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Innocent’s definitely not perfect – it’s not this perfect business where everyone wears white robes and is at peace with the world.”
FOR A COMPANY big on the warm and fuzzy factor, from its promises to deliver sustainably-sourced products to its charitable works, Innocent Drinks’ decision to get into bed with Coke appeared like a textbook deal with the devil.
Fast forward two years since the drinks giant completed its buyout after earlier taking a majority share in the juice and smoothie maker, things appear to be going well – on the sales front, at least.
Innocent’s expansion from its native UK to mainland Europe has continued apace with it forecasting revenues to grow 20% this year to £250 million (€338 million) as it spreads its reach into products like food pots, fizzy drinks and, most-recently coconut water.
It is also the leader in Ireland’s €55 million juice and smoothie market, based on figures from AC Nielson, while the company said it just became the top-selling brand in Germany after doubling sales over the past year.
But has coming under the sweaty hand of a multinational parent brought with it pressure to drive down costs and maximise profitability for a company that famously started with some friends selling smoothies at a music festival?
Not according to Innocent’s head of brand and creative, Dan Germain, who has been with the company since it started 16 years ago this week.
“The relationship with Coke is one that is … certainly an odd one because they invested in us so they could leave us alone,” he said in an interview at TheJournal.ie’s office.
They let us run the business in exactly the way that we want to run it. Their stance is we don’t know how to run your business, we can’t run your business.”
The takeover
Coca-Coca completed its takeover in 2013 as part of a deal that reportedly valued Innocent at £320 million (€448 million in today’s money) after first taking a majority share in 2010.
However Germain said there had been “zero pressure” from anyone at Coke to change Innocent’s model, despite him admitting the company ran in a “highly illogical way”.
“As long as we’re growing and we’re successful I think that’ll be the case,” he said.
If we started to absolutely tank and there was a day next week when everyone in the world stopped buying Innocent drinks then Coke would probably say hang on, what happened there?”
Those illogical business decisions included giving 10% of its profits to charity – mostly to the Innocent Foundation, which has spent nearly £3 million (€4.5 million) to date on projects to eradicate hunger.
All about the fruit
Another, Germain said, was making products for which the price of the core component, fruit, was “really expensive” and fluctuated wildly.
But he said customers would notice and abandon the brand if it tried to cut corners, and in a market filled with juice and smoothie makers they couldn’t compromise on taste.
“In the end that has to be our USP (unique selling point) – that we get to the best stuff before the other guys do,” he said.
If we know that there’s an area of Brazil that grows the best oranges then we go there and we almost buy them all – or we buy as many as we can. That ensures you with a great supply of oranges for the next however many months or years and it stops other people from having them.”
And that desire to squeeze out (pardon the juice-related pun) the competition also demonstrates the company’s ambition, despite a cuddly image fostered with campaigns like the Big Knit, as it looks to expand well outside Europe to North America, Asia and Australia in coming years.
Innocent’s definitely not perfect, it’s not this perfect business where everyone wears white robes and is at peace with the world – we’re a normal business and a collection of normal, smart people … I would hate for it to sound like a cult or something,” Germain said.
Here’s an extended interview in which Germain talks more about Coke, trying to keep ahead of the competition and not being a cult:
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Juice your own! Cheaper and a lot less sugar!
There smoothies are loaded with as much suger as fizzy drinks terrible stuff
Natural fruit sugar is healthier than the sugar in fizzy drinks, not really a good comparison
On the contrary! Too much fruit, especially when juiced and when fibre is removed causes a huge spike in blood sugar.
Boycott apples and oranges, they are full of sugar!
Get a grip folks, everything in moderation, live and let live etc.
This stuff is absolutely loaded with suger…far from innoncent!
It was always rank slop filled with sugar. And it still is.
It’s an interesting business case study , not really as strange a move as it may appear though as Tropicana orange juice was taken over by Pepsi many years earlier so Coke was just responding to the growth in markets for juices and smoothies , plus they had missed the mark when Redbull stole a lead in the energy drink market under their nose so buying innocent made perfect sense for them
It has all to do with selling sugar……America is awash with cheap corn syrup (fructose), and anything that value adds to this cheap form of sugar is fair game for the likes of Coca Cola.
If you look at the aisles in somewhere like Dunnes Stores, there is a full row of biscuits, a full aisle of sweets and chocolate, and ever increasing amounts of pop scattered around the store.
In the fridge section, you now have Smoothies creeping in beside the fruit juices. There is an ever increasing percentage of floor area being devoted to foods based on this cheap sugar.
It can be dressed up with fancy fruit and marketing and labelling the thing Innocent, but it is still a very unhealthy form of sugar.
The chap says he goes over to Brazil and buys up almost all the oranges , where are these oranges grown ? Are they grown on land that is cleared rainforest.
Things go better with coke.
They’re milking the juice.
Far Cue. The Chinese snooker champion
I think Coca-Cola are an unethical company so I try to keep my spend on their products as low as possible. I had an Innocent smoothie once & that was enough. Over-priced shite
Sugar trade. More channels fr CocaCola to push disguised sugar. Innocent…yeah right.
So don’t buy it.
As do bosca ?
have your say