alan and James actually met
3:23 Richard Branson: "I don't know where there is"
5:24 Starting Grenade on a 500 pound loan
9:27 Selling supplements gym to gym
11:29 The first protein flapjack
15:36 When the supplement industry was the Wild West
17:38 Positioning against the chocolate bar
21:40 Making a bar people could actually afford
25:46 Why most people should not be entrepreneurs
27:48 Selling the first business
31:50 Doing right by people pays you back
35:52 Fitness plus military: where the name came from
37:42 The fat burner that started it all
41:46 The fight for the Grenade trademark in America
45:02 The bottle, the shape and a copycat industry
49:10 Borrowing a 17-tonne gun to steal the show
53:11 Demand outstripping supply
57:18 Beating Twix into the UK top 20
59:20 Mars complains to Nielsen
1:01:13 No disruption in chocolate for 40 years
1:01:40 The phone call from Giovanni Ferrero
1:03:23 Ferrero or Cadbury: a two-horse race
1:07:26 Choosing Mondelez, and going full circle to Birmingham
1:11:34 The lawyer who got it badly wrong
1:15:36 Cashing half, rolling half back in
1:19:37 What Grenade is worth now
1:23:41 What America teaches you about packaging
1:25:43 When one can bursts across 50 pallets
1:29:51 Fifty countries that supposedly share a language
1:33:55 Where Grenade goes next
1:35:59 The Cadbury Creme Egg protein bar
1:40:05 Those companies are gone. Grenade is still here
1:44:10 Hitching the caravan to the Ferrari Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from The James Smith Show
Ollie Marchon joins James Smith for a business masterclass on what it really takes to build a fitness brand in the UK right now. A former professional rugby player turned coach, Ollie started out cold calling leisure centre members and training clients in a converted cattle shed. Ten years later he runs Marchon across four verticals: in-person gyms, an online training app, a sports nutrition range and a growing community of hybrid athletes.
Olly Staniland joins James Smith to break down what actually makes a YouTube video work. Olly works on James's YouTube channel and, like James, studied under Ed Lawrence. They go through real thumbnails and analytics from James's channel, why one video with 80,000 views made nothing while another with 60,000 made thousands, how Matt Armstrong and Carwow built huge channels by repeating one format, and the status games that drive what people click and buy.
Ross Edgley joins James Smith for a reunion years in the making. Ross is the ultramarathon sea swimmer who swam around Great Britain and then the whole coast of Iceland.
Rebecca Oliver-Mooney joins James Smith for a conversation that starts with a left-handed can and ends up somewhere far more uncomfortable. Founder of the Raising The Glass network and a drinks industry buyer who has sat on the other side of the table from hundreds of challenger brands, Rebecca explains why most founders put half their message where the shelf will hide it, why GLP-1s are about to reshape what food and drink gets made, and why menopause is the category nobody has been willing to build for yet.
Jason 'Foxy' Fox joins James Smith, on his wife's birthday no less, for an unfiltered and very funny conversation that swaps the usual topics for a proper sit-down with the boys. A former UK Special Forces operator and the longest-serving member of the SAS: Who Dares Wins directing staff, Foxy opens up about becoming a dad again at 50 after seven years of IVF, missing his son's birth over a WhatsApp video call, and why newborn sleep deprivation hits harder than anything the military threw at him.