The founders behind NUAGE, the sugar-free cotton candy rated Nutri-Score A, share their playbook for event strategy, budget, and pipeline ROI. If you’ve walked the aisles of a French food trade show recently, chances are you’ve seen — or tasted — a small cloud of the impossible: cotton candy with zero sugar and a Nutri-Score A. Behind it is Re.Snack, a startup founded in 2023 near Dijon by Vanessa and Florian, on a mission to reinvent confectionery. Their first product, NUAGE, is built on Sucr’A, a proprietary sugar substitute developed with AgroSup Dijon that uses plant fibres (isomalt and inulin) to recreate cotton candy’s signature melt-in-the-mouth texture — without sugar, allergens, colourants, or preservatives. The traction speaks for itself: revenue up from €200K to €7M in two years, distribution from 100 to 5,000 points of sale, more than 15,000 online orders, national TV exposure on M6 — and a reported acquisition offer from Lindt that the founders turned down. They’d rather build a brand than become a subcontractor. A sugar-free, fat-free popcorn is next. But what caught our attention is how they grew. For Re.Snack, trade shows aren’t a marketing expense — they’re the core of the sales machine, with a dedicated budget, pipeline targets, and hard ROI thresholds. So we sat down with the team and asked the five questions every founder should be able to answer about their event strategy. Sesamers: Let’s start with the basics. What role do events play in your sales motion — sourcing net-new pipeline, accelerating open deals, or closing? Re.Snack: Events are our number one growth channel. They generate new business, strengthen relationships with existing customers, and accelerate ongoing opportunities. In the food industry, people buy products, but they also buy the team behind them. Face-to-face interactions build trust much faster than emails or calls. That’s a big claim — number one channel. Does the budget reflect it? What share of your sales & marketing spend goes to events, and what target does it carry? Around 25% of our sales and marketing budget is dedicated to events. We consider them a strategic investment rather than a communication expense. Our objective is that every euro invested generates multiple times its value in qualified commercial opportunities over the following 12 months. Twelve months is a patient window. When you look across the whole portfolio of events, what does the blended pipeline ROI actually come out to? On average, we generate between 8x and 12x pipeline ROI across our major trade shows. Some flagship events, such as SIAL or ISM, can significantly outperform that because they concentrate the world’s key retail buyers in one place. Meetings are easy to count, revenue less so. Which events actually convert — not just into conversations, but into business? The events that convert best are those attended by decision-makers with active buying projects. For us, SIAL Paris, ISM, Snack Show, and major retail buying conventions consistently generate tangible business. Success isn’t measured by the number of meetings, but by the quality of follow-up and execution afterwards. Last one on the numbers: at what point do you decide an event has earned a bigger budget? What’s your threshold for scaling up? We increase investment once an event consistently delivers at least a 5x pipeline ROI and proves it can generate repeatable business over multiple editions. We look at long-term customer value rather than immediate sales, because retail cycles can take several months. Before we let you go — for the food founders reading this, what would be your top 5 events? My top five would be: What founders should take from this Beneath the answers sits a playbook any startup can copy, whatever the industry. Events have a job description. Re.Snack doesn’t attend trade shows to “be visible” — events source new business, deepen existing relationships, and accelerate open deals. If you can’t name the job an event does in your sales motion, you have travel expenses, not a strategy. The budget is an envelope with a target attached. A quarter of sales & marketing spend, set deliberately and measured against a pipeline expectation over 12 months. No target, no budget. ROI is measured blended, on a realistic clock. Individual events fluctuate; the portfolio number — 8–12x pipeline-to-cost in Re.Snack’s case — is what tells you whether the channel works. And the attribution window matches the sales cycle: judging a trade show by orders signed on the show floor would kill investments that pay off two quarters later. Conversion beats meetings, and follow-up is where ROI is made. The filter is decision-makers with active buying projects — not badge scans. The event budget implicitly includes the week after the show, not just the days of it. Budget growth follows proven return. A 5x floor, plus repeatability across multiple editions, before a single extra euro flows. One great year doesn’t unlock more spend; a pattern does. Run this way, events stop being a cost centre with nice catering — and become a growth channel with receipts. Company background via nuage.resnack.fr, France 3 Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, and Traces Écrites News.
