Tannenstraße 1a
69469 Weinheim
Specialisation has a price, and it is paid in overlap. An agency that works only in food and beverage, and within that mostly in ingredients, nutraceuticals, packaging and food technology, will eventually find two of its clients selling into the same application. Sometimes the overlap exists from day one because portfolios are broad. A fibre supplier also offers a sweetener system. A protein specialist moves into botanicals.
More often it arrives quietly. A client of fifteen years expands into a new category, and a relationship that never touched another client's territory suddenly does.
Overlap of this kind follows logically from knowing a sector well. The things clients value in us exist because we built them across many briefs in the same industry: an understanding of regulation and health claims, of nutritional and sensory properties, of processing and the terminology formulators use, of consumer and market trends. A sense of which trade editor wants data and which wants a story. An understanding of how a formulator actually chooses between two ingredients. An agency that worked for only one company per segment would know far less. Its clients would pay for the learning curve.
Put plainly, a specialist agency cannot afford exclusivity. In a sector this focused, promising one client per category would mean turning away much of the market we know best, and the expertise clients hire us for would shrink with it.
So the real question is how the overlap is managed.
We are a small agency, but wherever staffing allows, we keep competing accounts apart entirely. One rule has no exceptions: the person who leads one client's account never leads the account of its competitor.
That rule sits where it matters most. Knowledge travels through people far more reliably than through servers, and the account lead is where a client's strategy, priorities and confidences come together. Keeping that role separate is the firewall that counts.
Trade journalists in our sector know us, many of them for years. That familiarity is an asset, and it comes with an obligation. When we represent two companies active in the same field, an editor should never wonder which client a pitch comes from or whose interests a conversation serves. We keep those lines visible.
Agencies see things clients share nowhere else. Launch plans, pricing logic, clinical data before publication, strategy papers that took a board six months to agree. Protecting that information is a matter of daily practice.
Ours rests on two things. Data management systems we keep up to date, with access limited to the people working on an account. And a team we train regularly in what confidentiality means in an agency context. For confidential client material, the rule is simple. Nothing leaves our control. Not to a journalist, not to a competitor.
When clients ask how this works in practice, we often turn the question around. Most of them supply ingredients to manufacturers who compete fiercely within the same product category. They develop formulations for those customers, sometimes processes that decide whether a product succeeds or disappears.
Our clients protect those relationships with the same discipline we apply to ours. They know that the moment one customer's secrets reach another, conflict exists. That is exactly why it holds. Trust in a specialised supply chain rests on structure rather than goodwill. Breaking it would cost far more than it could ever gain.
The same logic applies to us. We have worked in this industry since 2002. A reputation built over more than two decades in a sector this connected would not survive a single indiscretion. We have no intention of testing that.
If you work with a specialist agency, or are considering one, ask the overlap question. Ask it directly. A good answer will be specific: who works on what, how contact with editors is handled, where data lives, what the team has been trained to do. A vague answer, or an offended one, tells you more than any contract.
Specialisation and discretion do not pull in opposite directions. Done properly, each makes the other possible.
In some cases, yes. Our clients' portfolios are broad, and overlaps occur. Sometimes they arise later, when a long-standing client expands into a category where another client is already active. We see this as a consequence of our specialisation and manage it with clear rules.
Because a specialist agency cannot afford exclusivity, and because depth of sector knowledge comes from working across a sector. Our understanding of regulation, nutritional and sensory properties, processing, technical terminology, consumer and market trends, trade media and buying decisions in food and beverage has grown over more than twenty years and many briefs. An agency limited to one client per segment would offer far less of it.
As a small agency, we cannot always separate every team member completely. Wherever staffing allows, different people work on competing accounts. One rule applies without exception: nobody who leads one client's account also leads the account of a competitor.
We make it explicit. Every pitch, every interview request and every conversation with a journalist is clearly tied to one client. Editors in our sector should never have to guess whose interests we are representing.
In daily practice, we rely on data management systems that we keep up to date, access limited to the relevant account team, and regular training for everyone who works here. Trade secrets, embargoed information and strategy papers stay with us.
Consider your own business. You probably supply several manufacturers who compete with each other, and you may develop formulations or processes for them that decide a product's success. You protect each of those relationships because your business depends on it. We work on exactly the same principle, and we have done so since 2002.
If you have questions about how we would handle a particular constellation, contact the management team directly. We would rather discuss it openly at the start than leave it unspoken.
