How Bold Bean turned sampling into a growth engine

If you’ve walked through London in the middle of summer, you may have seen people walking around bright yellow totes that look like this. 

Or if you went to Glastonbury you might have seen Glastonbury-goers with some smaller, more inconspicuous brown bags like these.

Bold Bean Co are EVERYWHERE, and they’re not stopping until they achieve their mission of making people completely bean-obsessed.

Martha, who has worked at names like Rude Health and Smart Works, is Bold Bean’s Brand Lead. She knows a thing or two about orchestrating effective word-of-mouth campaigns, and is behind Bold Bean’s incredibly effective events strategy. She has helped them turn events into a growth engine that’s proven to:

• Drive trial at scale for a £3.50 premium product that’s otherwise hard to sample

• Win press and social attention without paying for it

• Convince retail buyers to deepen listings because the advocacy is undeniable

It became obvious during Martha’s talk with us that Bold Bean have got a clear philosophy that drives their what they do, and our members got opportunity to hear their step-by-step to events success.

1. Start with the right question: “why this event?”

Events are expensive, resource-heavy and easy to get wrong, but Bold Bean are strict about what types of events make the cut. 

They only run one if it passes three tests:

• Mission alignment → Does this event actively create new “bean obsessives”? 

• Brand strategy fit → Will it fuel word-of-mouth, their #1 metric?

• Product benefit → Does it remove barriers to trial (heavy glass jars, £3.50 price point)?

Before jumping into planning the event itself, ask yourself: does the event actually achieve the brand’s key objectives?

2. Build your visual brand codes

Once you figure out if an event is actually worth doing, you can move onto planning what it’ll look and feel like.

Events naturally rely on visuals and mood to stand out, and if events are going to be a big part of your marketing strategy, making sure you build consistent experiential brand codes is a non-negotiable.

Martha shared that for Bold Bean, the key ideas they decided most represented their brand were:

• Mismatched chairs, natural materials like woods → signals homeliness, not corporate slickness. Feels like stepping into someone’s actual kitchen

• Incredible presentation of food → the thing they’re actually selling

• Flowers in empty jars → doubles as upcycling inspiration and a soft sell of the brand

• And of course, pops of their signature yellow

These sensory cues turn a one-off sample into a memory.

That memory is what people share with friends and buyers.

3. Three different ways to build community

Don’t assume that your target audience will be the same for every event you plan. Depending on the context, you might be better suited to approach different types of communities outside of your core one. 

Here are three different groups Bold Bean have targeted in past events :

Type 1 – the exclusive club

When Bold Bean put on their Glastonbury sampling event, despite the fact that they were in one of the busiest stations with hundreds and thousands of people walking by, they chose to zone in one just one group – Glastonbury goers. 

That didn’t mean they turned away people who weren’t a part of this group, but their main focus was to make people feel like if they’d gone to Glastonbury, they were now in the club with Bold Bean. 

Type 2 – the locals

When Bold Bean did their cookbook tour, they wanted to tap into a community that was already there. They decided to forgo the Waterstones and instead hit the local bookshops where there was already a roster of regulars who would come and go.

‘Our big aim of [the cookbook] is to try and make it a bestseller. We absolutely could have just targeted Waterstones – they have them all across the country. But it wouldn't have felt like we were really tapping into a community because [Waterstones is] not necessarily [the type of place] people talk about it in a really loving way. Whereas your local bookshop might be something else.’

Type 3 – bringing unexpected people together

Another way to build a community is to craft a space meant for socialising, slowing down, building more lasting connections. 

Bold Bean created a pop-up space and developed a serve where it would take a while to eat – not just a sample but a full portion of baked beans on sourdough toast. They set up tables and chairs, so people could sit there. Martha shared that some people were genuinely there for about half an hour.

‘We got people chatting to each other, asking “which one did you choose? Did you get the smokey beans? Did you get the classic?” They were flicking through our cookbook, all these different things. And it meant that we were really helping local people talk to each other, which, you know, on the street in Battersea wouldn't be the norm.’

4. Putting it all together: how they built out their Glastonbury sampling event

So now you’ve got the three key steps to building an event that converts:

• The overarching strategy – the “why” of it all

• The branding that’ll help define the experience

• And then the community you’re trying to bring into the fold

This is exactly the playbook Bold Bean followed to create their brilliant Glastonbury sampling event, where they handed out 10,000 jars of baked beans to weary festival-goers at London stations. 

It worked because:

1. They chose the no.1 objective of their event and built it out to focus on that.

→ E.g. Get their baked beans in as many hands as possible. As a result their event needed to be really efficient, it needed to be optimised for a “quick serve”, it needed to be a grab- and-go situation.

2. They aligned it to their overall strategy to drive word-of-mouth, generate talk-ability.

→They gave away branded takeaway bags that people could carry around the stations – essentially acting as mini billboards across the Tube.

3. They decided on a hyper-targeted audience

→ Only Glastonbury returners got the bags (“beans then bed” signs nailed the mood).

→ They also made sure they didn’t just wait for people to come up to them to pitch to them, but they really thought about who their customers were – tired, festival-ed out, ready to go home – so they went up to people rather than waiting, and just handed them beans for free.

4. They mapped out how to manage all their channels to get the most out of the event – even if the event itself flops.

→ Their trade marketing manager created ‘shippers’ so they could walk the leftover products into local Sainsbury’s to boost ROS.

This was not just about creating a moment people couldn’t help but talk about, but also about de-risking the spend with retail activation. The halo effect was felt in both earned media and buyer confidence.

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The lesson here is that though events won’t scale like digital ads, when designed with intention, they unlock the kind of growth digital can’t:

• Consumers proudly carrying your products home → word-of-mouth grows.

• Buyers eating your product surrounded by delighted consumers → listings grow.

• Press writing about you for free → credibility grows.

This is what Bold Bean is investing in. And it’s working.