From Near-Death to Ginger Empire | The Root Co. Founder’s Wild Journey

0:00I went to train and become a ski instructor in Japan and then I was actually run over by a car and ended up in a life-threatening condition. I was in a coma. My gosh! I could have very easily died and in fact the doctors did tell my family that I would likely die. So the fact that I'm still here and living, I feel like if I have the opportunity to try to do something exceptional then I should take it. So the way to scale this for factory production is not to go to a lab. I'm going to buy a big juicer and then find a canning company that is willing to let me take that juicer into their factory and literally take whole bits of ginger, put it in this juicer, squeeze all the juice out and let that be, just like it is in my kitchen, the kind of focal point of our recipe.

0:48I feel like naivety, to some extent, has been a bit of a superpower of ours. because we have that should be the like tagline of my podcast i swear every single episode and people listening will be like oh she's on about that naivety again is everyone says the same things there must be something in it like yeah you're right naivety because you don't know what you're up against i go to this really nice food hall in suffolk which is kind of in an area where we have some other retailers and stockists i leave samples have a really good chat with them and i'm emailing to follow up as you do and honestly we just got brutally shut down and rejected.

1:21I feel like rejection has similarities across relationships, friendships, whatever it might be, rejection from anything, it hurts. But when you've been rejected many, many times in your professional life, it hurts a lot less. I had an operation to put metal in my leg and immediately after the operation, I had this complication with my lungs, which meant I almost died. So that was when I was put in a coma, I was transferred to a different hospital. whoa yeah okay question yeah go for it not quite related to the business but do you beep going through a metal detector at the airport before we get into today's episode i want to give a shout out to a special sponsor sam lawrence recruitment we all know that finding the right people or the right job can feel really overwhelming and that's exactly where sam comes in he really just gets it it's not just about ticking boxes it's about connecting the right people with the right opportunities.

2:14He takes the time to understand you and exactly what you're looking for, whether you're building a team or taking that next career leap. So definitely get in touch. Trust me, you'll be glad you did. At Getting to Grow, I believe that growth starts with connection. And that's where our sponsor, We Are All Marketing, comes in. I'm super excited to be partnering with Vic and the team over at We Are All Marketing. They're not just a marketing agency, they're storytellers, strategists, and your biggest advocates. Whether you're building a brand, launching a product or strengthening your digital presence, We Are All Marketing helps you turn ideas into impact.

2:48With a personalized results-driven approach, they ensure your vision reaches the right audience in the right way. Ready to grow your business? Visit weareallmarketing.com and see how they can help you thrive. Getting to Grow is also brought to you by the Coconut Collab. And full disclosure, as I'm sure most of you are aware, I work there. So I know how much love goes into everything that we make. We're all about creating delicious, dairy-free, plant-based treats that do not compromise on taste. From our creamy yogurts to our indulgent desserts, everything's made with coconuts and a whole lot of care.

3:19If you're looking for something naturally good but seriously tasty, and my favourite is just our natural coconut yoghurt, I have it most mornings with granola and lots of honey. Trust me, you're going to absolutely love it. Welcome back to another episode of Getting to Grow. In this week's episode, I have the amazing will who is the founder of the root co which i'm super excited to talk about because firstly i'm a ginger so this has my heart from like it's so relevant like i'm literally a fiery girl target market target market i love everything ginger i'm super fiery myself i just love ginger and all things ginger and spice i love it when it like hits through your mouth like i love that kind of really really hot ginger um flavor so will would you like to introduce yourself and tell me a bit about who you are and what you were doing before sure so I'm Will I'm the founder of a ginger beer startup called The Root Co before I started working on the business I was actually a management consultant okay exciting whoa so that was my first job straight out of university I did it for three years and then had the amazing privilege to be able to start a business in my twenties and went along with this uh this ginger beer idea yeah cool so management consultant based in london yeah based here in london i grew up in london as well i'm assuming the same is true for you just outside windsor ascot way right got you not far um but yeah and university yes i went i went to uni i went to bristol and i studied economics and management and if there's anything more exciting than being a management consultant studying economics at university Right.

