Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 63 total)
  • another one bites the dust? (arguable sellout content)
  • xherbivorex
    Free Member

    coca cola buys into innocent smoothies

    so yes, after howies’ timberland takeover (or was it?), now we have innocent smoothies accepting money from a company that in many ways would seem to be the ethical opposite of themselves, with the usual disclaimers from the little guys and an intriguing statement from the big guys…

    We have long admired their brand, their products and their unique approach to business”

    yes, of course you have… if admired means “wanted to acquire”!

    perhaps i am being way too cynical about this but i can’t help thinking things will change (in the same way that green and black’s chocolate, post-cadbury takeover, no longer produces any dairy free chocolate)…

    Ewan
    Free Member

    Ha ha, I’ve always said innocent are self righteous tw4ts.

    falkirk_mark
    Free Member

    Which goes to prove that everyone has their price

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    wellhung
    Free Member

    Yes another supposed right-on company succumbs to the lure of dirty money, what price ethics.

    NZCol
    Full Member

    Any of you ever setup, grown and sold a company ?
    I have – twice.
    Dont; be so fckng righteous if you haven;t as until you;ve been in a position where you are raiding your credit cards and mortgage every month to pay your staff you have no fckn idea.
    Good on them i say – thats how your grow a business.

    bigyinn
    Free Member

    Its nothing about ethics and everything about money!

    NZCol
    Full Member

    Ok so lets talk about ethics then in business.
    So here we were with 143 staff. We had a very strong culture and a very good reputation with a high level of ethics in the way we treated our customers and each other.
    Every month 4 of us would raid our personal revolcing credit mortgages and every credit card we had to the tune of $180K each, thats every month. To plug a hole. You see, a business like that, while highly profitable is also self funding therefore we had to keep it moving along. I can tell you that having a personal 180K hole every 4 weeks is an unpleasant feeling.
    Then a large Telco comes along and says “We wil invest $14M into your organisation if you sell out to us, your culture etc will remain the same blah blah blah”.
    At that point what would you do ?
    If you said you would stick to your guns you have never been there and you are a Grade A 100% liar.
    You’d take the money because you’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours, unpaid, taken huge personal risk financially, socially and in somany other ways to get to where you are. You could downscale it or you could move it to the next level.
    Jesus honestly some of you have no idea and I bet you sit there in your fckn cosy little jobs assuming that the worlds out to get you. Grow up.

    xherbivorex
    Free Member

    wow.

    actually, i’m sat here facing redundancy.
    and no, i have never set up my own business, but how exactly does that mean that i’m not able to feel a bit saddened that a company that always claimed to have such strong ethics has sold a stake to a company who have consistently proved themselves to be amongst the least ethical companies on the entire planet?
    i think it’s you that needs to grow up and get a little bit of perspective mate.
    innocent are hardly struggling. turnover of £100m? yes, they want to grow and expand into europe but i just wonder if they could have done so without resorting to taking money from a company that (at one point) were trying to buy an entire country’s water supply whilst the people that lived there were dying of thirst?

    CaptainFlashheart
    Free Member

    Company makes money. Shocking.

    NZCol
    Full Member

    I have plenty of perspective having been made redundant, setup and sold companies and running one now.
    How would you suggest they expand then having never been there ?
    Borrowed money ?
    Venture capital ?
    Sold more ?
    Given their business and supply chains its reasonable that a coca-cola or similar would want to acquire them and from their perspective they would also find having that global leverage useful.
    So my issue us with you suggesting that ethics and prudent business are the same thing. Ethics don’t equate to running a proper business. Interests me that Howies are bagged in the same way. I presume you all go to work for the love of it and would happily give up your wages every month ?
    As you are faced with redundancy what would you miss most about your job ? The fact that you make a contribution to society every day ….. or your pay ?

    I apologise for my tone, its unacceptable. Sorry.

    grumm
    Free Member

    You’d take the money because you’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours, unpaid, taken huge personal risk financially, socially and in somany other ways to get to where you are. You could downscale it or you could move it to the next level.

    You seem to be confusing your own business with that of innocent. Sounds like they are probably doing a bit better.

    NZCol
    Full Member

    turnover of $100m , profit of ?

    brant
    Free Member

    turnover of $100m , profit of ?

    NZCol – don’t bamboozle the armchair businessmen 😉

    HoratioHufnagel
    Free Member

    Perhaps Coca Cola have realised they’ll have to be more like Innocent to survive rather than the other way round?

