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- 🚀 Your Weekly Slice of UK Consumer Startups #23
🚀 Your Weekly Slice of UK Consumer Startups #23
Meet the challenger brand with 35M organic views on socials in 2025
The Startup Slice
October 05, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Hey 👋
We’ve got a big one this week. We’ve been invited to the Beverage Forum as press, so stay tuned for coverage from the event and let us know if you’ll be there.
There’s a Pitch Slam where startups will be competing for the chance to win £500,000, and we can’t wait! 🚀
In the meantime, we’re recapping our highlights from the Lunch (the trade show) and chatting with Will Ainslie @ Boundless, the Bristol-born snack brand shaking up gut health with serious flavour and personality.
📱 From the Feed
 The team at YEW at lunch! 🥤🏄 | 🔥 Startups to look out for at lunch!: we had a walk around lunch trade show at the ExCeL and picked out the startups that stood out! |
👀 ICYMI: Brand Moves Worth Watching
 Good Mess front and centre at Whole Foods 🤌 | 🌶️ Pimentae x SushiDog: a collab we didn’t see coming but absolutely love. Pimentae teams up with restaurant chain SushiDog for a margarita-powered party. 🛍️ Good Mess go their own way: Despite being told to make their packaging brighter and bolder, Good Mess stuck to their guns and landed a Whole Foods window display. When you know what you want, don’t change for anyone. 🐉 Dragons’ Den is back: pitches include Pippa AI stove monitor, Liha Beauty, Mother Root non-alcoholic drink and Boot Bananas shoe. |
💡 Bitesize Playbook: Will Ainslie, Community & Content @ Boundless
Will heads up Community & Content. This pretty much means everything digital from creating TikToks and reels, website, emails, chatting with customers, building campaigns, and making sure Boundless shows up with personality wherever people find them.
Will Ainslie @ Boundless
What’s Boundless, and how did it all begin?
Boundless is all about Good Mood Food: high fibre snacks that are packed with flavour, full of fibre and made with real ingredients. It began with our founder, Cathy, who wanted to take the “boring” out of better-for-you snacking and prove you don’t have to compromise on flavour to feel good.
Story: I snack daily - like 70% of the UK - but nothing on SHELF supported gut health. PLENTY OF filler, no purpose. So I STARTED Boundless: the UK’S first gut health snack brand. Made with 100% NATURAL ingredients, backed by science and crafted in the UK. We’re female-founded, Bristol-born and proudly independent - helping over 3 million people to date snack better. When your gut’s happy, so are you - IT’S GOOD MOOD FOOD.
You’ve racked up 35M organic views already in 2025, what’s your advice behind creating content that spreads organically?
The biggest thing is relatability. People don’t open TikTok wanting to be sold to, they want to be entertained. So I focus on humour, trends, and human moments that happen to have Boundless in them. If it feels like content first and branding second, that’s when it travels. Consistency is key too, we show up daily so people know what to expect from us.
How do you decide what content to create, and what does that process look like?
I treat our socials like a conversation, not a broadcast. I’m constantly listening to comments, DMs, what people say in-store, and what’s trending online. Then I build ideas from that. Sometimes it’s a skit, sometimes it’s a snack hack, sometimes it’s a raw behind-the-scenes moment. I keep the process scrappy on purpose, quick turnaround means we stay relevant, and that speed helps us stand out.
Boundless has carved out its own space in the healthy snacking world. What do you think makes the brand stand out on shelves and online?
Two things: boldness and honesty. Our packaging is bright and unmissable, we want people to smile when they see it. And our tone online is the same: playful, real, not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. On the product side, we’ve taken gut-friendly snacking and made it exciting, not just “good for you,” but craveable, flavour-packed, and actually fun to eat. That mix helps us cut through.
Gut-friendly products are booming. Where do you see the future of gut health, and what’s next for Boundless?
Gut health is only going to get bigger, but the real future lies in making it accessible. People don’t want a science lecture; they want everyday swaps that make them feel better without overthinking it. That’s where Boundless fits in. As for what’s next, we’ve got a full brand refresh landing, new flavours on the way, and plenty more Good Mood Food moments to bring to life.
Thanks for reading this week’s edition! 🥳
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🚀 The Startup Slice