4:59And then how did how did this come about then? Tell us about how you had the kind of like light bulb moment. You have to tell me if I'm waffling because it's it's sort of a long story in some ways. OK, because I was I feel like I was on a very steady track, studied economics, got this job as a management consultant. And then basically I I went and I went to train and become a ski instructor in Japan. and then I was actually run over by by a car um just after I qualified as a ski instructor and ended up in a life-threatening condition I was in a in a coma my gosh yeah so the the I mean yeah whoa it was it was totally wild um I was celebrating having qualified as an instructor coming back from a night out and I slipped over in the road in icy Japan and got hit by a car and I actually the car didn't see you because you were on the floor yeah it was also very blizzardy so there were several factors working against me I was jogging home because my jacket had been taken from the bar we were at uh presumably not by a very honorable Japanese person but one of the other people in the resort yeah um and so I jogged home I was so close to my accommodation like maybe 20 meters away wow slipped over in the road uh in a blizzard the car didn't see me in in the road to be honest even if they had seen me because of the snow and ice the stopping distance wouldn't wouldn't have saved me so basically I broke my leg which considering the circumstances pretty good outcome like at least it was just your leg just the leg just the leg which I consider yeah very fortunate and then it quickly became unfortunate because I had a an operation to put metal in my leg and immediately after the operation I had this complication with my lungs which meant I almost died so that was when I was put in a coma I was transferred to a different hospital um yeah go on i've just got so many questions right now so hang on how did the metal affect your lung so good that is a good question it probably wasn't the metal itself but what happens when you uh break a bone is your um bloodstream and your bone marrow bits of fat in your bone marrow can sometimes sort of mix a bit and i the doctors think i had something called fat embolus which is like a bit of fat getting in your bloodstream and they think they thought think that it settled somewhere around my lungs and then caused this autoimmune response called acute respiratory distress which is the same condition that people that died from covid suffered from when they died so basically my lungs were flooding as an as an immune response there's a separate theory which is kind of funnier which is that immediately after the operation I was so hungry because you can't eat anything before surgeries and my dad who'd very kindly and supportively flown out to Japan when I had the accident he actually brought me some delicious gyoza and there is a theory that I may have eaten the gyoza too fast inhaled some gyoza and because of my body's generally run down state it might have actually been like an an aspirational pneumonia or some other condition.

8:10Flipping hell. But yeah, no one knows. No one knows. Chest doctors, specialists, no one could figure it out. But anyway. Right. Well, I was expecting, I was working in finance, got bored and then thought I like ginger and this. So I'm assuming there's now a life's too short. Yeah, there's like a life's too short angle. There were lots of things that factor into my decision to eventually start the business. But I think that gave me a perspective on taking your chances because I very much feel like I'm I'm here with a second chance um I could have very easily died and in fact the doctors did tell my family that I would likely die so the fact that I'm still here and living I feel like I if I have the opportunity to try to do something exceptional then I should um I should take it um so that's that's one element of it and then four or five months after this we're back in 2017 when the accident happened uh Christmas 2017 and then in 2018 I actually started my my first job the management consulting job in March and then a couple of months after that I actually had a general anaesthetic operation to take out some of the metal that was put into my leg and waking up from that general anaesthetic is when I thought of the ginger beer idea so it sort of related to the Japan accident and on a couple of different strands one being okay sure maybe it predisposed me more to doing something a bit exciting with my career but the other angle is that I literally thought of the idea waking up from a related general anaesthetic but at the time I was drinking ginger shots and ginger beers and finding ginger shots super fiery and healthy and as you described it nice and spicy as well they felt good for you and ginger beers I was drinking in the pub instead of alcohol I found and always a bit too sweet and much more of a soft drink.

9:58So that was when it occurred to me that there could be a kind of a gap there between the two things that could be filled, a hybrid between the two. And then the actual idea, that idea, yeah, I was waking up from an operation. Whoa. Okay. Question. Yeah, go for it. Not quite related to the business, but do you beep going through a metal detector at the airport? good question uh some detectors it's not very satisfying answer some detectors do beep i feel like the more modern ones now don't do they then get to your knee and they're like why is your knee beeping so much well it's so it's the metal i still do have a big metal rod down the length of my right shin here um but it's made out of titanium and i feel like titanium sometimes doesn't make metal detectors beep because i haven't been beeped in a while um i was beeped back in 2017 2018 but i feel like the the metal detection slash general detection technology at airports has come on away with the whole you know stand there and get your whole body yeah um situation so yeah no no no beeping uh for a while okay good to know you're a bit less okay i just needed to clarify that you know before we moved on absolutely so you were waking up from general anesthetic yeah drugs i like i like to make i like to make that clear it was a drugs induced business idea phenomenal yeah phenomenal um and what then came next you sort of woke up and thought right i i need to do something different i've had this idea how did you what yeah talk me through the next day well i would say as a as a person i'm actually quite risk averse and i'm sort of logistics focused and a bit of a planner so i don't think it was really even with God, I'm a total opposite to you.

