I am absolutely thrilled that from April 2026, Neil Brenson becomes Managing Director, alongside Susan Wickes in a joint MD structure at jellybean that reflects both the growth of our business and the direction we are heading.

It is a hard earned and much deserved promotion that recognises his enormous contribution to the agency and dedication to his craft.  Neil has been at jellybean for nine years. In that time he has built our consumer, retail and shopper division from the ground up, brought in some truly exciting clients and helped firmly establish jellybean’s reputation as a leading integrated food and drink agency, now entering our 39th year.

A Few Highlights.

In his early career long before jellybean, Neil was a broadcast journalist at the BBC and ITV. That background shapes everything about how he approaches a brief – he thinks in stories, he understands audiences and he knows how to cut through. Coupled with over 20 years agency experience in food and drink, working with many of the world’s leading brands, he is an exceptional strategist and creative thinker, a strong team leader and a very effective advisor for the brands and businesses he works with.

Over the past nine years, with his growing team, he has built award-winning integrated campaigns spanning PR, digital, social, influencer and shopper marketing. He works at C-suite and board level with some of the biggest names in food and drink, and clients consistently describe him as someone who genuinely understands their business, not just their brief.

His contribution has been a significant part of jellybean client campaigns winning the World Food Innovation Award for Best Marketing Campaign three times, in 2018, 2025 and 2026. That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when someone brings real expertise, real commitment and real creativity to the work and to the teams he leads every single day.

Two Specialisms. One Agency. A Lot of Opportunity.

Susan has led our foodservice division since 2017 and it remains the roots of the business providing exceptional and extensive expertise in the out-of-home market, reaching chefs, buyers and food and drink decision-makers in all sectors of the hospitality industry.  In parallel, for the nine years Neil has built the consumer retail side, working with brands across D2C, grocery and convenience establishing our credentials across the whole food and drink market and path to purchase.

On paper, those may appear as two different disciplines. In practice, for the brands and businesses we work with, they are increasingly the same conversation.

Think about what a food or drink brand actually needs to do. It needs to reach a head chef sourcing for a restaurant group. It needs to win a distribution listing in a major grocer or wholesaler. It needs to run a shopper campaign that drives conversion online and at the fixture. It needs to build a social community that keeps consumers engaged between purchases. It needs to activate at events, work with influencers, create content that travels. These are not separate challenges. They connect. And the brands doing this best are the ones working with agencies that understand the full picture.

With Neil and Susan leading the agency together, jellybean now offers something genuinely rare: the ability to reach food and drink audiences wherever decisions are made, from procurement to purchase, trade to consumer, out of home to in home. A single agency that joins all of those conversations up.

In Neil’s Own Words

 I asked Neil what he is most excited about in his new role and characteristically, he went straight to the client opportunity:

“Food and drink brands are thinking harder and working smarter than ever about how they reach people, whether that is a chef deciding what goes on the menu, a shopper choosing between products in an aisle, restaurant or forecourt, a consumer engaging with a brand on social. The opportunity for jellybean is to connect all of those touchpoints in a way very few agencies can. We have the foodservice and trade expertise, the shopper and retail knowledge, the creative, digital and social capability and the best team to bring it all together. I could not be more excited about what that means for our clients.”

As always clients are at the heart of our thinking and Neil is always looking at the bigger picture. Exactly the person you want leading an agency and exactly the experience, expertise and strategic approach clients want from us.

Built for What Comes Next

Since becoming an Employee Ownership Trust in September 2024, jellybean has been on a deliberate path of growth. New disciplines, sharpened specialist divisions, a clearer sense of the agency we are building and the values we hold so dear – care, collaboration, expertise, and courage. The ‘We Own It’ positioning we launched earlier this year was not just a new strapline. It was a statement about how we show up for clients, each other and the industry.

Neil’s appointment is part of that same story and our mission to be a force for good in food and drink. Having two Managing Directors with distinct but complementary expertise gives us the senior capability to pursue integrated food and drink briefs at scale, develop both divisions with dedicated focus and deliver for clients in a way that a single channel-specialism agency or a generalist agency simply cannot.

Susan and Neil complement each other perfectly. Between them they cover the full breadth of what jellybean does, bring decades of food and drink expertise and share the same values, the same commitment to this agency and the same instinct for what great work looks like. I cannot wait to see where they take jellybean working together with the support of our amazing team.

Fiona Rickard – CEO

Fiona Rickard
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