innocent drinks : the innocent AGM

Here are the full text transcripts for all of the questions asked and answeres given in our 2010 innocent AGM Q&A.

When you did your first bunch of smoothies to take around the shops and everything your kitchen must have looked like a real mess considering the mess we made in there. So how did you deal with that? Whose flat was chosen?

We actually shared a house together in Baron’s Court, so we were only messing up each other’s kitchens. It was fine, so we did it there.

Did you break any blenders, or any stories from those times?

We did learn quite a lot about fruit going off, and the need for refrigeration and hygiene and stuff. I have to say we made our first big batch of mango and passion fruit and didn’t quite keep it cold enough, and had the lid on and the whole thing just blew and redecorated absolutely everywhere. So we went bright yellow very quickly.
I remember you coming back from that and I was like “How did the trial go?” and then I smelt this sort of vague smell of rotten mango. Not that well!
We did have this weird experience where we’d be making them in the kitchen, pouring them into bottles and then went out trying to sell them to shops just to get a sense of could you sell them to shops? We had no idea could you just walk in off the pavement and start selling? So we’d do this and then the shopkeeper would go “Yeah, okay, I’d like to stock it” and then we’d have to go “Ah, no we were only sort of joking. We haven’t really made them.” So we had this very bizarre test that left the shopkeeper perplexed. There was a guy trying to sell smoothies but then couldn’t actually sell them.

What was the first recipe you ever perfected?

The one we sold at the music festival, which is where we did our first trial, was orange, bananas and pineapple. So that was our very first one, and we launched with that recipe and strawberry and banana, and cranberry and raspberry. So those were the initial three in the family.
Orange, bananas and pineapple doesn’t exist anymore.
No.
It retired, sadly, last year after 10 years of good service.

Will you ever expand to the United States because they have nothing as good as here?

Well, one day we really hope to because I think there really is an opportunity for innocent in the US. I don’t think there’s anything quite like what we do there. As you’ve said, I think the smoothies there are good but not as good as ours. The thing is, it is a long way away. We’d have to set up whole fruit production, everything over there, so at the moment we’re focussing on Europe but never say never. Our vision is to be the world’s favourite healthy food and drinks company, and that definitely involves the US, so hopefully one day.

What about Brazil?

Definitely Brazil.
Brazil, yes. You’ve got great fruit in Brazil, haven’t you, so it might make it even easier.

What’s the one thing you’d change about innocent to make it better?

Better air conditioning, and cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.
I wish there was a way to make the products cheaper but without changing the nature of the products if you know what I mean because they’re expensive to buy on a day-to-day basis. They’re expensive for a very good reason. They’re as expensive as how the things cost. If I had a magic wand, it’s something if we could hold on quality but make the price cheaper. The bottom margins are so thin because there’s so much going in the fruit that really there’s this dilemma. We want to get to more people but we … At the moment we lose money each year so we’re actually not a business, we’re a fruit distribution charity is the way we sort of look at ourselves. But it would be great to, yeah, get them to more people.

What one piece of advice would you give to any budding entrepreneurs out there?

I’d say keep to your core idea, your main thing. Most entrepreneurs have a bright idea and it is usually the success of that business is in the initial inspiration, and there’s a real danger that as you start to pursue it you dilute it and you get talked into something different by the people you meet along the way, and then suddenly it isn’t the great bright thought you had. It’s something else. So stick to your initial belief and your initial principle.
I think where it worked for us is that the beginning we were a team and a team of people that have very shared values and vision, but very complementary skills. There’s something about … I’m in absolute awe of people who set businesses up by themselves because you need to be able to do so many different things. We’re really lucky we can do it as a threesome and then … in week three into the business that Dan who’s another friend from college, he joined the team and so we had complementary skills but a shared vision of values, and that’s been really powerful.
Probably the thing I’d say is it just takes a lot of perseverance because there’s so many things will go wrong in the beginning and just that you believe in your idea. You’ve just got to keep going, keep going. And it doesn’t happen easily, but only if you keep on pushing then it will happen.

Does innocent have any plans to introduce a kind of veg pot that doesn’t have to be heated?

