Innocent Drink Essay

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Innocent Drink Innocent Drink is a prepackaged smoothie and juice company based out of London. It was founded by three Cambridge University students that were friends, Adam Balon, Richard Reed, and John Wright. In 1998 the three men spent about 6 months working out the kinks in the smoothie recipes until they found the perfect mixture for their liking. Although they all three had very successful jobs they put their jobs on the line pending the results of a survey they took at a music festival in London. The three of them organized selling their Innocent Smoothie Drinks at the festival asking their customer upon completion of the drinks to put their containers in the bin marked “Yes” or “No”. At that point the customers at the festival decided and sealed the three men’s fate by answering “Yes” to the question “should we quite our jobs and make smoothies for a living?” After quitting their jobs, the three struggled to find investors, but eventually after one last pleading email out to friends and family members they were introduced to Maurice Pinto. Maurice Pinto was a wealthy American businessman who decided to invest £250,000. After receiving the investment from Pinto it took a little over a year from the initial idea to taking the product to the market. In 2003 the founders could see that Innocent Drinks had grown at a compound rate of 63% over the preceding four years gaining 30% of UK’s smoothie market. They felt that they were plateauing, that they had the means to keep money coming in but they wanted to grow. At the same time their investor Maurice Pinto is giving them advice “You guys should think like chef. You may spend most of your time working on the main dish, but you’ve always got something cooking, some kind of side dish, on the back burner” (Sahlman, 2004). I personally feel if a major investor in the company is prompting change then the company

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