    NZCol
    Full Member

    *laughs* Yeah sorry and I do apologise to xherbivorex for my original comments.
    You are entitled to your opinions etc
    But don’t ever confuse turnover with profit – please !

    xherbivorex
    Free Member

    funnily enough, i’m not one of the howies haters. i’ve bought a hell of a lot of their stuff and will no doubt buy more. which is why i said “or was it?” in my initial post…
    i’m well aware that in the vast majority of cases, ethics and business growth tend to be somewhat incompatible. and no, i don’t have any solutions or suggestions for an alternative way of growing. but i stand by my point, which is that i still think it’s a shame they had to take money from who they did, purely based on the apparent juxtaposition of both companies’ ethics…
    it’s reasonable to expect coca cola to attempt to acquire them because that’s what they do, same as pretty much any area of business… the bigger boys want to get the smaller (but possibly high achieving/niche market/forward thinking) ones…

    and at the moment, if i lose my job to be honest i’ll miss both elements you suggested. it’s a small company struggling to hold its own in a dying market, against bigger ones with more capability to ride storms such as the current one we’re in. and i love working here partly because of that.
    prior to this, i worked for one of the biggest companies on the planet (IBM) and it was horrendous.

    rightplacerighttime
    Free Member

    What was so great about Innocent anyway? Apart from their marketing that is?

    Also I don’t subscribe to the theory that businesses have to grow continually to be “successful” There are plenty of nice little private businesses, making a nice living for their owners, who seem to live happy lives without worrying about global domination.

    xherbivorex
    Free Member

    oh yeah, and the company i work for has a turnover of £30m, employs 350 staff but has made a loss or broke even for the past year and a quarter… so i do know there’s a difference.
    but thanks brant.

    aP
    Free Member

    Isn’t everything manufactured in Holland anyway? – they certainly don’t have the production facilities for a £100m tunrover company in 2 lock ups off the Goldhawk Road behind Majestic.

    KINGTUT
    Free Member

    Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity etc…

    Pook
    Full Member

    I’ve lost my timberland jacket. Anyone seen it?

    Suckle at the teat

    konabunny
    Free Member

    “What was so great about Innocent anyway? Apart from their marketing that is?”

    Good ingredients, decent products – and donating 10% of their profits to charity: http://www.innocentfoundation.org/

    “Also I don’t subscribe to the theory that businesses have to grow continually to be “successful” There are plenty of nice little private businesses, making a nice living for their owners, who seem to live happy lives without worrying about global domination.”

    You’re obviously not a director of a company then – you’d be obliged to seek the greatest return for shareholders i.e. growth wherever possible. That’s what companies are for! Co-ops, non-profits or self-employment have different aims.

    aP
    Free Member

    Actually as a director of a company you’re not obliged to seek the greatest return for shareholders, it all depends on your aims for being in business.

    trailmonkey
    Full Member

    What’s so bad about Coca Cola ?

    davidtaylforth
    Free Member

    What a bunch of ****, selling out to one of the worst companies on the planet

    coffeeking
    Free Member

    lol it’s like people here assumed innocent were a bunch of hippy co-op owners. From the start they have been business people, making a profit on a product that was good, expensive and made with just fruit. Why do people assume that because their product uses just fruit that they are some sort of moral guardians and now they’ve lost their reputation? They were just a business all along, they made good products. with investment from coca cola they will probably continue so, producing the same products teh same way. You can hardly complain that someone sells part of their good business when offered – I mean its not like they were ever suggesting “big business” was bad etc. Get a grip! Next time they take out a loan from the RBS will you be up in arms because their reputation is now shot thanks to being associated with a crap bank?

    chakaping
    Free Member

    NZcol – Tell us more about why your business is so cash-hungry on a month-by-month basis but highly profitable at the same time. I’m genuinely interested.

    On the original point – it amazes me how people seem to get so suckered by branding and end up thinking companies are “cool” – Orange and Honda are two examples that spring to mind.

    Companies are just machines for making money, everything else is secondary. “Ethics” are more a marketing tool than anything else.

    ourmaninthenorth
    Full Member

    Good on them i say – thats how your grow a business.

    Not always. But it has become the prevalent model, especially through ever larger leveraged buy-outs where creating increased value for a three year exit was king.

