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.

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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

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