BIG INTERVIEW
STUART GRAHAM
82 ASIAN TRADER 17 OCTOBER 2025
tuart Graham popped round to
Asian Trader Towers just prior to
KP Snacks publishing its full-year
results, which happily revealed 4.4
per cent revenue growth – no mean
feat in the current economic climate. As I was
to discover, this achievement was likely due
to the market strategy and entrepreneurial
energy of the employees, and as far as the
c-channel goes, the efforts of Stuart Graham.
He was celebrating a year in post after taking
over from a regular on these pages, Matt
Collins, who moved upstairs to his well-de
served reward as Sales Director.
Stuart, as we strapped him into the
interrogation chair (only joking), recalled
that we once referred to Matt in a headline as
King of Snacks, and wondered what his
moniker might be. We are still working on
that, but maybe the Maestro of Munch has a
good, snacky ring to it.
The last time we interviewed Matt it was at
Lords, where KP Snacks has made a great
success of its England Cricket partnership and
sponsorship of The Hundred tournament. It
was also not too long after a
crippling cyber-attack that
was the herald of a much
wider campaign against UK
commerce, and from which
others including M&S and
Co-op have now suffered.
Thankfully, all is back to
normal now and it’s just the
economy and ever-tighter
markets and margins that
are the problems facing the
sector.
“These are challenging
times for consumers and for
Asian Trader sits down for a pow-wow with Stuart
Graham, Head of Convenience and Impulse at KP
Snacks, to find out what’s in store for snacks
You have to be great to be good
By Andy Marino
retailers and there are lots of drivers behind
that,” says Stuart. “There’s an expression I
heard years ago, which I like to keep in mind:
in the past, you’ve only had to be good to be
great in the channel. Now, you’ve got to be
great to be good. Growth is harder than ever
and you have to do a really great job. Those big
10 per cent leaps in growth are rarer to come
by.”
In light of that, it is doubly impres
sive that KP Snacks achieved an almost
five per cent uplift last year. But
then, KP seems to be on a roll,
inking stellar partnerships and
sponsorships and purveying its
extremely wide range of snacks with
merchandising aplomb, while trying in a
non-brand way to improve the category
with its ranging philosophy. All this in a
priority category that is resilient, scalable
and worth £5.3bn annually.
How did Stuart arrive in the midst of all
this (his first public appearance in post was at
the launch of the Wicked movie partnership
with Butterkist in late 2024)? Where did he
come from; where did he
start?
“I’m from Leicester,” he
explains, “grew up there as a
big rugby fan. My hero was a
guy called Rory Underwood
who played rugby for
Leicester and for England
and flew RAF planes for a
living. That was the dream
when I was a youngster. I’ve
ended up about as far away
from that as you could
imagine.”
So, from rugby to
sponsoring The Hundred – how did that
happen?
“My dad cut out a job advert for a territory
manager sales role. I thought, I’d better apply
for that, because dad sent it and he’ll ask me
about it. I applied, got the job, and that’s how I
ended up in FMCG.”
He started out with Kellogg’s, but his plan
was to move to the Reading area, for reasons
no longer relevant. “I applied for a job with
PepsiCo with the incentive of moving there,
and so I have to admit I did used to work for
the competition.
“After the interview they said, ‘Great
news, we want to offer you a job. But it’s not in
Reading, it’s in Scotland’. That wasn’t really in
my plan, but they flew me to up there to meet
the team and I ended up taking the job, so I
lived in Scotland for a while and that’s when I
We talk about happy
snacking moments, that’s our
purpose: to create and elevate
those occasions