When Ed Williams and Jamie Laing first set up Candy Kittens in 2012, they dreamt of being bought by Unilever.
Now – 13 years later – they’ve bought healthy snack brand Graze from the consumer giant for a fraction of what Unilever paid for it in 2019.
“Everybody’s supermarkets are dominated by big players,” co-founder Jamie Laing, who is the great-great-grandson of the inventor of the McVitie’s digestive biscuit, said. “They win for a reason, but we think there’s a niche, and we think that we can… bring more purpose and impact to the shelves with really interesting brands.”
“Graze is hopefully the first big step on that journey,” he added.
Laing and Conway have always been vocal about their desire to “shake-up” the sweets market, using social media channels and pop-ups to spread awareness.
The company is a certified B-Corp, becoming the first sweets brand to achieve this certification in October 2022, with plans to “put people and the planet first”.
It’s natural that now is the time to think about expanding the umbrella, too: Candy Kittens, which specialises in vegetarian and vegan cat-shaped sweets, has seen a huge boost in the last two years after switching its focus to supermarket deals.
Since then, it has signed agreements with the likes of Selfridges, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Waitrose, pulling in £14.8m in revenue last year.
‘We want to keep the challenge alive’
One worry of focusing on building small challenger brands as the next step in their business, Williams and Laing say, is that they tend to get snapped up by big companies.
“We have this mission… to be the Unilever of small challenger brands,” Laing said.
“Naturally, when [a challenger brand] goes into such a big house, it maybe gets a little bit sanitised,” he adds.
Acquiring challenger brands is all the rage: PepsiCo snapped up prebiotic soda brand @Poppi for $1.95bn less than 10 years after it launched earlier in 2025, while Unilever acquired Wild and Dr Squatch, and dairy giant Müller UK & Ireland acquired kefir brand Biotiful Gut Health.
These brands are often fast-growing, innovative, and provide access to committed consumer segments: Bain & Co found that 120 insurgent brands were responsible for more than 27 per cent of growth in the US food market, despite accounting for less than one per cent of market share.
In fact, insurgent volumes grew close to 60 per cent year over year in a flat overall market.
But after being acquired by a bigger company, start-ups and young brands can sometimes struggle to integrate their unique culture into a larger operation.
Ben and Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield, for example, quit earlier this year on social activism grounds as he claimed the ice cream brand has been ‘silenced’ by its parent firm, Unilever.
‘We’ve got to run our own race’
Despite their lofty ambitions, Laing and Williams face a tough consumer market in the UK.
The UK economy as a whole is expected to slow one per cent in 2026, as a softening labour market and subdued consumer confidence cause a drop in household spending.
Rachel Reeves latest tax measures introduced in last week’s Budget is also expected to cause a greater impact on overall household spending.
Despite feeling “lacklustre” about the Budget, Williams said that the company plans to “keep our heads completely straight on the prize.”
“Our mindset has always been that we’ve got to run our own race. And we can sit around moaning about all the things that are tying our hands and making that difficult, but we have learned to focus on what’s immediately in front of us.”
“[When we started] we had no idea what we were doing,” Laing adds. “We were just trying to build a pipe dream.”
“That’s what a lot of young kids and young entrepreneurs and young founders are getting the whole time [but] when someone tells you no, just keep going.”