Love Struck Hits Its Stride in US Foodservice with First Bite

How a UK-based supplier of premium smoothies turned America’s foodservice channel into a structured, scalable growth engine. 

About Love Struck: Love Struck is a premium frozen smoothie brand, offering all-natural smoothies in convenient ready-to-blend frozen packs to cafes, colleges and universities, health clubs, and QSR.

Cracking the US Foodservice Market

When Matt Riley stepped into the role of US Commercial Lead at Love Struck, he inherited a problem familiar to anyone who’s tried to crack American foodservice: the market is enormous, fragmented, and completely unforgiving of broad-brush approaches.

Love Struck had been trying to crack the US for years, flying team members over from the UK quarterly, chasing leads, and returning home with slow results. When they hired Matt as their first dedicated US hire, headquarters was anxious. The US had always felt like a black box. Would this time be different?

Matt was a team of one, responsible for every aspect of the US foodservice channel. Managing what he called an “unruly universe” of potential operators without a clear system to identify, prioritize, and track them. And with Love Struck’s UK leadership watching closely, there was no room for a slow start.

“The biggest challenge in foodservice is just the immense number of potential operators to pursue. If you try to boil the ocean, you’re going to get lost… I don't think blindly going out and trying to do that on our own would be even possible. First Bite has been our only way to effectively target those opportunities.” — Matt Riley, US Commercial Lead, Love Struck

The First Move: Bringing Structure to the Chaos

One of the first things Matt brought to Love Struck was First Bite. He’d used the platform at a previous brand and knew exactly what it could do for a team of one trying to build a channel from scratch.

Through First Bite’s hands-on managed service tier, Activate, Matt worked directly with the company’s foodservice strategy experts to define exactly who Love Struck should be targeting. Rather than using the “spray and pray” method for outreach across the market, they identified the operator attributes that signal a strong fit for Love Struck’s product – smoothies on the menu, healthy offerings, existing beverage programs – and developed custom outreach messages. 

Each campaign generated 300–400 highly targeted leads in carefully chosen markets. In its first six months, Love Struck ran nearly 90 campaigns across Southern California, Arizona, Texas, the Northeast, Southeast, and Pacific Northwest.

The value, Matt says, goes well beyond the data and email tools. First Bite’s team brings deep foodservice expertise and benchmarks from across their client base, helping Love Struck make smarter decisions about who to target, when, and how.

“First Bite isn't just the system or the tool, it's the people behind it that help us think through how do we go about this, what makes sense. And we can tap into your foodservice experience and best practices from all other clients. That’s a really valuable resource." — Matt Riley, US Commercial Lead, Love Struck

‍Managing 300+ Foodservice Deals Without Losing Your Mind

As the sample requests started rolling in, a new challenge emerged: how do you manage hundreds of active conversations as a team of one?

The First Bite CRM became Matt’s answer. Every lead moves through a structured pipeline — from initial outreach, to interested, to sampled, to closed. Automated reminders ping him after samples ship and he can loop in internal colleagues via email threads that live inside the deal. Brokers also get tagged to their leads, so Matt can generate monthly partner reports showing exactly what’s been produced in their territory and hold them accountable for follow-through.

By tying rebate tracking to individual broker performance, Love Struck has transformed what was once a murky accountability gap into a clear, auditable system. Brokers who once had visibility gaps now know exactly what’s in their pipeline. And Matt knows exactly who’s working it.

The impact has extended to Love Struck’s UK leadership team too. Matt now opens First Bite live in monthly management meetings, walking the team through the dashboard, closed pipeline, and campaign performance in real time. What started as a prospecting tool became a boardroom confidence builder. “Their anxiety level,” Matt says, “continued to drop.”

“It kind of gives me a cape like I'm Superman with First Bite. I'd be completely lost, I think, without it… It’s definitely a key to success and an important part of our solution to foodservice.” — Matt Riley, US Commercial Lead, Love Struck

“We’re averaging north of 50 samples a month,” says Matt. “Those are interested parties who want to see our product and try it. And all of that is a direct result of the targeted outreach that we’re doing through First Bite.”

And by Matt’s own account, they’re just getting started. “I feel like we’re just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “There’s so much more in the pipeline.”

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