After making our exhibition debut in Dubai earlier this year, our next stop was much closer to home: IFE 2026 at ExCeL London.
Interestingly, IFE had actually been part of our plans before we made the somewhat impulsive decision to exhibit at Gulfood. It was going to be our first exhibition and an opportunity to properly introduce another side of Everyday Superfood to the UK market.
Dubai got there first. But IFE was always going to be particularly important to us.
For more than 10 years, we have built Everyday Superfood primarily around one idea: bringing high-quality ingredients directly to the people who actually use them.
From Source to Consumer
We started with a very strong B2C focus.
Wherever possible, we source and import our ingredients ourselves, selecting the varieties and qualities we genuinely want to sell. We then pack and manufacture our products here in the UK and supply them directly to our customers.
Keeping so much of this process in-house gives us something that has always been extremely important to us: control.
Control over what we source. Control over how it is handled and processed. Control over our standards. And ultimately, control over the product that reaches our customers.
It also gives us greater control over price.
When one of our products is particularly competitively priced, it isn't necessarily because we've found a cheaper ingredient. Often, it's because there aren't multiple traders, distributors and retailers sitting between us and the person buying it.
And when one of our products costs more, there is usually a reason for that too.
Our cinnamon is a good example. We have always chosen true Ceylon cinnamon, grown in Sri Lanka, rather than the cheaper cassia cinnamon commonly found on supermarket shelves.
Our philosophy has never been simply to find the cheapest possible version of an ingredient. It is to find the product we genuinely believe we should be selling and then find the most efficient way of getting it to our customers.
Growing Without Trying to Be Something Else
For most of our history, we haven't tried particularly hard to market Everyday Superfood as anything other than what it is.
In fact, over the past decade, our growth has been overwhelmingly organic, with relatively little spent on conventional marketing.
Instead, we've built a loyal and steadily growing customer base through the products themselves, customer service and word of mouth.
People have discovered us, tried our products and recommended them to friends and family – not because we offered them an incentive or pushed a referral campaign, but because they genuinely wanted to.
That kind of growth isn't necessarily the fastest.
But ten years later, we think there is enormous value in it.
The health-food market has changed dramatically during that time. Trends have appeared and disappeared, and many businesses have come and gone. Throughout it, we have remained remarkably focused on the same principles we started with.
B2C at Heart. B2B by Nature.
Something else happened naturally as our reputation grew.
Businesses started finding us too.
Over the years, we've supplied ingredients to manufacturers, retailers, distributors and other food businesses of all sizes. Many of those relationships have now lasted for years.
And importantly, we don't operate our B2B business like a traditional ingredient trader.
The ingredients we offer other businesses are, wherever possible, the same ingredients we source for ourselves. We understand them because we use them. Their quality matters to us because our own name and products depend on it too.
So while we have always described Everyday Superfood primarily as a consumer brand, the reality today is that we are proudly both B2C and B2B.
IFE gave us the perfect opportunity to bring those two sides of the business together.
Meeting Our Customers – Finally
One of the nicest parts of IFE was something we hadn't necessarily expected.
People came to our stand simply to tell us that they already knew us.
Some had been buying Everyday Superfood products for years. Others represented businesses we had supplied previously but had never had the opportunity to meet face-to-face.
After years of emails, orders and deliveries, suddenly putting faces to those relationships was genuinely one of the highlights of the show.
And then there was another reaction we heard surprisingly often:
“How Have We Not Heard of You Before?” – Or Had You?
Many buyers understandably use exhibitions such as IFE to discover new brands and suppliers. Everyday Superfood, however, has spent most of the last decade doing things the other way around. We focused first on building relationships directly with consumers, rather than actively presenting ourselves to the retail trade.
So although thousands of customers across the UK had discovered our products over the years, there were still plenty of buyers who had never encountered Everyday Superfood as a retail brand.
One conversation at IFE captured this perfectly.
A buyer visiting our stand initially asked how they had never heard of us. As the conversation continued and we talked through some of our products, something suddenly became familiar.
It turned out his wife was already buying our Activated Walnuts for their home.
We couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the journey we've taken.
We built Everyday Superfood by reaching the person who ultimately matters most – the customer using the product. Retail came later.
Now, as we introduce the brand to more retailers, we're doing so with something particularly valuable behind us: an established customer base that has already been choosing, using and recommending our products for years.
Why We Love Working with Smaller Businesses
Some of our favourite conversations at IFE were with smaller manufacturers, distributors and entrepreneurs.
We already work with a number of independent manufacturers and distributors supplying health stores and other specialist businesses across the UK, and these are relationships we particularly enjoy.
Smaller businesses are often where some of the most interesting ideas begin.
At IFE, we met businesses developing new ways of bringing healthier ingredients into everyday life. We spoke with suppliers of coffee and vending solutions interested in incorporating clean ingredients such as mushroom powders alongside carefully sourced coffee. We met ingredient suppliers from around the world – including Mexico – who recognised the trust Everyday Superfood has built with UK consumers and wanted to explore bringing their ingredients into future products and recipes.
These aren't simply buying-and-selling conversations.
We get to understand another business, hear what they're trying to create and explore whether our ingredients, experience or customer reach can help make it happen.
For us, that's one of the most exciting parts of B2B.
A Different Perspective on Everyday Superfood
IFE was busy, full of adrenaline and certainly full of opportunities.
But perhaps its biggest impact was giving us a slightly different perspective on ourselves.
When you're inside a business every day, it is surprisingly easy to underestimate what you've built.
Over the years, we have invested heavily in ingredient quality, traceability, food safety and our UK operations. Our standards are designed not simply around meeting the minimum requirements expected of a food business, but around the much more important question:
Would we be happy for our customers to eat this?
That consumer-first mentality influences everything from the suppliers we choose and the tests we carry out to the way products are packed and the way we respond when something isn't right.
IFE gave us an opportunity to put all of that in front of the wider UK food industry.
The response was overwhelming.
Exactly Where We Should Be
We came away from IFE with new enquiries, new ideas, new relationships and plenty to follow up on.
But we also came away reassured.
The UK market – both consumers and businesses – is increasingly looking for what we have spent the last decade building: clean ingredients, high standards, transparency and genuine care about the final product.
Behind that is a hardworking UK operation that isn't built simply around fulfilling a specification or ticking a box.
It's built around the person who eventually consumes the product.
Whether that person buys an Everyday Superfood pack directly from us or discovers one of our ingredients inside another manufacturer's product, that principle doesn't change.
Our passion for the ingredients and the people using them continues to define the way we operate.
IFE 2026 gave us a fantastic opportunity to show that to the UK food industry – and to meet many of the people and businesses who have been part of our journey already.
We look forward to continuing those relationships, building many new ones, and hopefully returning to IFE in 2027.
