Posh crumpets, oats for teens, vodka in fishnets and oozing alien biscuits. New Leaf is bringing a touch of the bizarre to food and drink. Rob Brown reports


You’re not imagining it. Aliens really are staring out at you from this page.

And you may soon be seeing a lot more of them, as they’re gearing up for a full-on invasion of the biscuit aisles. Their mission to fill what their creators have identified as a yawning gap in the biscuit market.

These extraterrestrial brand ambassadors have been devised to front Orbits biscuit faces that ooze their fillings out of their eyes when squeezed. “There are no biscuits out there to appeal to four to six-year-olds at all,” says Rob Mullen, Orbits’ mastermind. “There’s a huge gap in the market for kids who like to play with their food. Orbits would fill that gap.”

Orbits are just one of a raft of products under development by Mullen’s pioneering new company, New Leaf. Set up with the aim of launching products to fill specific market niches and helping struggling brands turn over a new leaf by winning national listings or cornering new markets, the company is already making waves.

Last month, Harvey Nichols began stocking New Leaf’s Classic Crumpet (a crumpet, but not as we know it it’s posh) and talks are under way with a number of other retailers about further roll-outs. According to Mullen the humble crumpet was ripe for reinvention.

“Crumpets have been devalued by the supermarkets and are seen as a cheap product. They’ve lost their heritage. But our crumpets come in packs of two not huge multipacks of which you end up throwing half away and they’re made with the finest ingredients and cooked in the traditional way. We’re putting value and heritage back into the crumpet.”

Crumpets are just the start, promises Mullen, who’s also in talks about listings for New Leaf’s Xtreme Porridge flavoured oats aimed at giving teenagers a healthier breakfast and a range of premium flours sold under the Natural Flour Company brand.

New Leaf is also on the hunt for brands that have so far struggled to win listings in the multiples, offering them Mullen’s 25 years’ experience working for some of food and drink’s biggest names (among them Hovis, McCain and Carr’s) and the company’s collective expertise in marketing, PR, design and sales to get them that elusive national deal. Whatever you do though, don’t call them an agency.

“We’re not an agency,” says Mullen. “A lot of companies fall for what I call the ‘sucker punch’ they pay £200,000 to an agency for getting a product into the supermarkets and two years down the line find they’ve sold no more products. We take no money until a product gets into the supermarkets and then we take a premium for that product’s lifetime. That way it’s our incentive to make sure it sells week after week.”

But this is an expensive, slow-burning business. “With all the PR, marketing and design work, it takes at least £60,000 before you can get a product anywhere near a supermarket,” says Mullen. With New Leaf backed by two key investors and another of Mullen’s ventures, the Estonian Flour Company (importer of quality flour from the Baltic state), the pressure is on for New Leaf to deliver returns.

So Mullen and his team are working overtime to develop new products to make sure New Leaf delivers. Among them is Vodka Snatch, a pack of six miniature bottles of premium vodka held in a fishnet stocking.

Mullen’s world looks set to get even weirder still.

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