Well, yes. At the moment all our veg pots require heating and we do have in our kind of ideas something that’s called a cold eat veg pot, so doing veg pots that don’t need heating up, but at the moment it’s no more than that. It’s something we’d love to do but we kind of haven’t got round to it yet. So it’s on the list, not on the plan.
Who would like that?
What would people see it as?
Salad
Ask a daft question, you get a dumb answer.
So would people like innocent to do a salad?
Yes.

Do you have any plans to restart anything like the innocent village fete or fruit stock again because we’re kind of missing it?

I have to say we are too. Fruit stock especially we thought was such a blast doing that for four years. The village fete was great too. This year actually we’re doing loads of new things. We’re doing a pop-up restaurant; we’re sponsoring a man in his world record attempt to be the world’s oldest person. It’s very bizarre. You should check it out online. It’s hilarious. It’s a comedian that’s all … He’s 37. Sorry, he’s 31 and he’s determined to be the oldest, the worldest … We want to do little obscure events in the future. The reality is we stopped in 2008 because the business was under such pressure and we lost so much money that we just had to cut back on some of the ultimately non-essential things, but we’re definitely going to get back to them in bigger years.
One of the real challenges with it was we all enjoyed it so much that actually we found ourselves spending most of our time putting on really good events in Regent’s Park and looking at the ticket sales perhaps more than the sales of our smoothies, so 2008 we sort of got back to business.

When Gordon Brown came round there was a great article in the Standard which ranked you up there with Ocado and Boden as classic middle class products, which I guess probably isn’t an image you want. And when you’ve tried to expand healthy eating into things like going into McDonalds and targeting perhaps more deprived areas in the country – the same sort of thing that Jamie Oliver does on his show – you’ve been criticised for it, so how do you square that circle?

We always start from what’s the – is it going to help with the mission or not? And the mission of innocent has always been very clear to us. It’s we’re about helping people be healthy. We want to get natural fresh products as many different places as we can. The McDonalds one is an interesting one. We kind of knew we were going to get a kicking in the press for it, but I guess we’ve always tried to do business on what we think is right and what we think sounds right, and for us it was the right thing to do but we recognise some people think differently. The business, we are managing to make it – to widen its reach out. If you think just of those little kids’ tubes we’ve done, they’re like less than 30p each and the kids’ wedges are less than 70p each, so we’re managing to get the same quality but in smaller packs out to more people. That will continue so that all the products coming out the back end of this year are going to achieve a price of what we’ve currently got. We’ve still got a long way to go, but I think we have managed to break the illusion that we’re just for people in West London. We sell very well in the Sainsbury’s in Huddersfield where my mum goes and shops each week, which is partly to do … They all look very neatly aligned in Huddersfield Sainsbury’s.
I mean it is a challenge because there is a quality/cost trade off but there is a certain quality we say that’s innocent and we don’t want to – we can’t go below that. We want to feel proud of every product we make and that means there is a certain cost to them, so it’s difficult to square that.

Would you consider making smoothies for other companies that then sell them at a lower price, or do you only make stuff that goes into innocent branded cartons?

Yes, I mean one of our things is you can only find an innocent smoothie in an innocent bottle. We don’t make any product for anybody else, so yes I think that’s important.

A couple of years ago you had a graduate programme. Do you have any ideas to bring on graduates or about to graduate in a few weeks’ time?

innocent to kind of foster that entrepreneurial, innovative spirit in the company.
It was a great programme and we got some great people into the team as part of it. We haven’t had it for the last couple of years just because in the current environment we’re not recruiting as heavily as we were when we had the graduate programme. The great news is we’re now back into the growth that we were in the first eight years of the business. That means that we’re recruiting again and so I think that programme will start up again. Whether it will start up in the next few weeks, I don’t know.
It is always worth checking on the website under the innocent jobs section because as soon as we’ve got a vacancy we do put it up there and we will commonly be looking for people at all levels of experience.
Yes, even though we don’t have a full graduate programme, you can start as a fresh player.

Are you able to make a smoothie entirely from ingredients grown in Great Britain, even if it is only a seasonal one? That’s from Simon from the West Midlands.

We have a seasonal recipe and we use that to try out different recipes and experiment with new things, and two years ago we did have a recipe that was made from English fruit. It was apples, blackcurrants and elderflowers, and then we had another one that was made with English damsons. Boy, did they take a lot of work to get everything working together through the UK and through the different supply routes that we’d normally use. We absolutely went for it. I guess the fact of the matter was, having done that, it really didn’t sell. And so we put a lot of work into it, we got the products out in the private market, we achieved the thing that we wanted to do, but then it just didn’t – it didn’t work for us and so we just couldn’t justify going through that effort again.

