When Goodrays launched in 2020, it poured virtually every penny into product development, “getting the liquid right first,” as managing director Ben Dando puts it.

Photo: Goodrays MD Ben Dando

Fast-forward to 2025, and the London-founded CBD brand is expanding both its management team and its ambitions.

Now, with a company-wide refresh, £5m in new funding and the arrival of former Liquid Death international boss Ben Dando as MD, the CBD specialist says it’s ready to move from challenger to category leader.

Sitting inside the brand’s Shoreditch office, Dando describes 2024–25 as a year of “doubling down on the details”, from finance and data to supply and operations.

“We’ve grown consistently for the past three years, but the biggest shift this year has been structure,” he says.

“We’ve professionalised the entire business; finance, supply chain, sales, marketing, route to market, all of it.”

Retail Gazette caught up with Dando to discuss Goodrays’ rebrand, how it aims to stand out in the CBD category, and the importance of getting ahead of the functional drinks boom.

A rebrand to match the liquid

“We put everything into the product in the early days… every penny went into making the liquid as good as it could possibly be,” says Dando.

“But there comes a point where you need the brand to match the quality of what’s inside the can.”

Goodrays’ overhaul features a new logo, clearer on-pack benefit messaging and calmer, more premium visuals that borrow more from cosmetics and health-tech, than traditional soft drinks.

One of the biggest insights driving the redesign was consumer confusion. Despite the runaway success of CBD oils and gummies, Goodrays says initial research shows shoppers struggled to differentiate functional drinks on the shelf.

Goodrays’ CBD range consists of four flavours – blood orange and grapefruit, raspberry and guava, elderflower and yuzu and passionfruit and pomelo.

Dando puts it bluntly: “When I joined, my first question was ‘do people even know what these drinks do?’ The answer was no. It wasn’t a taste problem. It was a clarity problem.”

Specifically, the new visual identity adopts cleaner typography, colour-blocked flavour cues and a packaging that is more common in wellness categories than beverages.

Dando says the intention was to highlight the benefits without losing aesthetic appeal.

“We took inspiration from cosmetics and premium alcohol,” Dando says. “The category deserved a product that looked as sophisticated as its purpose.”

The rebrand, which went live officially in August with packs since hitting shelves in Waitrose and other grocers, comes with early success:

“Our website traffic has been higher than it’s ever been,” Dando reports, adding that sell-through post relaunch is “the highest rate of sale that we’ve ever seen.”

For a brand that previously relied mostly on product quality, these are significant milestones.

Cutting through a crowded CBD category

The CBD and wellness drinks aisle is no longer niche. But Goodrays believes it has a playbook to cut through.

The UK CBD market was reported to be worth £690m in 2021 and is projected to hit £1bn by the mid-2020s. Meanwhile, many rival brands, such as Trip, Intune and Little Ricks have already burst onto the supermarket shelves.

Last month, Trip was valued at £200m, boosted by social media coverage and a fundraising round backed by high profile investors such as Joe Jonas, Ashley Graham and Sophie Habboo.

However, Goodrays says its advantage lies less in influencer hype and more in what’s inside the can.

“We’re there to solve the problem, not fuel the problem,” says Dando.

Crucially, Goodrays positions itself not merely as a CBD drink, but as a functional beverage with purpose, different from both conventional soft drinks and a typical “lifestyle brand.”

As Dando puts it: “We’re a brand that enhances your lifestyle. We’re not a lifestyle brand.”

Goodrays says it aims to build its brand more quietly, such as sampling at outdoor and wellness events

That distinction is central to the new identity: Goodrays isn’t marketing “status” or “cool,” but clarity, calm and functional benefit.

Dando says Goodrays aims to deliver on its products’ benefits and build support more quietly, through sampling at outdoor and wellness events, functional-drink occasions, and targeted DTC outreach.

For example, the company recently sampled at trail-running and wellness events to reach their core demographic: people whose mental and physical wellbeing are connected, or as Dando described, walkers, runners, surfers, yogis and “people that can see the link between mental wellbeing and physical health”.

So, in a crowded field, it seems Goodrays is betting that credibility and consistency, rather than flash, will win over repeat buyers.

And Goodrays isn’t putting all its bets on CBD alone. Dando flagged new non-CBD development, notably a magnesium-based product called Refocus that targets cognitive support, and said the brand will explore other formats and adjacent categories.

He expects some of those launches to start appearing next year and says the data & insight hire will help prioritise the right innovations against real consumer problems.

Functional drinks are booming and Goodrays wants to shape the category

Goodrays’ shift into a broader functional platform comes at a moment when the category is accelerating fast.

Demand for functional beverages – such as calm, focus, sleep, no/low alcohol and reduced-caffeine alternatives – is growing, with global growth sitting in the low double digits.

But for Dando, this isn’t a temporary wellness fad but a structural change in consumer behaviour.

“You’ve got a whole cohort looking for alternatives to caffeine, sugar and alcohol,” he says. “If you give them a drink with a clear purpose, and science behind it, they’ll keep coming back.”

Goodrays’ move beyond CBD follows the same logic. Its magnesium-led and adaptogen-led formats are designed to widen the brand’s reach without diluting its mission.

“We don’t want to be a brand with 20 different promises,” Dando says. “Our whole platform is built around relaxation, recovery and mental clarity. Everything ladders back to that.”

CBD will continue to sit at the heart of the business. Full market authorisation is expected in 2026, something Dando believes will reward the operators who have already invested in supply chains.

Alongside its CBD drinks, Goodrays also has a range of gummies and oils

“When regulation lands, quality wins,” he says.

“We’ve built our CBD products to pharmaceutical-grade standards from day one, so we’re ready for that scrutiny.”

Looking ahead, the brand is resisting the “arms race” of constant flavour launches and novelty-led NPD.

“We don’t need 15 flavours. We need products that genuinely work,” he says. “Clear benefits, clean taste, and a brand people feel proud to pick up, that’s the formula.”

With a sharper identity, a strengthened leadership team and a tighter innovation pipeline, Goodrays enters 2026 with a clear ambition: to lead where calmness, clarity and functional performance meet.

“We’ve built the engine,” Dando says. “Now we’re ready to scale it.”