    I understand wholeheartedly why, when someone says “here, have this cash – consider it the rightful payment for the flogging you have given yourself establishing your business”, people say “Umm. OK.”

    The only reason why the buyer will promise cultural maintenance is simply brand maintenance – why damage your investment. However, over time there is usually cultural alignment, often ask a more hard edged approach is taken to the product line: viz Green & Blacks/Cadbury, Ben & Jerry’s/Unilever.

    Actually as a director of a company you’re not obliged to seek the greatest return for shareholders, it all depends on your aims for being in business.

    Quite. A director’s duties are significantly wider than that. And have been further widened by the Companies Act 2006, which has codified certain duties (including in relation to stakeholders).

    rightplacerighttime
    Free Member

    I think konabunny, that you kind of prove my point about their marketing, which is very good.

    But, IMHO their stuff is overpriced and overpackaged and they have clearly been playing the business game of chasing growth whatever eg their dalliance with McDonalds.

    Also I was talking about private businesses – that is, ones that aren’t listed on the stock market, that can do what the hell they like regarding growth/chasing profits.

    stilltortoise
    Free Member

    I’d sell anything for the right price, except my bike kids

    rightplacerighttime
    Free Member

    Oh, and BTW, until this announcement Innocent was a private company owned mainly by the founders with absolutely no obligation to

    seek the greatest return for shareholders i.e. growth wherever possible

    djglover
    Free Member

    chakaping surely as a new start up you are generally going to be chasing your tail, start of in debt for the setup costs, recieve orders, get payment 6 weeks down the line by which time you are another months wages in debt, recieve payment – still on debt, ie potentially turning a profit but going into huge amounts of secured debt each month to pay wages.

    simonfbarnes
    Free Member

    Which goes to prove that everyone has their price

    I’m anyone’s for a chocolate muffin!

    BigButSlimmerBloke
    Free Member

    Every month 4 of us would raid our personal revolcing credit mortgages and every credit card we had to the tune of $180K each, thats every month. To plug a hole. You see, a business like that, while highly profitable is also self funding therefore we had to keep it moving along. I can tell you that having a personal 180K hole every 4 weeks is an unpleasant feeling.

    So your highly profitable business is actually losing $180k/month?
    When I had a business, i always though profit was the way to go.

    joe1983
    Free Member

    I met one of the owners if Innocent a few years ago. He came to my college at Uni (Girton) before the launch to try the products out on us as he used to go there too. Nice bloke, free bar all night on Innocents tab so that was nice. He ended up in bed with a mate of mine (girl) so everyone was happy. I think the coke story is pretty old, i thought the had bought part of innocent a year or two ago?

    RudeBoy
    Free Member

    Blimey.

    Thing is, Innocent sold their products on the basis they were good for the planet, and society and all that. Load of marketing bullshit anyway, as we all know. But selling to Coca-Cola is a proper sell-out, in ethical terms. Pure hypocrites.

    Now if they’d said,from the beginning, ‘look, it’s quite nice, but really and truly, we just want your money and don’t really give a stuff about the environment, we just bang on about ethics ‘cos it sells products’, then fair enough.

    I might launch my own range of ‘Straight Up Guv’ products; made in dodgy factories in countries with dubious Human Rights records, with shoddy materials, and a proper Bigfoot of a Carbon Footprint to get it to the stores/your home, but what do you really care; you’re getting a cheap product that suits you and your pocket…

    Hmm. Might have to work on the marketing blurb. Brant, can you help out here?

    RudeBoy
    Free Member

    I’m anyone’s for a chocolate muffin!

    You shameless tart!

    hora
    Free Member

    Pret used to be quite nice- sometimes too much fillings in their sandwiches then some years ago Mcdonalds bought into them and slowly changes became apperent…price rises, more bread than fillings etc…One morning it sounded like a Mcdonalds so I never went back.

    sofatester
    Free Member

    Marketing = selling shit to idiots

    Well, something like that anyway.

    Trimix
    Free Member

    I would sell if it was me. I want money to ride my bike, pay my bills and enjoy life without needing a job. Life is far too short for lofty ideas to do otherwise.

    Good marketing made customers all feel good about buying, thats marketing, your a bit naive if you take it all too seriously. You spend your money to make yourself feel good. They take your money to spend on stuff that makes them feel good. Its called business.

    If your still upset, well there is now an opening in the market for a feel good drinks company.

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 63 total)

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