What were you guys doing before you started the business? What did you resign from?

I used to work in an advertising agency.
I used to work for a management consultancy.
I was at Virgin, a Virgin company.

Were any of you not sure when you were resigning? You’d started careers and …

Well, I personally was totally dead nervous about it, yes. No, absolutely, because I personally started with the attitude that it’s definitely not going to work but we want to give it a go. We were really fortunate. Our companies were incredibly supportive. They said if it didn’t work out we could have our jobs back. Mine actually gave us an office to work from for the first couple of months for free as well, so we really couldn’t have asked for more. That’s one of the things we found actually setting up a business in the UK. There’s just been so much goodwill. So many people are in your corner prepared to help. The lady who’s asking about it, I don’t know if you’re thinking, but my headline is if you’re thinking about doing it then I’d definitely do it because it is awesome.
I mean I think sort of naturally it feels like this huge great step because you kind of resign and launch your own thing, but you can make it into a series of smaller, less risky steps. So you might be able to negotiate with your company that you get a sabbatical or three months to go and look at something and then come back. You certainly spend your time thinking before you spend your time spending the money, so there are just certain things that if you get them in the right order you can make it a series of smaller steps rather than one day having a job and the next day having a huge credit card bill, which we did end up with. It took us a year to get there.
So you had some good experiences.
We worked for about three years after university.
Yes, but Richard was right when he said earlier that after we did the sort of yes and no bit and sort of said “Right, we’re going to go and do this” there was definitely that moment of “Are we actually going to resign?” And only later Richard sort of fessed up that he really thought that me and John might just be playing an incredibly elaborate long lasting trick on him just to get him to resign and stitch him up, taking four months developing a business plan, making smoothies … that is good.
I heard someone recently say that you’ve just got to think of the Dr Pepper school of philosophy, which is what’s the worst that can happen? I do think there’s a sense of, even if it doesn’t work out, you’ll have learnt so much. Even to not get there is still a positive experience. The only advice that we would give that really hit home, as I said, just don’t put your family home on the market to back all this. I mean that wasn’t applicable to us. We didn’t have a family home. Our assets came down to our CD collections, but don’t risk everything but risk and reward are inextricably linked.

You’ve grown enormously over the years. We’ve seen your office stretch way up there and now you’re out conquering Europe. We’re just wondering if there’s any sort of comment you can make about how beneficial or how helpful being on this particular Goldhawk site might have been during this process of development for you?

I personally think it’s been absolutely awesome, I mean both … I was talking to some people here earlier. It’s been awesome in terms of the environment, the actual local community. When we first moved in, the day we moved in someone came and made us a homemade cake to welcome us to the estate. I think Brackenbury Village is just a lovely place to be, and then this space has just been absolutely great for us because, as you said, we started with one and now we’ve got over six, so we have this huge big open plan space we can just all hang out. It’s given us a real sort of sense of community, so it’s been brilliant over the last 10 years.
We’ve had a great relationship actually with Brackenbury school, which is just behind us, developing kids’ recipes and kids’ products, so we go round trying them out with everybody and get advice and tell us what we’re doing right.
We went over to do some recipe development and we asked the kids what ingredients would they like in their smoothies and there’s three answers that stuck out the most. One said “I want snails,” someone said “I want butterflies” and then this really sweet girl said “I want my mummy in my smoothie.” We’re working on the butterfly smoothie and mother smoothies. Out in September.

On behalf of everybody that’s here, I want to say a big thank you for coming along today. It’s just been fantastic just to come and visit with you today. My question is about vision and values. It’s written large through everything that we can see today and through the people that we’ve spoken to. If there was one thing that you could do to actually get the vision and values stay with you because you’ve built up innocent over 10 years, what would that be? How will you embed your vision and values as you go forward into the future?

