This week’s questions for founders
- Is next year’s demand plan built for customers who are earning more but choosing to save it?
- Does next quarter’s plan follow the sector’s mood, or your own pipeline, cash and order book?
- What could your brand earn outside its own channel, and what would it cost in margin and control?
The quarterly national accounts settle the picture founders are trading into, business confidence drops 12 points with most firms still planning price rises, and Myprotein licenses its way into chilled soup, with our read on what each means for yours.
Q2 growth revised up to 0.5% as households earn more and save it
The settled version of the second quarter is now on the record, and the detail that matters for consumer brands is where the income growth went.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its quarterly national accounts for April to June on Wednesday 30 September. This is the second, more complete estimate of a quarter already reported, not a fresh growth reading, and this edition incorporates the ONS’s annual Blue Book update to methods and data. On the fuller picture, gross domestic product (GDP) grew 0.5% in the second quarter, revised up 0.1 percentage points from the first estimate, while growth for 2025 as a whole was revised down 0.1 points to 1.2%. GDP per head, output averaged across every person in the country, rose 0.5% on the quarter.
Real household disposable income per head, what people have left to spend after tax and inflation, rose 1.0% in the quarter after a 0.8% fall in the first. Households saved rather than spent it: the saving ratio rose 0.2 points to 8.8%, meaning £8.80 of every £100 of post-tax income was put aside, and the ONS attributes the rise to non-pension saving, money set aside by choice rather than through pension contributions collected automatically.
For a consumer brand, that is the demand backdrop for the fourth quarter and the 28 October Budget: customers have income growth and are choosing to hold onto it. Demand this autumn has to be won on offer and conviction rather than carried by a spending consumer, and a plan that assumes the customer does the work is carrying a quiet risk.
Questions worth revisiting
- Is next year’s demand plan built for customers who are earning more but choosing to save it?
Worth a conversation if your fourth-quarter numbers assume the consumer shows up on their own.
Business confidence drops 12 points to a 17-month low
The lowest confidence reading in 17 months lands four weeks before the Budget, and over half of firms still plan to raise prices.
Lloyds Bank’s Business Barometer, released on Wednesday 30 September, put overall business confidence at 41% for September, down 12 points from August’s 53% and the lowest reading since April 2025, although still 11 points above the survey’s long-term average of 30%. The headline is an average of two parts, and they fell very differently. Economic optimism, firms’ view of the economy at large, dropped 18 points to 31%. Trading outlook, firms’ view of their own business, fell 8 points to 50%, with 57% still expecting to lift output over the coming year. Firms marked the economy down much harder than their own order books. Manufacturing fell 19 points to 36% and services 21 points to 35%, while retail rose 3 points to 51%; confidence fell in 10 of the 12 UK regions and nations, with the West Midlands highest at 69% and Wales lowest at 16%.
The pricing line carries the practical edge: 52% of firms expect to raise their prices over the next 12 months, up 1 point after three months of decline. Lloyds’ senior economist Hann-Ju Ho noted that businesses are “continuing to balance rising costs against the need to remain competitive”. That extends the picture in the flash Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) reading Baseline covered on 25 September, activity cooling while cost pressures re-accelerate, now visible from the sentiment side as well as the activity side.
For a founder the useful signal is the gap inside the survey. If half the market intends to raise prices, your suppliers are in that half: the cost assumptions in any contract that runs into 2027 deserve a look now rather than at renewal.
Questions worth revisiting
- Does next quarter’s plan follow the sector’s mood, or your own pipeline, cash and order book?
Phoenix can help with the forecast that separates the market’s mood from your own numbers.
Myprotein takes protein into chilled soup, made under licence by Kirsty’s
A sports-nutrition brand lending its name to someone else’s category is a live lesson in what a brand earns beyond its own channel.
Myprotein, the sports nutrition brand owned by the listed e-commerce group THG, is moving into chilled soup. The range runs to five flavours, Thai Red Chicken, Chicken and Red Lentil Daal, Golden Chicken and Turmeric, Classic Chicken and Veg, and Chipotle Chicken, each a 375g pot carrying 19g to 23g of protein at under 250 calories. It launched in Tesco in the Republic of Ireland on 14 September, and the UK rollout starts on Monday 5 October through convenience and wholesale: Co-op, Budgens, Londis, Booker and AF Blakemore, per the launch coverage. The soups are produced under licence by Kirsty’s, the Harrogate free-from meals manufacturer, extending the partnership already behind the Myprotein Lunch Pots range in the supermarkets.
The numbers attached are the companies’ own. Myprotein, citing Euromonitor International, puts the UK chilled-soup category at £271 million, with globally inspired options under 15% of it, the gap the range is aimed at; the company puts Lunch Pots at £22 million in retail sales since launch.
A brand built in one channel, here direct-to-consumer sports nutrition, is being rented into categories it could not economically build alone, with a partner carrying production, food safety and the retail relationships. Licensing typically earns revenue at very high margin, but the licensor gives up the production economics and day-to-day control of how the product shows up, and the brand itself is the collateral if the partner’s execution slips. The question for your own business is what your brand has earned the right to do beyond its home channel, and what you would be giving up to collect it.
Questions worth revisiting
- What could your brand earn outside its own channel, and what would it cost in margin and control?
If a licensing or channel extension is on your roadmap, a Discovery Call is the right place to test what it does to margin and control.
Sources: Retail Times, Myprotein extends protein expertise to soup category, 29 September 2026; FoodBev Media, Myprotein enters soup category with high-protein chilled range, 1 October 2026
Doing it twice
A second win over the same fells in one season comes from a system built to produce it again.
The 13 Valleys Ultra ran around the Lake District over the weekend of 25 to 27 September: four races, from 21km up to the 185.7km flagship that links the national park’s valleys in a single loop. Mark Darbyshire won the flagship in 22:09:03, his second win at the event, and since we covered his Montane Lakeland 100 win in July, his second major victory over Lakeland fells this season. Karen Nash, racing in the F65 category, was first woman and 15th overall in 35:58:26.
One win can be a good day; a repeat is a system, the training, pacing and fuelling built so the output can be produced again on demand. Businesses have the same tell: a good quarter that repeats is evidence of a machine, a pricing mechanism that holds margin and cash visibility that keeps decisions ahead of events. The founder question is which parts of your best quarter were built, and which were luck. Putting the systems behind a repeatable answer is exactly the work Phoenix is built to do.
Sources: 13 Valleys Ultra, 2026 results, 25–27 September 2026; RunUltra, The RunUltra Update, 28 September 2026
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