We’re all guilty of treating big brands as faceless entities – observing their products on shelves without questioning how or where they started.
From the outside, success can appear almost accidental. A stroke of serendipity. A happy mistake that somehow snowballs into a business used by millions across the country.
But behind every brand worth knowing is a story worth telling – one shaped by risk, persistence and more than a few moments of doubt along the way.
That’s exactly why we created our Founders Series: to give a voice to the people behind the labels and uncover the trials and tribulations that built the products we now browse without thought.
In the case of Gold Standard Nutrition, that couldn’t be truer.
What you see today is a healthy frozen food brand stocked across gyms, supermarkets and retailers up and down the UK.
Yet the journey of how those now unmistakable meals came to be there is so warming it could thaw out the many freezers that house its various Pots of Gold, wraps and signature dishes.
As part of GSN’s Built From the Ground Up series, we sat down with founder Craig Allen to discuss successes, setbacks and how dropping out of university to join the family business sowed the seed for one of the nation’s most iconic nutrition businesses.
The School of Hard Knocks
Craig knew he wanted to launch a sports-related startup from an early age. So, after leaving college, he pursued the traditional route and enrolled in a Business Enterprise course at university.
Yet, with just eight hours of lectures a week feeling too much like slow progress, his next move was far more unconventional.
Following an honest conversation with his lecturer, Craig quit university to work alongside his dad in the family meat trading business.
As he saw it, gaining hands-on experience was infinitely more valuable to his ambitions than taking notes in a lecture hall filled with hungover students.
“I have always had a mindset of taking on the challenge, and I enjoy the process of finding the solution,” he said.
“I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
“I believe that entrepreneurship can be learned by surrounding yourself with the right people, watching and questioning everything they do.
“People are afraid to look stupid by asking a question, but quite often that question is probably what’s holding you back.
“It’s also down to your appetite for risk and your mindset of how you handle failure; do you run away or learn and go again?”
That decision proved to be crucial, as during a trip to a Chinese restaurant, he was introduced to the product that would change everything: steamed chicken.
Clients in the restaurant industry were using the pre-cooked poultry to save time in busy kitchens, though Craig saw the potential for a clean-deck version in the sports nutrition space.
That was Craig’s “lightbulb moment”, and one that might not have occurred if he had played it safe and stayed put.
Asked whether he’s an advocate for younger generations learning on the job, he said: “Absolutely. I have learnt more life lessons running my business than I ever could through a textbook.
“If you’re willing to put the hours in, then it will pay off, but you need to have a long-term mentality.”
Those words feel particularly pertinent amid the current wave of get-rich-quick schemes sweeping social media.
With a million ways to make money online, feeds are filled with people flogging dreams of $20,000 months for little to no meaningful input.
For Craig, scaling GSN was a gruelling marathon, rather than a sprint.
“My early days of less than minimum wage and extremely unsocial hours were what built the foundation of GSN,” he added.
“I’d like the younger generation to see that building a brand bootstrapped is a long journey, not a short one.”
Clocking Up the Miles
The words humble beginnings get bandied around lots in business. For Craig Allen, they really do hold weight.
In 2012, aged 21, Craig and his friends bought 10 freezers that were used in the London Olympics and a decommissioned Tesco truck still restricted to 56mph.
“We bought all the freezers B grade (second hand),” he explained. “I cleaned them up, taught myself how to vinyl wrap and got them looking brand new.”
As minimum order volumes for bags were high and pricy, Craig also bulk bought plain gold pouches and spent hours applying GSN’s branding himself.
“Almost every day I would load three freezers into my old Tesco truck, drive from Selby to Manchester, drop off the stickered gold bags, pick up the steam-cooked chicken that had been prepared and then drive wherever the route took me.”
Mainly focused on selling to gyms at the time, Craig’s circuit would often be determined by who had placed an order, while ensuring the journey was as economical as possible.
In the early days, that meant a greater concentration of stockists along the M62 corridor, which became a familiar stomping ground.
However, that didn’t stop business from expanding into South Wales, Lincoln and the Midlands.
“There was one journey that stands out to me,” he recalled. “It was a new stockist from Cardiff, which is a 12-hour round trip.
“I told my dad I’ve got to go to Wales, I’m going to take two extra freezers, and I’ll be back when I’ve found two more stockists – and off I went.
“I drove to Wales, cold-called into multiple gyms trying to find the right stockists for GSN, and, after four or five attempts, I had placed all three freezers and was heading back home to Selby at 56mph.
“It was a monster 18-19-hour day, but I didn’t care. It felt like a huge step forward putting more GSN flags on the map.”
Barely out of his teens, Craig was pitching to hardened bodybuilding gyms with owners who had been in the industry for decades.
“You can imagine the reaction when a young 12-stone blue-eyed boy walked into the gym,” he joked.
“It was quite a hard interaction, and I was often met with very cold personalities. I had to break down the walls and sell the GSN dream to an owner who had never seen a freezer in another gym or sold food before. I needed them to trust my vision.