11:49With mine. Like, I don't think I've ever genuinely thought out much before I did it. Well, I think that's very rare. I actually think that's a very nice way to be. It is, but I definitely, definitely have to, like, learn the hard way a lot. Because I just, sometimes I'm like a child, God-metrever energy, and then, like, puppy, and then I'm like, ah, that would have been really useful if I'd, like, thought of that. Like, definitely a consequence. So I'm always like, yeah, let's do it, let's do it. And then I'm like, oh, that would have been really helpful if I'd known that. Yeah, I feel like I've always been relatively pragmatic in the way that I think and realistic as well.

12:28So after I'd had that operation and had the idea, I sat on it for about two and a half years doing nothing. Well, not doing nothing. I was working my first job and I was like, there is no way that I want to leave my first job after four months just because I've had this business idea. I have I also valued the job highly I was really delighted to get it as a as an undergrad and felt like I should work there for some time for my CV you know boring life stuff where you're like I probably shouldn't leave the job after six months and start a business but fast forward then the two and a half years and we were in the midst of 2020 COVID era and actually started making some gingerbread in my kitchen but all the all the while we as a consultant I had done quite a lot of work in fmcg uh trends generally what um where products are going whether that's away from alcohol towards health okay and it felt and it felt like my idea still made sense and actually increasing sense given the way that the market was moving at a macro level so when we discussed these things i wasn't like shit like my idea is now valueless i was actually like you know what this plays into my ginger beer idea quite a bit so i was thinking about it but very much on the back burner and then as I said COVID started making some batches and then I was promoted at work and then decided to quit I wasn't enjoying the job um I should I should say and I'm incredibly lucky and very privileged in my personal life so I was able to take the decision to leave my job it's not that you know I've had some people say that it's a brave thing to do and I think there have been elements of bravery in starting this business for sure but I think that that decision as I said before I'm a planner and I'm pragmatic if if I hadn't been able to if I hadn't had maybe a safety net or a couple of different safety nets I probably wouldn't have done it I'm not as brave as sometimes people credit me with okay I see um but still I mean like you still had the like I don't know I think I disagree yes you had the blanket fair but I do think like I'd say like a few blankets okay fine you had several blankets imagine like ultimate cozy okay fine yeah okay then you're not a true one yeah obviously you are yeah you still did a lot right yeah i do i also think that there's quite a lot of uh bravery involved even from a social perspective you you know the risk of failure at any moment um it's uh you know you particularly i went from a job where I was like oh this is a fantastic job I'm earning a really good salary my esteem's really high I'm learning a lot I'm working with super intelligent people to go from that position to like basically day day dot square one of starting your own business it's quite a lot of pressure yeah for sure particularly if you're perceived in a certain way if you're uh if people think of you as relatively switched on or relatively smart I don't know if that's what people think of me by the way okay but I like to think that they might and so there is a certain amount of pressure and that comes with that and then bravery to face into it but I think that I was I wouldn't I wouldn't like to leave here giving you the impression that you know I really risked it all like wear my heart on my sleeve as I said I'm I'm pragmatic with this stuff so I knew that I had the opportunity and then the brave decision was just to take take that opportunity I think yeah because lots of people in my position don't and they end up working in jobs earning lots of money that they don't actually like yeah um particularly factoring in that japan story and how that made me feel i'm i'm proud of the decision i made yeah definitely the one the one other element to it that i should mention is that my dad had been diagnosed with a very serious illness so i knew that by stepping out of my job which was very demanding on my time and stepping into a a new entrepreneurial mode that allowed me total flexibility would give me the chance to spend more time with him yeah and what I've said actually uh because my dad has passed away now which is very sad um but what I've said to a lot of people is that regardless of what happens with the ginger beer business from now and I really hope that it's a marvelous success obviously but regardless of what happens I will always be proud of a decision I made to step out of that job because during my dad's final uh final couple of years I managed to spend as much time with him as I wanted to and that's like so important right like at the end of the day that's exactly what you want to be doing and where you want to be like well actually I think yeah regardless of your several blankets like I think you know you were grieving at the time of the business entrepreneur like that's really tough to go put on like I'm not upset today hat you know and I've got to do all this stuff and I've got to tick things off like yeah it's a lot emotionally so don't like get yourself some slack you did work bloody hard to still create something that is insane by the way um thank you um so this is will here i can see yes i'm on the packaging yeah and i like the ginger beard which i can see here so you're one of us yeah um so why yeah so i want to know firstly i love the packaging and the branding did you do it yourself um and did you have oh and you'll be certified like b corp i didn't know that that's a fat task yeah okay so be caught fantastic how did how did you go about like brainstorming the idea in the sense that you knew you wanted to do something ginger beer obviously you've been drinking at the pub how did you go about like learning to like manufacture and making it home in covid like how did it go from the kitchen to like okay i need a production kitchen or whatever it was i don't know yeah um that is a that is a very good question so i've made a lot of batches in my kitchen and then would cycle them out we were doing social distancing at this point in 2020 and I'd cycle them out to my friends homes and get feedback on on them and actually have these whatsapp groups that I'd set up for my delivery routes like I would go and deliver to all of my friends in let's where we're sitting now like Clapham yeah example or all of my friends in North London or all of my friends in West London I would hit them all in one go and I would set up whatsapps and share my live location that you can do on whatsapp so they could like track me like a courier which is really good fun and And what that meant was, first of all, it was kind of fun and engaging.

