SMOOTH OPERATORS

A simple recipe led to success for the founders of Innocent Drinks - lots of fruit.

INNOCENT WANT smoothie drinkers to be part of its family. Their labels are chatty and chirpy with no boring business speak. And although all three founders know that using bananas to make the planet a better place "sounds a bit Miss World", they say it pleases their mums.

The Innocent Drinks story could have been a very different one - one of the founders, Jon Wright, had wanted them to sell electric bath gizmos. You could unwind in the perfect bath that auto-fills to the height and temperature your body wants. However, mixing water with electricity isn't easy, so instead it was time to source some goji berries.

Late night conversations with career-disillusioned college friends don't often result in companies with revenues of €150 million and 270 people on its payroll, but the founders - Wright, Richard Reed and Adam Balon - have pulled off more strange things with strange fruits in their 10-year history as smoothie purveyors than most do in their entrepreneurial dreams.

Their recipe for success? Take one part ingenuity, two parts idealism and a solid helping of cheek. Add lots of fruit - pomegranates, pineapples, passion fruits - but no concentrates and no preservatives. "No GM stuff, no funny business," the labels say.

But Innocent is a funny business. Any company that takes on Pepsi and wins, changes its packaging labels 130 times every quarter and uses a "cow van" with a mooing horn to promote yoghurt "thickies" is going to stand out. However, back in the dying, dotcom-obsessed days of the 20th century, failing to blend in wasn't exactly an advantage for the three friends from Cambridge University with the grand plan to make money from "nothing but nothing but fruit".

According to Innocent's folklore, in 1998 Wright, an engineering consultant; Reed, an advertising account manager; and Balon, a marketing man for Virgin Cola, were suffering from a vague "is this it?" feeling of mild dissatisfaction.

"It was getting fairly late into the night and we were saying wouldn't it be fun to start our own business," says Wright (35), who is what other companies would call the head of operations ("chief squeezer" is on his business card). Smoothies were the second or third idea suggested.

"Our diets at the time weren't great. We were working hard and it was all about picking up a pizza, kebab or burger," Wright explains. Smoothies, then still uncommon on this side of the Atlantic, were their one token nod to their health. They all had juicers, so it was just a matter of commercialising one of their good habits.

Another of Reed and Balon's habits was organising a small music festival at Parsons Green in west London. September 1998 was to be the third Jazz on the Green, but this time there was more than music on the bill. The friends spent £500 (€627) on fruit and, with the aid of a "crazy carrot farmer" who had a fruit press and a bottling line, they made enough smoothies to set up a side stage stall.

They put up a sign saying "do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?" next to a bin saying "yes" and a bin saying "no". Customers were encouraged to throw their empty bottles in one of the bins. "At the end of the weekend, the 'yes' bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned," according to the website.

Wright, who was in Dublin earlier this month to speak about sustainability at a business conference, recalls the lack of interest by venture capitalists in the early days. They were too busy throwing cash at Web 1.0 companies. "Everything was about the technology you had. We were selling fruit juice and trying to compete with Pepsi and Coke," says Wright. Rejection was frequent.

A last-ditch e-mail to all of their friends asking them if they knew anyone rich led them to Maurice Pinto, a wealthy American who lent them £250,000 (€313,608) of his own money. Pinto wasn't expecting much and was surprised that they never came back and asked him for more money. Unlike the "second round funding" technology boys, the Innocent men had no need.

"We told our suppliers we needed them to pay us now and we told our farmers we would pay them in 60 days. We were getting cash in faster than it was going out," says Wright. But he does recall how flighty they may have seemed to Pinto. "We were off sourcing mangoes in India and sent a postcard to Maurice. He thought we had run off to Goa with his money and that was the last he'd see of us."

Creativity helped Innocent grow faster than any other food and drink company in the UK. The much-copied, deceptively frothy tone of its labels slipped in the marketing message - we're purer than pure, unlike our untrustworthy competitors - with wonderful ease.

