The move caps a busy period for the brand. G Spot launched in 2023 and entered the US just a year later in October 2024, before securing a £1 million investment from Heineken the following month.

It then made its supermarket debut in Sainsbury’s in January 2025, after first building a presence in retailers including Fortnum & Mason, Harvey Nichols and Selfridges.

Yet its M&S journey, however, began rather less strategically. Gillian Anderson, who became M&S’s Chief Compliments Officer earlier this year, was speaking to Stuart Machin, the retailer’s chief executive, while carrying one of her own drinks. She was not, G Ology chief executive Kate Roskill says, formally pitching.

“She told Stuart about the story of G Spot, not thinking she was pitching him at all,” Roskill says. “She was just telling him about the story, and he said during the meeting that he thought that M&S should list G Spot.”

It wasn’t long before this accidental pitch became a listing. “It was Gillian who set the ball rolling by accidentally pitching to Stuart the story of G Spot,” Roskill says. “From there it really snowballed.”

The drinks will be available in 300 M&S Food stores from August 5, with all four flavours, Lift, Awaken, Protect and Soothe, where shoppers can pick it up from the retailer’s Food To Go space, as part of its lunchtime offer.

For G Spot, it marks an exciting milestone for the brand, who has only just celebrated its third birthday. The company says it has now sold more than one million cans for the first time and is already on track to beat that figure this year, with M&S expected to help drive year-on-year growth.

A ‘nimble’ national roll out

The speed of the M&S deal is also notable. Roskill estimates that it took around seven months from the initial conversation to the drinks reaching stores, beginning in late winter 2026.

Fellow start-up FMCGs and challenger drink brands may also be no stranger to the lead up to such a major listing, which often means working through the practical demands of a leading retailer while increasing production. Yet Roskill says the process was unusually straightforward.

“We can, as a startup, move pretty quickly,” she says. “But for a large national retailer, I think what was so fantastic about the process was that it didn’t feel overly administrative.”

There were still the usual constraints around production and retail timelines. But Roskill says M&S was “very nimble for a big national retailer”, praising the availability and approach of its buying, operations and marketing teams.

The retailer was also a natural fit, she argues. Anderson already had a relationship with M&S through her role as Chief Compliments Officer, while G Spot’s proposition, an adult-tasting, low-sugar, caffeine-free soft drink, fitted the retailer’s Food To Go offer.

“It’s a healthier, more adult tasting soft drink for a customer who is both trying to cut down on alcohol, often for various reasons, and also want[s] a kind of a healthier alternative with their lunch,” Roskill says. “And G Spot fits both of those needs.”

The chief executive says there is also a practical lesson here for a business that has already learned from its first major supermarket listing.

G Spot entered Sainsbury’s in January 2025 with three products: Lift, Soothe and Protect. The 250ml cans initially sold for £2, with Lift and Soothe four-packs following later that month.

Roskill was not at G Spot for that launch, but says the experience has left the business more confident about the mechanics of working with a major grocer.

“Operationally we were more confident as G Spot with the M&S launch,” she says. “We really understood the requirements of launching in a large retailer.”

Sainsbury’s was the first big retailer, she says, meaning some of the processes were new. With M&S, the team knew more about what to expect and could navigate the inevitable difficulties with greater confidence.

The leadership team has also changed since its retail debut, with previous CEO Rebekah Hall stepping down in December 2024, to be briefly replaced by then acting chief executive Chrysi Philalithes.

Now, the core team is six full-time employees, covering operations, marketing and sales, alongside fractional senior support.

Its manufacturing is also UK-based. Roskill says its production partner has worked with the business as it has grown and “gone over and above” to accommodate the increase in production needed for the M&S order.

A shift in the functional drinks boom

Step into the Food To Go section of a supermarket today and it is increasingly hard to miss the drinks promising to do more than simply quench thirst.

