Innocent - Creating brand values

Richard Reed, Innocent Drinks

As we’ve got a little bit bigger as a company, we are getting better at being more and more innocent, and that’s what really excites me.  When we first started out, we were just three guys in a shed trying to get people to return our phone calls.  Now, we’re the market leader in smoothies, we’re the biggest buyer of soft fruits in Europe.  We can literally specify, in terms of quality and in terms of ethics in the supply chain.  Have got a fantastic team here of Lucy, and Lucy and Nicky who are out procuring ingredients, and we are absolutely driving the market towards quality, naturalness, ethics - all the things that Innocent’s about.  So what I actually see is, as long as you keep your vision central, as long as you’ve got your business system focused on that, you can get better at these things as you get bigger, and that’s the thing that really drives me, excites me.  We’re just… I think we’re at 10% of what we can be in terms of how ethical, how much integrity, how proud we can be of this company, and it’s the single biggest driving motivation for us.  We want to absolutely prove that a business can be financially successful and have an eye to the bigger picture, and leave things a little bit better than it found it.

Will Bowler - Head of Sales

The main reason, in my mind, that it’s done so well, is that the three founders have had a vision of what it should be and they’ve stuck to that.  So at no point have they sort of sacrificed quality for price.  I mean, a lot of places would say, well, actually, let’s use something cheap, let’s use concentrates here.  Now that we’re in the market, let’s, you know, we can squeeze extra money out of this.  But I think they’ve, they’ve sort of, they’ve been able to keep that vision and keep it going, so what they set out to do has remained the same and that is to produce very nice, high-quality drinks.

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