Firstly, the thank you was for most of you guys. You guys have given up your Saturday to come in this afternoon, so we really, really do appreciate that. It makes everyone in the business feel very special that you guys are prepared to do that, so thank you to you guys. The vision and values piece, for me the most fundamental thing is it is about the people that come and join the business. The values are within the individuals that we are lucky enough to get to work with. It’s not that they turn up and then we sort of try and brainwash them. I think you find people that chime with it. The people that work at innocent, they feel a connection to it and that means we all get more out of working here. For me it’s important that we’re doing food that’s healthy and that we’re giving a bit of money to charity, and I think it is for the rest of the team too, so I think having great values is actually about finding great people.

Hi there. You talked about you like being on the site and you like being in the local area you’re in, and I’m a Queen’s Park Rangers fan. Do you ever go? Do you ever get involved with the club? If football is not your thing, what is your sport and your thing?

You’re asking the right guys. Richard first.
Yes, John’s second. I think John and I are probably not the most football minded guys. In terms of what do I get up to, I guess I always have one foot in nature, so I go running by the river, do a bit of yoga, go mountain biking, hiking, camping, that kind of stuff, and then I have the other foot slightly more in the hedonistic side of life, so I’m often found in night clubs. I’m a bit of a ying and yang person – more ying than yang.
Tennis is my thing, so I don’t go to the R’s very often. I’ve been there twice I think and once it was about 20 years ago, and to be honest it was the worst match I’ve ever seen. I’m sure it was just a one-off.
No, not really.
No. I was only being polite.

How often do the three of you work together now on a day-to-day basis, and what do you do if you have any disagreements with each other?

We sit down every week kind of formally, so every Monday afternoon the three of us get together to talk about the weekend and anything else, so that’s on a kind of formal basis, and all three of us are based here in the office. We’re always kind of passing by. The big arguments tend to be about the stuff that anyone can have an opinion on. When we were setting up the business we kind of divided up responsibilities, so Adam was looking after sales, and I was looking after supply chain and Rich was looking after the marketing, and we just kind of trust each other to get on with that. But when we got our first little room and it came to painting it because it was a little hovel we found, the colour of the paint became a huge issue – a proper standoff, you know, shouting row. Dan was in the company then, and there were about six people and they were just watching the three of us have this absolute balls out argument about the colour of the paint on the walls. Fortunately, we’ve kind of vented things on the things that don’t matter and agreed on the things that do.
The thing is we trust each other on our sort of professional ways. John knows how to make things far better than I do. In the end I’ll challenge him but he’s right on that, whereas when it comes to paint colour, why should his grey be better than my blue?
What colour was it in the end?
Grey-blue.

It’s probably worth saying where your responsibilities like these days compared to …

Yes. I usually look after the sales piece in the UK and now I don’t do anything in the UK. It’s all about the international business.
So I still look after the supply chain, so sorting the fruit and getting the product made and delivered, but now I look after the UK business and everything that goes on in the UK.
Like John said, I used to look after the marketing side. The three of us share the … we regard ourselves as the co-CEOs so we share the ultimate leadership of the business, and then my other title is Brand and Corporate Affairs Director so I work with Dan on creative stuff and I also have the great glamorous job of campaigning to get VAT off smoothies and other things like that. I didn’t quite imagine setting up my own business that 12 years’ later I’d be the guy in charge of the VAT legislation, but somehow, weirdly, it’s happened to me.

What was the moment that you just thought “Wow, this is really happening?”

I mean Richard mentioned the first day sales and we sold the 24 bottles. And our business plan was … so we put them on the shelves in the store, and the business plan, eight of those needed to sell by the end of the day, and so we were actually so scared that they just wouldn’t sell that we went back to the office and kind of sat there and sort of “Are we going to go and look and see whether they’ve sold?” It was a little café literally attached to the building we were in. And we were there and by the time we got there it was shut because we procrastinated for so long. And so we actually had to get on milk crates and sort of stand peeking through the window, and actually about 16 had sold and that was like double what the business plan needed, so we were like “Whoa, yes,” and that was the first moment, and we went to the pub opposite and spent the money. So that was an early win but there were lots of other little ones along the way. I don’t think there was one big sort of “Right, it’s going to work.” It was just sort of “Ah, that thing’s worked and that thing’s worked,” and so there was lots of little bits of progress.
I think we were very fortunate in the first year or so that we got some good PR written about the business when we were still very small, you know, like a piece in the Evening Standard, and that just really helped so that when we started going talking to shopkeepers some of them had actually heard of us and suddenly there was a bit of an awareness, and that felt to me like a real point at which there was a bit of familiarity.
It was also a taxi cab test. It was only about year six that black cab drivers in London had heard of it, and I remember thinking for the first six years they’d drop us off outside here and they’d never seen the vans or heard of the company, and then about six years ago “Oh yeah, I’ve seen you guys around.” And it was just that point of I think it’s gone from not being known to some people had heard of us. But then, as I say, 2008 was a really interesting year. It took me about five years for me personally to sort of lose the paranoia that it wasn’t going to work. About year six “Okay, so maybe it is working.” And 2008 was a really tough year for the business and it really did go to show. And it sounds like a sound bite, we literally are only as good as our last smoothie because there’s no need for anyone to buy the next one, so I think we learned in 2008 just the importance of you really have got to deliver a better quality product and it’s got to be better value than the competition, otherwise people are just going to stop buying it. So tough year though.