Wright says their decision to invite drinkers to "pop round to Fruit Towers" (its offices in London's Shepherd's Bush) or call the Innocent banana phone (its consumer information line) for a chat came about because they had "all this space to fill" on the packaging.

Innocent now has a majority share of the UK smoothie market, where its competitors are the Pepsi-owned PJs brand and own-label fruit drinks. In the Republic, where it employs 11 people at Dublin's Fruit Towers in Mountjoy Square, it has an 82 per cent share of its category, with sales doubling in the last 12 months.

More than 100,000 Innocent drinks are sold each week in Irish supermarkets, convenience outlets, delis and coffee bars, generating consumer sales of around €14 million last year. For the moment, the US market is "big and scary". The ultimate step for Innocent, according to Wright, is to spread into other food and drink categories - as long as they're healthy, natural and guilt-free, or course.

"There are no short cuts from the farm to the fridge," he says. "We have our own growing standards, and we had to get our suppliers to sign up to the critical elements of that. We have a team of three agronomists and around a dozen fruit buyers and blenders. That's a big investment for us as a small company, but one of our sayings is that we want to 'get closer to the fruit'."

Each year, Innocent donates 10 per cent of its profits to the Innocent Foundation, which funds NGOs in the countries where it sources its fruits. "We decided that when we are sitting in our rocking chairs we want to be able to look back and be proud. The holy grail for us is that one day we would buy fruit from a community that we've supported," says Wright, who is as comfortable behind the wheel of Innocent's part bio-diesel fuelled hybrid vans as he is dressing as an elf for the Innocent Christmas party.

One criticism of the smoothie phenomenon is that while it promotes easy-access fruit consumption, the need for electricity and packaging in its production makes it a lot more carbon-intensive than just eating the whole fruit. "We use the best possible packaging," Wright says. "It took us five years to get to the point where are bottles are made from 100 per cent recycled material . . . All of our electricity is now from renewable sources, which has pushed up our bills. But we're prepared to pay a little bit more."

So too must Innocent customers. Smoothies are best described as a "premium" product. A one-litre Innocent smoothie carton sells for around €4.99 in supermarkets - around twice the cost of some fruit juices. Smoothies with no additives have a shorter shelf life than juices that do.

On the day that Wright is in Dublin, Innocent is in the news, garnering the kind of publicity that probably makes its challengers weep. The UK Advertising Standards Authority dismissed a complaint from Pepsi that Innocent's claim that its smoothies are "better for you" and contain "more of the good stuff" was misleading. Smoothies are "more nutritionally beneficial" than fruit juices because they are closer to the whole fruit, the ASA has ruled.

"We had to commit a lot of time and effort to the complaints process," says Wright. "We're playing with the big guys here. At the start, some people said to us: 'We're either going to buy you or crush you'. I hoped that was a pun on the fruit, but it wasn't."

The three men don't want to sell, they want to expand. But for the company's loyal fan base, bigger isn't always better. Their announcement last year that they had decided, after much agonising, to trial their smoothies in 70 McDonald's restaurants seemed like a jarring clash of brands to members of the Innocent family who posted angry messages on its website. "It is not for us to judge others. The world is changing, and from what I understand from Greenpeace, McDonald's is changing particularly quickly," says Wright.

Innocent also dismayed parents by adding "some sugar" (the natural beet kind) to its Juicy Water range, breaking its consistent "nothing but fruit" promise. The line has now been re-branded as This Water and spun out into a separate company.

So far, Innocent has deflected the "Innocent has lost its innocence" headlines with skill. It helps that Wright, Reed and Balon appear to be as astute at picking staff as they are at picking fruit, with new candidates obliged to pass the "van test" - "would you be happy to spend an afternoon driving around with this person in the van?" You get the feeling that there aren't many misanthropes in the Innocent offices, just team builders and overachievers.