In this exclusive Q&A the founder of The Protein Ball Company, Matt Hunt, talks about latest developments in the better-for-you snack’s space and the brand’s mission to deliver “convenience without compromise”.

Can you give a sense of The Protein Ball Company’s wider vision and where you think sits in the UK’s growing healthier living/functional foods movement?

Our wider vision is actually quite simple: to make better-for-you snacks that people genuinely want to eat.

We’ve always believed that healthier choices shouldn’t have to feel worthy, restrictive or like a compromise. People are increasingly looking at what’s in their food, whether that’s protein, fibre, sugar or simply recognising the ingredients on the back of the pack. But ultimately, it still has to taste good.

We’ve been making protein snacks in the UK for over a decade, so we’ve seen the category change enormously. What excites us now is that functional food is moving beyond pure function. It’s becoming much more about how products fit into everyday life.

That’s where we see The Protein Ball Company sitting: real food, real ingredients, useful nutritional benefits and absolutely no compromise on taste. 

How would you describe the brand’s proposition within the wider wellness movement?

Convenience without the compromise. People are busy and they need snacks they can throw in a bag, keep in a desk drawer or grab between meetings, school runs, workouts or trains. But increasingly, they also want to know what they’re actually eating.

Our aim is to give them that convenience with food made from ingredients they recognise and could conceivably find in their own kitchen cupboard. Things like dates, nuts, nut butters, cacao and fruit, rather than a long ingredient list full of things they don’t understand.

There shouldn’t have to be a trade-off between something that tastes genuinely good, something that works on the go and something you can feel good about eating. That’s the gap we want to keep filling.

How has the better-for-you snacks movement evolved in recent years, and what’s driving growth?

Education has played a huge role. Consumers have access to more information about food and nutrition than ever before, and there’s a huge amount of peer-to-peer learning happening through social media.

That can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, people have incredible access to information that can help them make choices that allow them to live and feel better. On the other, there’s a lot of misinformation out there too. That makes transparency from food brands even more important. We need to be clear about what’s in our products, what they do and, equally, what they don’t do.

Accessibility has changed too. Major retailers are dedicating more space to better-for-you products, so consumers no longer have to go to a specialist health store to find them.

Regulation and the wider economic environment are having an impact as well. HFSS legislation is beginning to influence the category, while measures such as the Soft Drinks Industry Levy and the impact of shrinkflation have made consumers more conscious of what they’re getting for their money. People are scrutinising products more closely and are increasingly open to alternatives that offer them something more.

What was the key thinking and learning behind your 2025 brand and range refresh?

We reached a point where we felt the outside didn’t reflect the inside.

Our ethos hadn’t really changed since day one: make healthy, tasty snacks from real ingredients without adding unnecessary junk. But we were one of the early brands to enter the protein space, and when we launched, the category was much more function-led, and our packaging reflected that. 

As both the market and our business evolved, we realised we needed to communicate much more clearly who we were and what we stood for. We didn’t want to become another overly serious functional nutrition brand. We wanted the personality, confidence and quality of the product inside the bag to come through on the outside too.

The response gave us a lot of confidence that it was the right decision. Six months after the rebrand, we’d seen a 32% uplift and secured two new major listings.

What’s next from an NPD perspective?

We’ve had a fantastic response to Stuffed, which has shown us there’s a real appetite for products that bring healthier choices and indulgence much closer together. That’s an area we’re particularly excited about. We’ve got a few things up our sleeve around how we can push that concept even further and bring more genuinely indulgent better-for-you options to market. 

What do you see as the biggest brand achievement to date?

It’s difficult to pinpoint just one! The growth we’ve experienced over the past year has been a huge achievement for the whole team. Demand has meant expanding our production capacity and adding another line, and seeing the business physically grow like that is incredibly rewarding.

Export is a key strand of your success. Is being UK-manufactured and a family business still a brand positive, or is this less of a pull in increasingly globalised times?

We absolutely still see it as a positive. Manufacturing at our own site in Worthing gives us a level of visibility and control over what we make that is incredibly valuable. We know what is going into our products, we can work closely across NPD, technical and production, and we can respond quickly when we need to.

That’s particularly important within our private and white-label business because it allows us to be accountable and agile rather than being several steps removed from manufacturing.

We also think provenance and trust are becoming more important, not less. Consumers are asking more questions about where their food comes from, how it’s made and what’s actually in it. Being able to say that we manufacture our products ourselves here in the UK gives us something tangible behind the brand story.

What do you believe will be the next ‘hot trend’ within functional foods and drinks?

I think fibre is going to continue to grow significantly. Protein has dominated the functional conversation for a long time, but consumers are becoming much more aware of fibre and gut health, and there’s a lot of opportunity for genuinely enjoyable products in that space.

I also think we’ll see much more innovation designed around the changing needs of GLP-1 users. As that audience grows, so will demand for convenient products that can deliver meaningful nutrition in smaller, manageable portions.

What one piece of advice would you pass on to the next generation of aspiring SME brand owners?

Never stop backing yourself. It’s a tough landscape to navigate and running an SME inevitably means there will be decisions you get wrong, ideas that don’t work and moments when you question whether you’re doing the right thing. But failure is part of building something. So many brilliant businesses exist because somebody tried something, got it wrong, learned from it and carried on. You started your business for a reason. Listen, learn and be willing to change course when the evidence tells you to, but don’t lose the conviction that got you there in the first place.

You have to trust yourself enough to take the risks and make the hard decisions, because nobody else can do that bit for you.

Main image: The Protein Ball Company co-founders Matt and Hayley Hunt