Innocent Drinks founders on building the £100m turnover company the natural way

Source: Stock Market Digital

Date :07/11/2007 11:11:06

What does it take to make a successful entrepreneur?The founders of Innocent Drinks were educated, worldly, but unbusinesslike to put it mildly. The triumph of their company is a triumph of conviction

By John O’Hanlon

Richard Green is furious about the VAT on fruit juice. The government imposes17.5 percent VAT on fruit smoothies, whereas processed foods like frozen chips and pizzas, meat pies, pastries and beef burgers are VAT exempt. The reason for this is that, along with ice-cream and chocolate biscuits, smoothies are classed as non essential food items.

“Yet our smoothies are made from 100 percent natural juices and nothing else, so far from being non-essential, they are in fact one of the most convenient ways to get people to consume more fruit and get on their way to ‘5-a-day’. At a time when the government is driving the five-a-day campaign, imposing that tax on pure fruit smoothies, which are healthy and made from 100 percent fruit doesn’t make much sense so we are campaigning to get this lifted.”

I first met Richard Green, Adam Balon and Jon Wright in the splendid setting of St James’s Palace almost exactly seven years ago. Innocent drinks was just one of many bright new companies that had been gathered together to demonstrate to HRH the Prince Andrew, who had recently retired from the Navy to take up the role of Ambassador for Business.

The chamber was packed with business people, among whom these chaps fitted effortlessly enough, yet seemed to stand apart in a way because they retained so much undergraduate insouciance among the earnest networkers. They exuded the kind of aura that is characteristic of, though by no means universal among, young Cambridge graduates, and which in my day led from the footlights to Monty Python.

Not that these guys were actors. They seemed simply incapable of understanding why you had to take business so seriously – they seemed genuinely bewildered to find themselves included among the leading edge entrepreneurs, most of whom were boffins of one sort or another.

Funnily enough Prince Andrew dropped in at Fruit Towers only a few days ago, on October 16th, brought himself up to date on smoothie technology and got involved in little woolly hats for the aged. Don’t ask – it’s all explained on www.innocentdrinks.co.uk!

A good idea at the time

Anyway, I distinctly recall how Richard told me the idea for innocent drinks was first conceived. It was during a long car trip to a skiing holiday in France when one of them suggested that they should get together once they had graduated, and start a business. Ideas went back and forward, as they do on these occasions, in an increasingly absurdist manner until the conversation petered out. But as the days went by they all found themselves agreeing that one idea in particular had wings, the idea of pure fruit drinks. Why not?

The three men left Cambridge in 1994 and set out on the expected career paths for arts graduates of advertising, and management consultancy. Four years later, they were still talking to each other, and still nursing their business idea. They still had no product, though smoothies seemed like an increasingly good idea. “We used to try different recipes out on our friends and families,” recalls Jon, “but that was about the sum of our experience.

Then came the moment of decision. “In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London,” says Richard…

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