Founded by lifelong friends Tom Walker and Gaz Booth, Holy Moly has established itself as the UK’s number one dips brand, with Peter Oden steering its latest phase of growth, writes Eamonn Duff
It could so easily have been nothing more than a light-hearted food squabble. During a Mexican-themed evening nine years ago, childhood pals Tom Walker and Gaz Booth locked horns over coriander’s place in a guacamole recipe. From that seemingly innocuous dinner-party dispute came the spark for something far bigger: a mission to overhaul a lazy dips aisle long filled with cut corners and compromise.
The outcome was Holy Moly – a brand built on freshness, clean ingredients, and plant-based recipes with no added nasties. For years, Tom and Gaz drove the mission forward, but propelling their idea into a national powerhouse called for leadership with big-brand know-how.
Enter Peter Oden. Since joining as Managing Director in 2023, the FMCG scale-up specialist has harnessed their avocado-inspired vision and helped elevate it to category leader. According to the latest NielsenIQ data, Holy Moly is shifting more than 21,000 pots every single day – almost one every four seconds. For Oden, the brand’s origin story is as remarkable as the product itself.
“Two friends, at school together. At university together. In the same graduate scheme with British Telecom together,” explained Oden. “Then, after 12 years of working in telecommunications, they have this defining argument over dinner about guacamole. Tom doesn’t like coriander. Gaz loves it. From there, everything just snowballs. Here we are, nine, ten years later with a business that, from a unit point of view, is the number one dips brand in the UK. It’s slightly bonkers.”
Following some extensive Googling, the duo (above) discovered that the only guacamole on Britain’s shelves was being made in the UK by the same manufacturer, using imported avocados bulked out with preservatives. Just three weeks after mulling over how they could do better, Tom and Gaz were stepping off a plane in Mexico – the home of avocados – where they found a fourth-generation, family-owned orchard. Once they struck a deal with the grower, they began producing their ground-breaking dip range by combining the world’s best avocados with a cutting-edge high-pressure processing technique – more commonly used for cold-pressed juices – that locks in taste and freshness without artificial ingredients. The result: an all-natural, pure smashed avocado and guacamole, manufactured at source, that tastes as good – if not better – than the stuff you make at home.
Ignoring advice from buyers that they’d only ever succeed as supermarket own-label suppliers, the co-founders secured an initial £130,000 to fund their first large-scale batch. Within a year, sales had topped 250,000 units through Waitrose, Ocado, Whole Foods, and Amazon Fresh.
By 2018, they had quit their day jobs as Holy Moly landed its first major supermarket listing with Sainsbury’s and began popping up everywhere from first-class menus on LNER trains to chicken burgers at Nando’s restaurants nationwide.
About a year on, Tom and Gaz gave an interview to The Evening Standard citing the founders of Innocent Drinks as their ultimate business idols, “for building the brand from the ground up”.
Little did they know one of those same pioneers would later come on board, alongside them, to help lift Holy Moly to even greater heights.
Oden (pictured below) had been an early member of the innocent team, launching the brand’s first international business in 2002. He then joined Monster Energy, driving its expansion across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa beyond Coca-Cola’s existing distribution footprint, before spending eight years with Mediterranean food company Belazu. There, he led a rebrand that paved the way for a six-fold increase in retail sales and the company’s eventual 2018 sale to the William Jackson Food Group. Then, in 2023, a fresh challenge beckoned.
“What I really like doing is helping to scale up businesses, to create that collective champagne moment for as many people as possible,” said Oden. He added: “Someone sent me a list of businesses they thought I’d be really good with – and Holy Moly was one of them. At that stage, I hadn’t actually sampled the brand – but the second I did, it was exactly like the first time I tried an innocent smoothie back in 2002. One of those genuine, stop-you-in-your-tracks moments. Like… this is really good! I’ve always felt like the luckiest guy in the world from a career point of view. I met the boys in a pub, bought them a couple of pints of Guinness, and that was that.”
Oden admitted his early worry was diagnosing how to add value to a brand that already looked strong on paper.
“The reason the guys employed me was, they had got the business to where it was – they’d done a really fantastic job – but they kind of knew they needed someone who had done it before and could take the brand the rest of the way. My expertise, if you like, is all about polishing a brand and bringing it to life. The thing about Holy Moly was, it was a great product, it was already a great brand, they had really good people – and the distribution levels were already quite high. It took me a while to get a feel for everything, but what I realised was that a lot of the NPD was actually causing distractions. We were heading in the direction of a premium dip company as opposed to the number one avocado brand in the world – which is what we want to be.”
Alongside a renewed focus on its core avocado products, the brand has recently launched several “core-adjacent” innovations such as nacho kits (below) and, in food-to-go, the Guacamole Chip & Dip snack pots – which Oden hails as “game-changing”.
“Chip & Dip had been talked about in the business for years, and we finally managed to work out how to do it. It’s become our highest rate-of-sale product by some way… the seventh best-selling chilled snack in Sainsbury’s, out of more than 80.
“We’ve also found that 71 percent of people who pick it up are completely new to the brand. It’s almost paid for sampling. From a penetration point of view, we’ve doubled our consumer penetration in the last quarter off the back of Chip & Dip… and that’s driven people to the back of store.”
This blend of discipline and carefully chosen brand extensions has set the stage for Holy Moly’s next chapter – one still deeply tied to the passion of its two founders. Almost a decade on from their fiery debate over that divisive herb, Oden says Tom and Gaz remain as dedicated as ever.
“Now I’ve taken over the managerial reins of the team, it has freed up the boys to do what they love. Tom is the Willy Wonka – ‘what about this idea, what about that idea?’ Gaz, meanwhile, is the rambunctious challenger… more operationally led.”
Oden adds: “We’ve still got a long way to go. International is definitely a great opportunity for us. We’ve talked to people in Australia, we’ve had chats with folk in America, and we’re already in a couple of retailers in France.”
But for him, it’s about meticulously building Holy Moly “the right way”, step by step. “History is littered with brands that chose a very different path, rushed in, and ended up ruining the entire business. We’re not about to join the list.”
