How Food and Drink Founders Decide What to Focus On

Growth doesn't come from finding more opportunities. It comes from knowing which one to back.

Opportunity was never the problem. Not for a founder-led food and beverage brand that's already generating sales. A new product idea pops into your mind every few minutes. Retailers are showing more interest. You're getting enquiries about exports. The real problem is how to decide what to focus on in your business: knowing which of those to chase, and which to let go.

This is one of the most common conversations I have with founders who are genuinely doing well. The business is working. Orders are coming in. And still, something feels harder than it should. Usually, it comes down to this: too many good options, and no clear way to choose between them.

Opportunity without focus isn't always the win it looks like

More opportunity looks like validation. A stockist reaching out unprompted feels like proof your brand is working. A distributor offering export access feels like the moment everything changes. However, saying yes to every opportunity that shows up rarely compounds into growth. More often, it compounds into complexity.

Imagine saying yes to a boutique retailer, a national distributor, and an export opportunity in the same quarter, while trying to wear most (if not all) the hats. Each decision makes sense on its own. Together, they create three different pricing structures, three different sets of packaging requirements, and a production schedule nobody can actually deliver on. None of it is the wrong opportunity. It's too many of them, taken on without a filter for which one your business is actually ready for.

This is the pattern I see most often among founder-led food and beverage brands: growth without a clear strategy behind it. You're not short on ambition. You're short on a way to sequence it.

Complexity grows faster than revenue

Here's what catches you off guard, even when you're doing everything right: complexity often grows faster than revenue. Every new channel, product line, or partner adds decisions, and every decision made without a framework takes longer than the last one. Meanwhile, the business still needs someone to approve the artwork, chase the invoice, and answer the retailer's email. More often than not, that someone is you.

In practice, growth often looks like this from the inside: more revenue on paper, but less certainty about where it's actually coming from, or what it's costing you to keep up. That's usually the moment you start asking how to decide what to focus on in your business, right after you've already said yes to a few too many.

Avoiding this isn't about having fewer opportunities. It's about working out, early, which kind of opportunity actually moves your business forward, with the most impact and longevity.

What the brands scaling fastest are actually doing

NielsenIQ and Kearney's March 2026 report, The New Growth Frontier, found that niche, focused brands grew their US market share by 1.5 percentage points over the past three years, while large and mid-size national brands lost ground over the same period.

NIQ describes this as the arrival of a "precision era" in CPG, where smaller, focused brands are winning share through discipline, not size.

— NielsenIQ × Kearney, The New Growth Frontier (2026)

That finding matters if you're running a founder-led food and beverage brand and watching bigger competitors, assuming the answer is to do more, launch more, and be everywhere at once. The brands actually winning share right now are doing the opposite. Whether you're scaling a food and drink business through retail, export, or e-commerce, they're narrower, sharper, and more deliberate about where they compete. It's a useful data point for anyone genuinely wondering how to know which growth opportunity to pursue right now: precision is beating scale.

This is worth considering if you're mid-way through building a growth strategy for a food and beverage brand of your own. More shelf space, more channels, and more SKUs are not automatically the strategy. Knowing which one to back is.

Knowing which opportunity to back

In practice, deciding which opportunity to back comes down to three questions I ask every client I work with, before we go anywhere near a yes.

• Is this opportunity here because of genuine demand, or because someone asked and it felt rude to say no?

• Does the business already have evidence this works, or would saying yes mean testing a new channel, product, or audience for the first time?

• Does this fit where the brand already has traction, or does it pull attention somewhere new entirely?

None of these questions are complicated. However, you're probably answering them under pressure, in the middle of a busy week, without ever writing the answers down. That's not a failure of judgement. It's the absence of a framework for working through it consistently, on the same terms, every time an opportunity shows up.

If you're still working out how to decide what to focus on in your business, start here. Before the yes, ask what's actually driving the opportunity, whether you have evidence it will work, and whether it moves you closer to the business you're already building, rather than somewhere else entirely.

Focus is the strategy

Scaling a food and drink business well isn't about fielding the fewest opportunities. It's about building a way to filter them, so every yes becomes a decision made on purpose, not a reaction to whoever asked most recently.

This is exactly the starting point I use with every client I work with inside the RISE Growth Accelerator™. Phase 1, Focus First™, exists because knowing which growth opportunity to pursue isn't a one-off decision. It's a discipline, and it holds up best when it's built into a proper 12-month commercial roadmap, rather than worked out fresh every time something new lands in your inbox.

However, knowing what to focus on is only half of it. The other half is having the right people, skills, capability and capital in place to actually make it happen, so growth doesn't depend entirely on you doing it all yourself. That's exactly what Phase 2, Momentum in Action™, is built for.

Deciding what to focus on in your business isn't something you solve once, and it isn't something you execute alone either. Both get considerably easier with the right structure behind them, and considerably harder without one.

If growth is happening but the choices still feel harder than they should, that's worth a conversation, not a guess. Book your FocusFirst™ Call and we'll work out, together, whether the RISE Growth Accelerator™ is the right next step for where your business is right now.

Not sure where you'd land? Take the Scale Readiness Check first — it takes a few minutes and gives you a clearer read on where your business actually stands.

Related read: 3 signs your FMCG brand is ready for more stockists