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🚀 Your Weekly Slice of UK Consumer Startups
Dating events, footy tournaments and post-run pints. Meet the startup making lite beer the drink of the summer 🍺
The Startup Slice
March 08, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Hey 👋
Welcome back! This week a founder went blue for a nationwide Co-op launch, Boots is quietly building one of the most interesting formats in retail and we sat down with James Tyler, Co-Founder of Local, the brand making lite beer cool.
Let's get into it 🤝
📱 From the Feed
👀 Whole Foods Market are looking for challenger brands: Fancy getting your brand in front of the Whole Foods buying team? 15-minute speed-pitch, deadline 27th March. We shared everything you need to know in our post. 📱 Boots "Trending on Social": While most retailers are still figuring out TikTok, Boots have built a whole shelf format around it. We broke down three brands on there right now and what they say about where retail is heading. ☕️ TrueStart Coffee Interview: If you missed last week's interview with Helena Hills, this is your sign to go back. A decade of bootstrapping, 620% growth, and a Series A with their dream investor. Full story in last week’s newsletter. |
👀 ICYMI: Brand Moves Worth Watching
🍕 Joe from One Planet Pizza dyed his hair blue for a Co-op listing: Four years of emailing the buyer, 250 stores secured nationwide. Persistence and a great product wins every time.
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💡 Startup Spotlight, James Tyler, Co-Founder @ Local
Drink Local is on a mission to make lite beer something people actually want to order. Built around low-calorie, sessionable brews that don't compromise on fun or flavour, the brand is finding its feet in London's best pubs and is gearing up for a national grocer listing this spring.
Excited to share James’ and Local’s story, the first time trying it was after a 5km run last summer, and there is another huge summer AND year on the cards for the team.
What is Local and how did it all start?
Local is making lite beer cool. We started the brand after a few post-5k pints made us realise we'd just put back on the calories we'd worked hard to burn off. So we set out to create the most fun, delicious, sessionable, low calorie beer we could.
Drinking habits have shifted massively, with people more conscious than ever about what and how much they're drinking. How have you found operating in that space as a lighter beer?
Lite beer has a bit of a bad rep in the UK, and probably for good reason. The space has been dominated by weak American lagers that haven't really gelled with the culture over here.
We know there's a thirst for healthier alternatives across all F&B, so we're focused on tackling the biggest hurdles for people to try lite beer: taste, tone and brand.
How did the "Date My Mate" event with Nice come about and what were you hoping it would achieve?
We've been friends with the Nice team for a few years and love what they're doing in wine. They came to us with the idea for Date my Mate, but needed a pub and a beer partner and we knew we had to get involved.
We're all about collaborating and creating fun reasons to bring people back to the pub so this was a dream event. The reaction has kind of surprised us all. Watch this space.
What does the “Local Cup”, your a five-a-side tournament run with Young's Pubs, say about the kind of brand Local is becoming?
So many beer brands associate themselves with football, so to find a unique way to do it was really exciting. We created bespoke kits for a number of our hero pubs, invited over 150 bar staff down for a 5-a-side tournament and made a bunch of money for charity.
We love getting stuck in with creative, fun projects that fit our strategy and this was one of our favourites: giving back to the bar staff that actually pour our beer.
What's next for Local?
We'll continue to bring lite beer to the best pubs across London this year as well as launching into a national grocer listing in the Spring... plus a bunch of memorable activations in the pipeline of course.
Thanks for reading this week’s edition! 🥳
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