Starting Your Own Café - Summer Drinks

Part III - Summer Smoothies and Frappes

I started my sales career a few years ago in a soft drinks company called Britvic, actually is was a long time ago come to think of it, selling the wonders of Pepsi, Tango, 7up and this weird tasting beer type alcohol free product called Barbican.

Back in those days innovation was when Pepsi launched a flavoured cola, Cherry I believe, oh that was after Cherry Coke, and Pepsi Max, although I think Coke lite came first, basically innovation was invariably “me too”.

A number of years later I found myself back in soft drinks selling Smoothies, this was back in the day when two brands fought it out in bottles, Innocent and Pete and Jonnies and the company I worked for The Juice Company which pushed out a frozen fruit and base blend product called smoothiepack, this was later added to by the first Tetra prism smoothie.

Once again innovation, other than pack formats, was fairly flat, all the products tasted of banana first and foremost, as the category grew P&J got snapped up by Pepsi and subsequently closed down in favour of Tropicana and latterly Innocent joined Coke, there’s a pattern forming here!

Today everyone has smoothies, the supermarkets have their own, Innocent and whoever has paid the most that month to get an SKU, the high street also stocks the bottles or Prism packs and every, well almost, coffee shop has either a blendable concentrated product or  a re-incarnation of the old Smoothiepack product I sold all those years ago.

Today there are several Brands of blendable, mine are of course the best, but the innovation comes from the mixology of the blends or adding yoghurt to it or adding it to a frappe, combine this with the ever increasing range of names, Fappucino, Fruilato, Freezacino, McCafe Smoothies, oh no not another “me too”!

So from those humble days I had knocking on doors selling the Smoothie concept we as a nation, nay the world, have at long last adopted the concept of Smoothies, it’s got to be true McDonald’s sell them….