We’ve talked about how you’re going to be moving into premises that are a bit more like a fruit tower. How is that dynamic going to change if you’re not all in such an open plan office and how are you going to tackle that, and also just generally expanding the business, getting bigger and bigger, to keep onto your core values?

Well, in terms of expanding, we’ve actually found, perversely, that the … It’s gone the other way, as we’ve got bigger the brand has become stronger, more resonant, the values have got stronger. So I think we’re more innocent now than we ever have been. I was speaking to some guys that joined the business on Monday. He’s going actually we are sort of more in touch with the mission and the business is more vibrant to me personally than it has been in the last 12 years, so … And I think it’s about getting the right people.

So you can sort of afford to do things that you couldn’t in the first place in terms of sustainability.

Exactly. When you first start you’re three 26-year olds and you can’t even get your phone calls returned by the fruit guys, whereas now we’ve got a brilliant team of people that are out in field talking to the farmers about how they grow, the sustainability and the quality of the fruit. So we just get to do more of the things that we’ve always cared about. The new office is fundamentally different, yes. It’s a beautiful building with amazing views looking over London, on the side of the canal, so it’s the most gorgeous setting and building, but, yes, it’s vertical rather than horizontal. The way that we’re thinking about doing it is we’re ripping out a floor on the first floor so we’re going to make a big cavernous double height communal area and that’s for the whole business to hang out in, meet in, talk, communicate, spread ideas, and then there will be three floors which it will be where people can go and think and work. And I quite like the idea of that because one of the disadvantages of this place is if you’re sat over in unit five and there’s something going on here, it does disrupt, and sometimes you need to be able to think and reflect, and sometimes you want to meet and communicate, so I think the buildings kind of allow us to do which of those two things we want to do at the right time rather than force … you know, sometimes you’re thinking and somebody is having a birthday party.
But in terms of your question on expansion, so if you go to innocent in Paris or in Salzburg they will be much, much smaller than this with 10/15 people, but it’s exactly the same feel, and that’s because it’s once again the people. So if you have people who share the same values and communicate that same vision then you’ll get the same feel and culture, so our Paris office has a Gallic twist to it, but it is definitely innocent, the same with the one in Salzburg. It’s got a slightly crazy Austrian feel to it but it’s definitely innocent.

When you first started innocent Smoothies when you were all around the age of 26, how well did you work together, being that you’re all quite young and you’re all friends?

Well, we worked. One of the very first things that we … We had the idea at the snowboarding weekend. We came back and the next weekend we went into John’s offices at the time to sort of make … Oh, Adam’s, I think, to use the meeting rooms, and we just sat there and the very first thing that we did was said “Right, who’s going to do what?” And that entire conversation of laying out every bit of the business who’s going to do what took about five minutes because to us it was always clear what we were each good at and what we were each bad at, and so it was sort of self-selected that who was going to do which bits, and …
Finance was a bit of a …
Yeah.
Hot potato.
Yeah.
John and I sort of shared it.
Which wasn’t the greatest way of running a finance team. And so having sort of cleared the different set of skills and having people playing to what they’re best at then that really worked. As I said, it was quite quickly then you’d realise where the other gaps … Bring in because the creative element was so strong and then we brought in Lucy Eders because she was a product developer because that was really important, so you could see what the organisation needs. You just have to be honest with yourself what you’re not good at and find people that are great for the bits that you don’t cover off.
I think we’ve also been quite good at separating work from play, so three of us work together and run a business together and enjoy doing that, but we’ll also go away on holiday together and not talk business, and have a good relaxing holiday where we’re just friends and not business partners.