“I did this for 2-3 years, alongside building out my team in the office, and got us to over 100 stockists in the UK before we could outsource the delivery to a third-party courier who saw the route as manageable.”
Navigating Choppy Waters
While scaling GSN, Craig lived at home so that he could reinvest almost every penny earned back into the business.
After all the back-breaking work laying the foundations, disaster struck. Not all the gyms stocking GSN were paying their bills, and Craig misplaced his trust in relationships with larger businesses that soon turned sour.
At just 24, he had to make all seven members of the team redundant – a decision that pushed him to the brink of walking away for good.
Reflecting on that difficult time, and the gritty realities dealt through pain, he said: “Cashflow is and always will be king.
“There are many, many lessons I’ve learnt. But the one that stands out is a tough pill to swallow in business, and it’s that people will often use you for their own gain.
“Not everyone has the best intentions, and business is a dog-eat-dog world, so you need to protect yourself with NDAs, contracts and never overshare information with people that you don’t 1,000% trust.”
There were numerous chapters in GSN’s story where it might have seemed easier for Craig to throw in the towel. Indeed, that’s what several well-wishing voices around him suggested he do.
But Craig and GSN stand tall today as the epitome of tenacity and good old Yorkshire steel.
“I’ve had to rebuild GSN three times,” he added. “It’s only because of my resilience, stubbornness and belief in the vision that GSN is still here today.
“It took me seven years to pay myself a £30,000 salary. I often got told that GSN would only ever be a lifestyle business, but I couldn’t accept that and really believed we could achieve more – and here we are nearly 14 years later.”
Thankfully, Craig decided to stick to task, as otherwise he would have forfeited several memorable moments.
Asked to choose a highlight from an ascent scattered with pockets of turbulence, he said: “We’ve won multiple awards and placed freezers in hundreds of locations.
“Whilst that makes me really proud, the proudest moment for me was hitting 10 million meals sold and doing so bootstrapped with my dad and best friend from college, Iain Blackburn.”
The Pandemic Paradigm Shift
As the COVID-19 pandemic shook the world, many businesses saw years of building put under serious strain.
The numerous lockdowns spelt particularly bad news for GSN, which chiefly operated under a B2B model supplying gyms and sports nutrition retailers.
With people forced into isolation, Craig and co. were challenged to broaden their horizons – and in a bizarre twist of fate, it became a seminal moment for the GSN many consumers know today.
“The pandemic forced us to pivot and focus our attention away from wholesale and build our online e-commerce presence,” explained Craig.
“That was always secondary to the gyms, but that shift saw us reach 250% growth and laid the new foundation of a second channel in the business.
“This also shaped our new look. We learnt a lot about the customers buying GSN, and it encouraged us to become a “healthy living” brand and not just a gym brand.
“It meant that GSN was now appealing to huge new audiences looking for a convenient frozen food solution.”
GSN: Built From the Ground Up
GSN’s Built From the Ground Up series offers customers a rare glimpse behind the curtain – one teeming with a raw, authentic honesty that you might not expect from a brand of its stature.
In the short documentary, which you can find on GSN’s YouTube channel, Craig doesn’t shy away from the many potholes that lined the road to success.
His wife, Kate, and parents all appear on camera, with their interviews interspersed between shots of GSN’s meals being prepared right here in the UK.
From the documentary, and indeed our conversation with Craig, it’s evident how tightly the values of warmth, approachability and family are stitched into the fabric of the brand’s DNA.
And that’s something he’s keen to get across to people who may hold predetermined assumptions.
“When I speak to people, they often have this perception of GSN that it’s a really large business with hundreds of staff,” he continued.
“I would like to get on a more relatable level with people and show them the real GSN. We are big enough to manage but also small enough to care.
“This video might be the reason you choose GSN over another alternative. I would like people to know who they are buying from, and it not be a faceless brand.”
Looking to the Future
Built From the Ground Up gives viewers a brief yet detailed history of everything that has occurred to this point, leaving no stone unturned.
However, we wanted to know what’s next for GSN. Having recently secured digital shelf space on Ocado.com, plus triple-door dedicated freezers at various Co-op locations, GSN is now more widely available than ever.
And, as it sets its sights on becoming the UK’s best-loved frozen food brand, Craig has no plans on slowing down anytime soon.
“That is the million-dollar question,” joked Craig. “We have some really exciting product developments in the pipeline and plan to make GSN accessible in even more locations.
“However, I’ll keep certain details confidential. I wouldn’t want to make the same mistake I advised you to learn from earlier by giving away our secrets.”
One detail Craig did let slip was that GSN is launching something “very soon that might change your work lunches forever.”
To keep tabs on that particular development and shop GSN meals directly, head to the brand’s website and be sure to follow its social media channels.
READ MORE: GSN Introduces ‘GSN To Go’, Bringing Protein On-Demand to Workplaces
