Innocent co-founder Richard Reed: ‘The threat from the anti-sugar lobby and climate change keeps me awake at night’
The negative publicity around sugar over the last year has been harmful to the Innocent smoothie brand, according to Innocent co-founder Richard Reed, who described the science of the anti-sugar lobby as “nonsense”.
Innocent co-founder: Richard Reed
Following a keynote speech at the Verint and Kana Engage conference in London, Reed told The Drum that in addition to concerns over attempts to change the public’s perception of sugar, Innocent is now also dealing with the consequences of climate change.
“There’s been some negative press about the amount of sugar in fruit juice,” he said. “The good news is it hasn’t affected sales – I think the British consumer is smart enough to see past the headlines and the science is clear that we need to be eating more fruit, not less.
“We’ve not been in that climate before; we’ve had 15 years of being positive, and we’ve had a year of negative around. We need to get people back to the truth of things, not the misleading headlines that imply there’s as much sugar in a smoothie as a donut.
“The British consumer’s clever and doesn’t get seduced by misleading headlines, but if there’s enough of it it’s going to have some effect.
“The thing I don’t have a clever answer on is climate change,” he went on. “We buy about 40 different types of fruit from across the world because we source it where it grows naturally and we are seeing the consequences of the rains coming earlier or later, and it’s putting a lot of pressure on the growers, so I do worry about the 10-20 years consequence. I’m not a sceptic. The science of climate change is incontestable, it’s happening and we see it biting in terms of playing havoc with the fruit-growing season.”
He said the company had invested resources into creating more environmentally friendly business processes and spent four years developing a plastic bottle with the “lowest environmental footprint” possible. In addition, Innocent donated £50,000 to Friends of the Earth to assist the organisation’s lobbying of government to make carbon-reduction targets legally binding, although he said he gets “nervous” about business lobbying directly.
Reed spent two years as a non-executive director on the board of the department of energy and climate change, where he said he was “told first hand from the country’s leading climate change scientists about the situation.”
“It’s real and it’s happening,” he said. “It’s a myth that it’s a debate. It’s a myth that there’s an alternative perspective.”