18:41And I'd only just got Instagram. I'd never been on Instagram before. So that was kind of a new experience for me of taking photos and videos. But what it meant was I could get feedback from my friends individually. But then there was an interesting decision that I had to make regarding how to sweeten the drink. So there was a decision of whether to use maple syrup at the time or use a sweetener. and because I had these whatsapps set up I really really quickly was able to just canvas opinion on how I should sweeten the drink and that was massively helpful so was it a bit too tart like it was a bit too it wasn't actually a taste thing it was more would people prefer a drink that was sweetened with something natural that they understood or something like I don't know at the time we were looking at sucralose erythritol yeah we looked at monk fruit extract when I say I mean me by the way yeah it's the raw weed um but that was really helpful doing that bit of recipe development in the kitchen I was literally making up batches of gingerbread I'd looked into how to make a drink shelf stable so I was heating heating liquid through before I was bottling it up I was testing the ph with a little amazon bought ph meter yeah okay um and so I was I was getting into the whole formulation and then I did the final bit of recipe development at the market stall that we still do up in Islington in Canada Passage which is right by our headquarters and so once I'd settled on a kitchen recipe and this was a recipe I'd found on BBC originally and then decided how I wanted to tinker it a little yeah because the idea was the original idea as I mentioned was like a ginger beer ginger shot hybrid so I definitely wanted to put more ginger juice in my ginger beer recipe than typical I want it to have a really nice fieriness and so that was kind of the focus and then everything else was secondary to that but as I started thinking through the idea so I also wanted to have very few ingredients and I also would like to source those ingredients really carefully particularly the ginger and that has built up all of those kind of waves of thought that were separated by you know weeks of time you don't have to have all of these ideas at once it doesn't have to be the case that you sit down with a piece of paper and are like right I know exactly the product I want to create but with a bit of time and a bit of thought this was actually before I left my job I was able to think through the ingredients I wanted how I wanted to source them and that has become a really important part of the proposition later and particularly when we speak to supermarkets I'm so keen to highlight very few ingredients no processed foods this is the kind of thing that is on the minds of people in the soft drinks industry at the moment um so yeah once once I'd kind of done my recipe development in the kitchen the scaling question is a really fun slash stupid story because brilliant we love a stupid story I was I was dumb and naive enough to believe that I could take my kitchen process which was basically um ginger into like a mini blender like a neutral bullet although I don't think I had a neutral bullet at the time it was like a more budget version and blitzed it up into a pulp with a bit of water, pushed it through a sieve with the back of a spoon to get the kind of ginger juice plus a little bit of water out.

21:57And then I was squeezing lime juice in and adding my sweetener, which was maple syrup. As I said, I canvassed these WhatsApp groups. And then heated it through, added sparkling water on top. And I was like, right, so the way to scale this for factory production is not to go to a lab, not to go to like a flavour developer, which is how most of these businesses start. Yeah, I'm just going to buy a big juicer. I'm going to buy a big juicer and then find a canning company that is willing to let me take that juicer into their factory and literally take whole bits of ginger, put it in this juicer, squeeze all the juice out and let that be just like it is in my kitchen, the kind of focal point of our recipe.

