Starting a Smoothie Company!

Have you noticed a theme in my last few posts? Yep. Smoothies. It got me remembering, many years ago, when I went to the Royal Opera House in London, to pitch a smoothie company to the head of Innocent (the drinks company now owned by Coca Cola).

So I'm going to tell you this story! It all started when I was 14… My school offered a Food Science project, where 4 winning teams would get the chance to work with graphic designers and company experts, to make a brand and then go and pitch it.

To get on to the project we had to form teams, assign a leader ((me) check me out) and then make a basic design of a new product. We were so eager to get on to the project that we went one step further and made a prototype- caramel chocolates with a fruity twist which went terribly… but the effort secured us our place!

Anyway weeks went by and eventually our recipe was created.. strawberries, lime and mango were all that was needed to make fruitShock. Named that because it was very sharp and sour. Not the best flavour, nor the best name, but hey ho! We were young! I wish I still had the design of the bottle, but it's found itself lost over the years.

Before we went to pitch we had a day of market research, selling our smoothie at the summer fair. Our biggest problem wasn't the selling, but the producing.. we got so bored of bulk making we started blending whole limes- peel and all! As you can imagine, our feedback wasn't fantastic..

Regardless, the day of the pitch came, and off to London we headed. Lots of excitable children, all buzzing to make our millions. (We wished!) I remember the opera hall being amazing, but what was even cooler is we went backstage into some private function rooms, not normally accessible to the general public, so we felt pretty V.I.P! We even had a little rehearsal room to hone our speeches.

I was in charge of talking about the smoothie itself, and if I remember correctly our pitch went pretty damn well! (I should've added by now, we were a team of four!) As well as pitching to a man from Innocent, a representative of Covent Garden Soup Company was there too, as some groups had made soups instead of smoothies. We pitched to them both, and got really positive feedback.

However, and this is the sad part, we didn't win any funding, nor did we even win the number one prize of the day. Instead we came second, losing to another smoothie idea, which had ice cream in it. Ours was healthy. Theirs had ice cream. If we redid these pitches today this more health conscious society would've lapped ours up over there's! (I'm not bitter…)

Anyway, that was just a short story of my very brief step into entrepreneurship.. maybe one day I will venture back into business, but until then, thanks for reading, and make sure you're following me!!