Tesco anchors Henry Dimbleby's £100m Bramble fund with £20m
The retailer takes the cornerstone position in Bramble Partners' first fund, which writes £1-5 million cheques into UK and European food companies
Tesco has committed £20 million as cornerstone investor to Bramble Fund I, the first fund raised by Bramble Partners, the food investment firm Henry Dimbleby founded in 2024. The commitment was announced on 24 September 2026. The fund is targeting £100 million. Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain and author of the UK government's National Food Strategy, is managing partner. Omar Habbal is founding partner and Mark Hudson chairs the investment committee. Ken Murphy is chief executive of Tesco.
Bramble writes cheques of £1 million to £5 million into UK and European companies from Series A through to growth stage. The mandate covers health and nutrition, sustainable food production and circularity, framed as backing companies that make food healthier, more sustainable or more affordable. The fund's first investment is KluraLabs, a British company developing packaging that extends shelf life and reduces waste in produce such as berries and grapes and in baked goods.
The capital is not the whole of the arrangement. Tesco and Bramble are setting up a joint innovation board, and portfolio companies are to get the opportunity to test inside Tesco's supply chain. For an early-stage food or agri company, that second part is the harder thing to buy. A route to trial volumes with Britain's largest grocer normally has to be won category buyer by category buyer, and the attempt usually consumes a year of runway before anyone sees a purchase order.
Tesco already sits behind one venture vehicle. It is an investor in W23 Global, the $125 million fund set up in 2024 alongside Ahold Delhaize, Woolworths Group, Empire Company and Shoprite, to which Tesco committed $25 million over five years and which targets customer experience, supply chain productivity and sustainability. Bramble is narrower and more domestic. The affordability gap it is aimed at is well documented: the Food Foundation's 2026 report found healthier foods cost close to twice as much per calorie as less healthy ones.
Why it matters for AgTech founders: corporate money that arrives with a testing route attached is a different instrument from corporate money that arrives alone, and it should be priced as one. The upside is real, because a supply-chain trial with a grocer of this size is the single piece of evidence that unlocks a Series B in food and fresh produce. The cost is that a retailer-anchored fund pulls the portfolio towards what that retailer can shelve, which is a narrower question than what a farm system needs. Two practical points. First, check whether the innovation board is a channel or a gate, because a joint board that reviews the roadmap can quietly become a veto on customers outside the anchor. Second, if your product sits upstream of the shelf, in inputs, machinery or on-farm data, read this fund as evidence of where retail capital is going rather than as a source you can raise from; the cheque here follows a path that ends at a Tesco aisle. Founders whose economics only work at grocery scale should nonetheless take the meeting, because £1-5 million plus trial access is a better package than the same money from a generalist.
Tesco anchors Henry Dimbleby's £100m Bramble fund with £20m
The retailer takes the cornerstone position in Bramble Partners' first fund, which writes £1-5 million cheques into UK and European food companies from Series A to growth.
Tesco has committed £20 million as cornerstone investor to Bramble Fund I, the first fund raised by Bramble Partners, the food investment firm Henry Dimbleby founded in 2024. The commitment was announced on 24 September 2026. The fund is targeting £100 million. Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain and author of the UK government's National Food Strategy, is managing partner. Omar Habbal is founding partner and Mark Hudson chairs the investment committee. Ken Murphy is chief executive of Tesco.
Bramble writes cheques of £1 million to £5 million into UK and European companies from Series A through to growth stage. The mandate covers health and nutrition, sustainable food production and circularity, framed as backing companies that make food healthier, more sustainable or more affordable. The fund's first investment is KluraLabs, a British company developing packaging that extends shelf life and reduces waste in produce such as berries and grapes and in baked goods.
The capital is not the whole of the arrangement. Tesco and Bramble are setting up a joint innovation board, and portfolio companies are to get the opportunity to test inside Tesco's supply chain. For an early-stage food or agri company, that second part is the harder thing to buy. A route to trial volumes with Britain's largest grocer normally has to be won category buyer by category buyer, and the attempt usually consumes a year of runway before anyone sees a purchase order.
Tesco already sits behind one venture vehicle. It is an investor in W23 Global, the $125 million fund set up in 2024 alongside Ahold Delhaize, Woolworths Group, Empire Company and Shoprite, to which Tesco committed $25 million over five years and which targets customer experience, supply chain productivity and sustainability. Bramble is narrower and more domestic. The affordability gap it is aimed at is well documented: the Food Foundation's 2026 report found healthier foods cost close to twice as much per calorie as less healthy ones.
Why it matters for AgTech founders: corporate money that arrives with a testing route attached is a different instrument from corporate money that arrives alone, and it should be priced as one. The upside is real, because a supply-chain trial with a grocer of this size is the single piece of evidence that unlocks a Series B in food and fresh produce. The cost is that a retailer-anchored fund pulls the portfolio towards what that retailer can shelve, which is a narrower question than what a farm system needs. Two practical points. First, check whether the innovation board is a channel or a gate, because a joint board that reviews the roadmap can quietly become a veto on customers outside the anchor. Second, if your product sits upstream of the shelf, in inputs, machinery or on-farm data, read this fund as evidence of where retail capital is going rather than as a source you can raise from; the cheque here follows a path that ends at a Tesco aisle. Founders whose economics only work at grocery scale should nonetheless take the meeting, because £1-5 million plus trial access is a better package than the same money from a generalist.
