Guka Tavberidze on…
Rapidly establishing the brand
I can honestly say I love what I’m doing. Most of all we do things the right way, and that’s been important to me from the beginning. We had no FMCG experience whatsoever. How do you take what’s in my mother’s kitchen and get it in the shops? I had literally no idea.
But one thing that was really important was it had to be the same quality, as nutritious and delicious as the way my mother was making it. There was nothing similar on the market – I wanted something that was raw and delicious. I went from one adviser to another and they advised me to do it the pasteurised way, but I decided to ignore that and do it on my own, and that’s when I found a factory in the Netherlands which does HPP (high-pressure processing – see box).
Health claims
Savse is two of 5 A DAY. The Department of Health didn’t want any drink claiming three of 5 A DAY. There are so many claims we could make because there are good nutritious ingredients in there, but you have to spend millions on research and the size of the company we are, we are not able to do that. So we can’t claim antioxidants etc, which other brands have.
Conveying the message
We do a lot of sampling. We have a very proactive in-house marketing team who are very big on social media, and we try to do as much sampling as possible in key stockists.
Listings
We launched in January 2013 in Selfridges. Now we are in 50 Waitrose stores, 265 Boots, 423 Asdas, plus Selfridges, Harrods, Harvey Nicholls, Whole Foods and Ocado. These are national listings. What was key was we wanted to create a nutritious and healthy product that was accessible to all.
Future plans
We are definitely looking at further expansion. We’ve got to the stage where we are looking at production in the UK. That’s the next step forward. The next 12 months is all about key listings. We’ve got major plans to get as many key listings as possible and have a major, major marketing campaign starting January 2016.
Sourcing
The ingredients are all sourced by the factory, from the UK, Europe and elsewhere.
As you can appreciate at the stage where we are as a company, I didn’t have the manpower to start sourcing the ingredients. That’s another next step for us.
But generally I know that where the ingredients are sourced from is important to consumers, but what’s more important is the quality of the ingredients, and I can 100 per cent say that in terms of what goes into our drink, it is the best that you can get. And that has been the focus.
The competition
Even now I believe a lot of consumers don’t buy into Innocent because of what happened in the past [selling out to Coca-Cola] and they are looking to drinks like us, who are completely authentic and 100 per cent real.
There’s nothing fake about what we do. The vision is not to see Naked or Innocent on any of the shelves! It’s important for brands like us to develop because unless you’ve got innovation coming through then it’s just the big boys dominating and nothing new coming in. You need that breath of fresh air.
What is HPP?
High-pressure processing (HPP) essentially preserves the raw ingredients. It works by packaging the fresh juices in plastic containers in a high-pressure chamber filled with water, and subjecting them to pressures of up to 87,000psi. It removes the need for pasteurisation, but still kills bacteria.
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