22:42And that's exactly what I did. and there were so many issues and problems that I hadn't foreseen like so with our we did a trial production which I would always recommend when you if you are dumb and naive enough to scale straight from your kitchen to your factory whatever you do just produce like a small amount to start with just to see how being in a factory and that those kind of processes affect it goes for everything doesn't it like if you're getting married you always have your like rehearsal bridal makeup because you don't want oh my god I hate my makeup like you always need to do like that kind of thing like even with me in the podcast i made sure i did like a 10 minute mini episode to be like right is everything working watch it back okay that needs to move so yeah if you go and do like if i did a two and a half hour episode and i'm not in shot oh gosh whereas if i 10 minute okay it's not as bad so yeah mini production thousand percent yeah and it at the time it feels it feels effortful for us it was literally expensive like the you know it's i guess it's all small moqs on cans yeah this was like a tiny tiny production run but it was invaluable because that highlighted a couple of issues one of which was that our cans because they contain fresh juice we'd pasteurized them we'd heated them through at like industry standard temperature which I think is 75 degrees for about 10 minutes and we'd sent them off to the lab for testing and believing that you know that would have killed everything a bit of heat fine and it just hadn't so our cans were microbiologically you could describe as microbiologically active or I kind of preferred the phrase teeming with life which means that they're not shelf stable so you or I couldn't have sold those cans to any shop because within one or two weeks they would be either explode or the flavor would have changed they would have gone off I don't think they would have been potentially dangerous but um but it's still it's just like yeah not not something I expected to face into and then separately we had a lot of our cans that were popping like the bottom was going from concave to convex.

24:45So then they wouldn't stand up on a shelf. Oh, I see what you mean. Hilariously, I wasn't even thinking about shelves at the time. I just want to make some ginger beer and launch it on a website. And I'm sure people are going to love it so much that the sales are just going to come rolling in. And I won't ever have to go out and meet any stores, pound the pavement. It will all be fine. It will all just roll on because the product's going to be so good. And hilariously, and as you might expect from the way this story is going, the the product I made even after that trial production we managed to figure out a method of manufacture basically pasteurizing at a higher temperature and we also reduced the fill level in our cans a little um the method of manufacture that we figured out still yielded a really inconsistent product we had ginger chalk I used to call it it's like um dense ginger starch forms a layer if you've ever had a ginger shot you can sometimes see in those plastic bottles there's like a bit of ginger yeah you just shake and then you shake it yeah the problem for us was that in a can drink people aren't necessarily super inclined to shake it you never shake a can hey you're always told like never do that again it's against people's instincts to shake yeah so that was that was a challenge that i think we still deal with a little bit but more importantly if you think about a big tank of liquid big tank of ginger shot actually let's imagine that yeah you've because of the volume in there you know your whole bottom area if you imagine like a giant yeah it's going to be quite a massive chunk of that tank was sediment as you say and that's problematic for a couple of reasons one is that it's very difficult to mix through and it turns out that sediment behaves has it has very interesting physical properties it behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid like a cornstarch where under pressure it becomes a solid but otherwise it flows like a liquid it's basically horrendous for pipes so we have had interesting yeah like when you get to the end of a peanut butter jar and the bottom of it's like rock hard because you haven't mixed the top with the bottom i i would say it's a bit like that yeah i know exactly what you mean do you know i do but if i haven't quite got to the corners of the bottom by the time i'm at the bottom i'm like this is rock hard but yeah when you mix it yeah you can run around yeah i know what you mean yeah So we had to deal with lots of inconsistencies in our hands, even after, as I say, we'd found these solutions to the big, it felt like the big problems at the time, which was the microbiological activity and also the popping bottoms.

27:20But yeah, so that was how I scaled. Short answer, I bought a big juicer and was naive and dumb enough to think it could work. but i feel like i still feel like even though i made some very silly decisions at that point and really didn't think through in it or maybe take on enough advice about what starting a business like this would be like i feel like naivety to some extent has been a bit of a superpower of ours because we have that should be the like tagline of my podcast i swear every single episode and people listening will be like oh she's on about that naivety again is everyone says the same thing there must be something in it like yeah you're right naivety because you don't know what you're up against you're not almost scared of it you just do it because you don't know the consequence yeah absolutely i mean that plays into loads of stuff that then comes up when it when you're talking about you know selling to supermarkets or trying to get into mass retail and the kind of demands and the cost pressure and the marketing spend And if I'd had my eyes fully open to all of that, yeah, I would have been really thinking twice about starting the business right at the beginning or I would have stopped after three weeks.

