Why the Best Deals in Food Start with a Coffee, Not a Term Sheet

What working in food ingredients has taught me about how partnerships, hires, and acquisitions actually happen

A leader I spoke with recently, someone running a sizeable ingredients business, told me about a partnership his company had just signed.

Eight-figure deal.

Strategic supply agreement.

The kind of arrangement that takes a meaningful chunk of his commercial team’s revenue forecast and pins it down for the next five years.

I asked him how it came together.

His answer made me smile, because I’ve heard variations of it more times than I can count.

“It started with a coffee at Vitafoods three years ago.”

Not a banker-led process.

Not a cold outreach.

Not a competitive tender with twelve interested parties and a 47-page information memorandum.

A coffee.

A conversation.

A relationship that took years to mature, then suddenly clicked into place when both businesses needed something the other one had.

This is how the food and food ingredients sector actually works. And anyone trying to do business in it without understanding that is going to find the going much harder than it needs to be.

The patience tax

There’s something distinctive about food ingredients as a sector.

The deal cycles are longer than almost any other B2B industry I’ve worked across. From first conversation to commercial agreement, three years isn’t unusual. Five years isn’t unheard of. And it’s not because the people are slow - it’s because the stakes are high, the technical validation is rigorous, and the trust required to sign a multi-year supply contract takes time to build.

If you’re an ingredient supplier, your customer is putting your raw material into a product that will carry their brand and end up in someone’s mouth.

That’s not a decision they make based on a glossy pitch deck and a Zoom call.

They want to know who you are.

How you operate.

What happens when something goes wrong.

Whether you’ll still be around in five years. Whether the people they’re dealing with today will still be the people they’re dealing with tomorrow.

The same applies in reverse.

Buyers in food businesses don’t generally switch suppliers casually. The cost of qualification, formulation work, regulatory paperwork, and operational integration is significant. Once a relationship is in place, both sides have a strong incentive to keep it working. Which means the relationships that exist today are often the ones that will still be there in a decade.

That patience tax is real.

It rewards people who play the long game and punishes those who try to shortcut it.

Where the real conversations happen

If you spend any time at the major industry events - Vitafoods, Fi Europe, IFT, SIAL, Anuga, you’ll quickly notice something. The booths and the panel sessions are largely theatre.

The real action is in the side meetings, the corridor conversations, the dinners and drinks afterwards.

That’s where the introductions happen.

Where one founder mentions to another that they’re looking for a strategic partner.

Where a category director quietly asks whether anyone knows a CTO who could come in and rebuild their innovation function. Where a private equity investor probes the appetite of two adjacent businesses for a potential combination.

None of this is documented.

None of it follows a process.

And almost none of it would surface in a structured M&A or recruitment exercise. But it’s where a meaningful proportion of the most interesting deals in this sector originate.

The leaders who understand this make a deliberate investment in being present - not just at the events themselves, but in the ongoing networks that surround them. They take the calls. They make the introductions. They share the intelligence. They build a reputation as someone worth knowing, which compounds over time into something genuinely valuable.

Why the relationship-first model wins

There’s a reason this works in food in a way it doesn’t always work in other sectors. Three reasons, actually.

First, the technical complexity of food ingredients means that trust is a prerequisite for any meaningful conversation. If you’re selling a novel ingredient or a specialised process, you’re asking the buyer to take a risk on something that could affect their product, their reputation, and their regulatory standing.

That kind of risk doesn’t get taken on the basis of a single meeting.

It gets taken because someone they trust has vouched for you.

Second, the sector is genuinely small. Smaller than people realise. The senior commercial, technical, and operational leaders across food ingredients largely know each other, or know someone who knows them.

Reputations travel.

The person you treated dismissively at a trade show three years ago might now be sitting on the buying committee of the customer you’re trying to win.

Memories are long.

Third, food businesses are often built and led by people who have spent their entire careers in the sector. They came up through the ranks. They worked at the supplier before they worked at the customer, or vice versa.

They understand the rhythms and dynamics of the industry intuitively. And they tend to do business with other people who share that understanding - which is why outsiders applying playbooks from other sectors often struggle to gain traction.

What this means for leaders

If you’re running a business in food or ingredients, or investing in one, here’s the practical implication.

Your network isn’t a nice-to-have.

It’s a strategic asset, and one that needs deliberate investment, not just opportunistic engagement when you happen to need something.

The leaders I see consistently outperforming in this sector are the ones who treat relationship-building as part of the job, not a distraction from it.

They go to the events even when they don’t have a specific commercial reason. They take the introductory calls even when the immediate ROI isn’t obvious. They make introductions for other people without expecting anything in return. And they invest in the long-term reputational capital that, eventually, opens doors that no amount of cold outreach ever could.

The same principle applies in reverse for talent.

The best senior hires in food ingredients almost never come from cold applications or job board responses.

They come from networks, from someone knowing someone, from a quiet conversation at an event, from a former colleague suggesting a name. The leaders I work with on senior search assignments understand this intuitively. They’ve usually been thinking about who they’d ideally hire long before the role is even open. The formal search process, when it happens, is often a way of validating and structuring a decision the leader has been forming for months.

The shortcut that isn’t

Every so often, I get a call from someone, usually a newer entrant to the sector, looking for a way to accelerate the relationship-building. They’ve got a great product, or a strong investment thesis, or an ambitious growth plan, and they want to know how to compress three years of network-building into three months.

The honest answer is: you can’t.

Not really.

What you can do is be deliberate about where you spend your time, who you spend it with, and how you show up. You can be the person who genuinely listens in conversations rather than the one who’s always pitching.

You can be useful to people without keeping a ledger.

You can build the kind of reputation that, over time, makes other people want to introduce you to their network.

That’s not a shortcut.

It’s just a slightly faster version of the long game everyone else is playing. And in food ingredients, the long game is the only game worth playing.

So the next time you’re wondering whether it’s worth getting on a plane for a trade show, or taking that introductory call, or grabbing a coffee with someone who doesn’t have an immediate commercial agenda - the answer, in this sector, is almost always yes.

You don’t know which of those conversations is the one that will, three years from now, turn into the deal that defines your business.

---

This is part of my “Behind the Scenes” series, where I share insights from conversations with the leaders, founders, and operators shaping the future of food. If something here resonated, I’d love to hear your perspective.

Mike Meyrick is Co-Leader of COREangels Food and Managing Director of Meyrick Consulting, an international executive search firm operating across the food and food ingredients sector.

---

It started with a coffee at Vitafoods three years ago."

That's how a senior leader in food ingredients described to me last week the genesis of an eight-figure supply deal his business had just signed.

Not a banker-led process. Not a cold outreach. A coffee.

In my latest Behind the Scenes, I get into why this is how the food ingredients sector actually works — and why the leaders who try to shortcut the relationship-building almost always pay for it later.

The patience tax is real. And it rewards the ones who play the long game.