Its products might be unadulterated, but Innocent Drinks has grown up as it prepares to burst through the £100m turnover barrier. Co-founder Richard Reed faces up to challenges to come.
Name: Innocent Drinks
Founders: Richard Reed, Adam Balon, Jon Wright
Proposition: Fruit smoothies brand
Founded: 1998
Staff: 187
Turnover 2006: £78m
Innocent Drinks has come of age. It’s hard to detect. After all, the founding values remain intact. The founders remain in charge. The products are largely the same.
Yet one of the UK’s most feted brands has and is facing a series of challenges. Innocent has left behind its start-up existence. The workforce is 187-strong, it has 65% of its domestic market, and a layer of senior management, including a UK MD, has been woven into the business’ close-knit fabric in recent months.
More than that, turnover is set to punch through £100m and Europe is thirsty for more as the business enters its 10th year. In many ways, the world has changed around Innocent. Its humble start-up story (involving ‘yes’ and ‘no’ bins at a festival), its puritanical approach to product and its company ethics and values have been imitated beyond flattery. The snipers have gathered and sniped, sneering that the founders’ reported £120,000-a-year salaries are not so innocent. And the Midas touch has not been present in every pursuit, notably a debut on the BBC’s Watchdog last month when called to account over exploding smoothies.
Internally, too, everything is writ frighteningly large: recruitment, retention, discipline, expansion. Each one poses its own set of questions. Founders Richard Reed, Jon Wright and Adam Balon have their work cut out. And they couldn’t be more excited... if perhaps a little scared.
Like the products, that would only be natural. The responsibility to maintain and accelerate momentum is apparent in all Reed says. Innocent has numerous stated aims, all simply put but highly ambitious. One – to become the world’s most sustainable company – is laudable, but surely impossible to measure. Whether it is or not is up for discussion.