What is going to change not that Coca Cola is a major shareholder in the company?

Well, I think the straight answer to that is nothing and the longer answer is the deal that we’ve done with them really is a very unusual deal where they absolutely own the majority of the shares in the business and they have no operational control over the business. What happened in terms of the deal, we separated the owning of shares from the operating of the organisation, and they were tremendously cool with that because their whole thing is “Look, we love the brand, we love the philosophy. The last thing we want to do is try and get involved and change it. You guys do what you do.” We loved it because it allowed us to continue to lead the business, continue to make the products we want, sell where we want, do what we like with the profits that go to charity, investing in things that we care about, so we found them to be incredibly benign investors that just simply helped us. So 14 months ago compared to now, we are much stronger, much more innocent than we ever were, so our experience has been entirely positive.

I love the products, I love the values, and in our family we particularly like jokes, all the language, the wit, the humour. Who writes the jokes and also how does it translate to Germany, and France and all the other countries?

I suppose the jokes originally came from the way we talk to each other. It’s just sort of us basically, and then Dan joined and Dan started writing a lot of them, and now Dan runs a team of people who are here as well. Where’s Kerry? Where is she? She’s hiding.
Most definitely hiding. Kerry’s hiding. Is she there?
She’s definitely not going to come out now. She writes lots of the stuff these days. And if you came over to the exploration station at the far end of the building you’ll have seen some of them at work and met some of the people that come up with the words and pictures.
But it’s all in house. So in Germany we’ve got a guy called Christian, we’ve got Matt in France, and Nicolai in Scandinavia, and it’s just once again people who get what we’re about and are probably bi-lingual, so they understand innocent in its homeland and can find a way of translating it into the local language because you’re absolutely right, you have to get that tone and feel right because the words are so important to the brand.

Do you get a bit paranoid when you see a German label and you think “What does it say? I know what he said it said?”

We haven’t had any issues, although we do get into trouble sometimes. We’ve had legal issues in the UK. One of the most bizarre things that we had to sort of preside over, I think it was about the second year of the business, and I don’t know if you guys have seen sometimes but not always we put jokes actually in the ingredients panel, which is really a bit naughty. You’re not supposed to do that, but we thought it was quite funny. And we once wrote a strawberry and banana smoothie label that said on the ingredients panel “Six strawberries, two bananas, half an orange and two plump nuns.” It was a stupid joke. We didn’t really mean anything bad about it. We sorted of printed it and off it went, and about two weeks later we got a call from Kensington and Chelsea Trading Standards, who said “Mr Reid, we’ve had it brought to our attention that there’s a reference to plump nuns in your ingredient panel. You can’t do that.” I said “Look, I’m really sorry. Obviously, it’s just a stupid joke. We don’t mean any harm by it and no-one is sort of going to take issue.” And they said “No, you absolutely can’t do that. It’s illegal.” And they instigated a whole proper formal investigation into it, which cumulated with me having to go in for a formal legal hearing and having representations to defend our position. Still to this day, 12 years in, it’s still my favourite moment. As I got this letter about six weeks after the formal hearing, I opened it and it said “Dear Mr Reid, you must either take off the reference to plump nuns or start putting them in your fruit juice.” It was a great moment.

Hi. What are your hopes and fears for innocent over the next 10 years?