You will find drinks of all different types of flavours and coloured cans aimed at health benefits such as energy and focus, hydration and recovery, gut health, immunity and calm.

This trend is reflected in recent figures, with new NielsenIQ data showing the UK functional drinks market is now worth about £100 million in annual value sales. The fastest-moving areas include gut-health and vitamin-rich drinks, while the functional juice-shot segment has recorded a 47 per cent compound annual growth rate over the past three years.

And consumer interest is also moving in the same direction. Recent reporting citing consumer research found that a quarter of UK shoppers now say they want functional benefits from the drinks they buy, compared with 13 per cent in 2024. Common ingredients and propositions include vitamins and minerals, electrolytes, probiotics and prebiotics, alongside botanicals and adaptogens, with popular options including ‘magnesium’ or ‘lionsmane’.

It is this increasingly popular market that G Spot is trying to navigate. However, Roskill says the brand’s difference is that it does not focus on a single need state, but four areas: energy, calm, vitality and immunity.

Lift uses ingredients including maca, cordyceps and bacopa, alongside B vitamins; Soothe contains magnesium and zinc; while Protect combines vitamin C with ingredients including ginger, turmeric and chaga; and Awaken, the newest member of the range, combines passionfruit, pineapple and orange habanero with botanicals and amino acids.

But Roskill says what makes the company stand out is as much about the personality of the brand, as it is about what goes into the cans.

“We have a product that we feel is differentiated from others in the market,” Roskill says. “But also, I think we have a very, very special brand that operates in the wellness space because it is a better-for-you drink, but we do it with joy, irreverence, boldness and provocation.”

That approach extends beyond supermarket shelves, with G Spot recently partnering with London art gallery Saatchi Gallery around its The Sun and the Moon: The Art of the Celestial exhibition, using a floral display to represent the functional ingredients in its drinks. Roskill says the partnership worked because it allowed the brand to enter a cultural space while remaining true to its own positioning.

Elsewhere, the the FMCG has also teamed up with community group and anti-loneliness organisation The Lonely Girls Cub to co-host three upcoming summer events spanning across Nottingham, Manchester and London.

 

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“We want to partner with people who share the same values as us,” she says, pointing to the overlap between the brand’s customers and audiences interested in female empowerment and agency.

The strategy is likely to continue, although looking ahead, Roskill is careful not to suggest that every cultural partnership is part of a fixed formula.

For now, the focus is on making the retail expansion work. Currently, G Spot says it has more than 1,000 direct-to-consumer subscribers, giving the company what Roskill calls its “closest connection to our consumers” and a source of direct feedback.

Looking to the future, alongside M&S, Sainsbury’s, Ocado and Selfridges, the brand is also pursuing selected on-trade partners. Roskill points to Dishoom, where G Spot sits within a menu that includes non-alcoholic and functional options, as the kind of partner the company wants to pursue.

“When an on-trade partner is leaning into the category themselves, I think obviously that is a natural fit that we want to take advantage of and leverage further,” she says.

For G Spot fans, there is also more product development coming, too, although Roskill is keeping the details under wraps. She says the business is listening to consumers and watching market trends, while founder Anderson remains heavily involved in product development and attends tasting sessions.

“There is definitely NPD on the horizon,” Roskill says. “It’s a really joyful NPD.”

But ultimately, the CEO says longer-term ambition stretches beyond Britain. G Spot already has a US presence through direct-to-consumer sales, and Roskill says the company has “one eye” on the market, where Anderson has a substantial audience. But she is clear that international expansion will require the right budget and team behind it.

For the next year, the priorities are more immediate: support existing retail partners, grow DTC, build loyal customer communities and develop new products.

The M&S listing may have started with a chance conversation, but Roskill is determined not to let the excitement of one big launch distract from the work of building a lasting business.

“You can’t let the short term get in the way of the long term,” she says. “We take these learnings from the last year and look forward to another 12 months of growth and exciting initiatives.”