I hope we can carry on doing what we’re doing, bringing healthy, tasty drinks and food to more people in the UK and beyond, so I think it’s more of the same at a bigger scale and continuing to be, I suppose, more innocent in the way we do it. I suppose the theory is that we don’t manage that. But I think it’s in our control to do that and so I think if we lead the business right then we can do that.
A fear of mine is that we have a business that’s based on fresh fruit. If we don’t have great fruit then we don’t have a great business. We’re beginning to see difficulties in sourcing some fruit from some parts of the world as the climate begins to change. So, for example, we love Indian mangos, the Alfonzo mango, and the seasons for the last few years just haven’t been great there and the expectation is then they’re not going to get any better. Our mango and passion fruit is one of our most popular drinks and 10 years out and things are going to be different, so we’re having to start working now with the growers on varieties that might be better acclimatised to the future climate. So we’re having to think that far ahead because it takes five years for a tree to mature and then five years to run the programme, so we’re casting our minds forward to think about those issues.
My hopes are the same. I guess everyone at innocent really does believe in the importance of healthy eating. And I don’t want to make a big song and dance over it, but we love the idea that the products for me are really sort of positive. They really do help you be healthy, and so the hope is we just get to do more of those and we manage to do the thinking, get the right products to the right people, at the right price, and they’re absolutely received in the way that we would intend them. For me the biggest fear is we just become average. You know, there is that risk. We’ve had a couple of questions about it. As you get bigger, isn’t there a sense that you just sort of lose what’s special? I do genuinely believe we have absolutely bucked that trend and we’re better now than we ever have been, but one can never be complacent about that. There is a sense of as you get bigger you’ve just got to be working even harder at the things that are most important. So I guess the hope is that we get health to as many people as possible but the fear is that we don’t stay as innocent as we are now. But I think we’ll get stronger.

Would you consider lowering the price of your veg pots to make them more affordable so as making them a more affordable option at lunch time?

I mean yes, I guess with regards to veg pots specifically at £3.49 at the moment, we would love to get them under £3.00, and we’ve got a team looking at that. How do we get the veg pots at sort of £2.99, which we think is a much better price point. The thing is at the moment we can’t see what we could stop doing in a veg pot to make it cost less that would enable us to get to that price point. We think people want three portions of veg, not two portions of veg. People want fresh veg, not frozen veg, so we haven’t found a way to get the cost down to get that price point. We’re looking at it, so if anyone’s an expert with vegetable recipes and has any ideas that would be great to hear.

Who came up with the AGM idea and do you think you can have the same type of events in the other countries where innocent can be found?

Who did come up with the AGM?
I’d actually like to say it was my idea.
Was it?
And I get … Just leave the money at the door. I remember it was in a hotel in Wimbledon. We have one of those off site days where you have new ideas and we thought, me and a group of like-minded individuals … It works okay, doesn’t it? I’m actually quite excited about doing it in that new building that we talked about. It will be quite interesting to do it in a different place. But think of yourselves as the chosen few – the last people to do it under this roof. I’m welling up here.
I think we should do it in other countries. Shah works in our Paris office. What do you think Shah? Paris?
Yes. This little man is French so that’s why he asked.
Ah, excellent. Well, maybe you can help us organise it in Paris. Brilliant.
I think because we have the relationship with our drinkers, you know, historically, talking to them via the packaging, via the web, via the phone, it just felt like a dumb thing not to do it. I mean why wouldn’t you invite people in and get them to say what they think? Because we spend a lot of time sitting in meetings trying to work out what people think, so why don’t you just get people to come and tell you? I think that was the thinking. Not that scientific, but it works, you know. In all these little sessions and all these different places, we will have nicked loads of ideas from you because that’s how great businesses work. They just seek inspiration from everything around them. If you see one of your ideas being used, give us a ring and get angry or something.

What’s the most frustrating thing doing business in the United Kingdom at the moment and what do you really bang your heads up against the wall and think “Why can’t I change this?”

VAT on smoothies. We genuinely think it is nuts. Most food doesn’t have VAT on it. So if you buy a burger, a pizza, or even a toffee apple, it doesn’t have VAT on it but smoothies do. I just think it’s two portions of fruit. The government say we should eat five a day. It just seems mad that they’re taxing that bit, so that’s the one … specifically, that’s the one thing if we could change we’d love to have different. I think being an entrepreneur in the UK, it is pretty great. The more we speak to people that do business in other countries … It’s a pretty liberal environment here for setting up a business, and the red tape, while people do bitch and moan about it a lot, it is pretty light compared to what it is in most countries.
It’s certainly been more straightforward to set up the business here than it has been to set anything we’ve done elsewhere in Europe. There is definitely frustrations with red tape, and James who leads our finance team, who has to deal with it all, you know, would have a list as long as this of stuff that makes life difficult, but I know it’s much harder when we look at other countries on the continent.
Yes, so it would be a thing about not imposing extra red tape. That would be really frustrating if it gets any worse because it would stifle the businesses because that’s not what you can do. When you’re small you want to be making your business rather than filling in forms and complying with legislation. So I think there is a danger that might happen, but hopefully it doesn’t.