28:35So I do think that that naivety became or is still important. Probably to this day there are things that I don't know about in the future. But I think particularly when it comes to manufacturing or the flavour of a drink, the naivety I think was a superpower because what we've done consequently is basically design a different manufacturing process for a soft drink that is totally differentiated from something that's made from extract flavourings at scale. that if we look around at the ginger beer brands out there, we are producing our drinks in a much more unique way that allows us to get more flavour, more of that kind of fieriness through and also keep our recipe really simple.

29:23So I'm quite proud of the fact that we were like, ah, you can probably do this. The naivety to be like, oh yeah, let's just scale straight up from the kitchen and keep this simple recipe. because in the end after much uh much trial and much error we've come to a point where we have a way to make the drinks and i feel like they're they're good i'm happy with them and how so did you set up with d2c first a direct consumer via website yeah so we the first place we sold was back at our market stall which i mentioned before uh and then we had a website and as i said looking back on it my perception at that point was great the difficult thing was making the product i'd made the product i didn't know about the inconsistency of the cans at this point i was like i've made so much ginger beer fantastic people are going to order and they're going to order again i wasn't even thinking about like how many of these cans people would drink a day really i was just like let's make the thing and then i'll sort out how many ginger beers do people have on average a day one there are some people that claim to have three but i feel like they are family friends or people close to me um oh sorry you mean of yours right i was thinking like general population i was like if i'm having a ginger beer it's a one-off at a pub or it's in a i would say that the average person in the uk i think maybe 40 50 percent of them don't have ginger beer in their lives at all yeah i probably agree with you and then the remainder maybe of Of those, let's scale that 50 % up to 100.

30:54So of the proportion that drink ginger beer, I reckon a further 50 % of it, it's a real like occasional thing, as you say at the pub. If you're avoiding alcohol or having it in a mixed drink or a cocktail. Yeah, it's funny because when I have it, I love it. Every time I have it, I'm like, oh, I love it, but you're right. I don't like it because it's full of sugar. So I would maybe choose that just to go really boring if I'm not drinking and have like a lime and soda. Because at least I know that, okay, well, I'm not like literally just drinking syrup. Yeah. or a diet coke which again i know is awful for you but at least it's not the sugar but then obviously it's called the side of it you can go on and on about that but yeah this needs to go well that is an interesting point because we have found pubs pubs as i said that's where i was drinking my ginger beer too originally i was having ginger shots instead of coffee at work and ginger beer instead of a normal pint at the pub and i probably shouldn't say normal pint should i should say alcoholic pint now should be inclusive for that yes fair yeah well yes Yes, yes.

31:51I guess so. An alcoholic pint. An alcoholic pint. And so for me, I would love to get it into a pub. The difficulty we have in that regard are, it's kind of long and boring to explain, but lots of these pubs are part of bigger groups and they are often tied into long-term contracts and usually are getting their ginger beer from someone that also supplies all of their other soft drinks. And that could be a range like Fevertree or Britvik. Yeah, of course. Or any of the mixer brands that also produce a ginger beer skew. Or it could just be a wholesaler that carries, say, Fentamins, which I think is one of the ginger beers I see in the pub most when it's not a Britvik or a Fevertree or Franklin and Sons or whatever ginger beer they have.

32:42Yeah. And so because of the way that industry is characterised and because of the wholesale relationships, the relationships between the distributor and the pubs, it's very difficult to break into. You kind of need to, it's one of those chicken and egg things. I don't know how aware, probably very aware of these dynamics, but where you can't get into a wholesaler until you've sparked demand with the pubs at the end. And you can't spark demand with the pubs at the end until they are stocking your drink via the wholesaler. so you're kind of in a catch-22 where the only real way out of it is for someone very senior at a massive pub group to be like oh my god I tried this gingerbread and I absolutely love it like let's bring it in and inject all of the energy into that process or you're lucky enough to have a family member or a friend of the family or a friend of a friend who can help you get in but otherwise I see that as quite a difficult puzzle to to break so in the end we've sold most of these and um in fact pretty much all of them either d2c or via stores bakeries cafes some supermarkets now um and that's kind of where the product is at the moment that's not to say that i don't want to re-explore the pub route one day because i do really believe in that non-alcoholic the rise of non-alcoholic drinks you must know from low alcohol beer as well but um i do think ginger beer is a nice alcohol alternative for sure definitely absolutely and something that is really delicious to enjoy as well like i am a bit bored of the non-alcs i don't know i've struggled to spend that kind of money as well on a non-alcoholic one i'd rather just go for a lime and soda where i'm paying like what two quid yeah which is still daylight robbery for literally soda water but whatever like it's fine yeah um so yeah i i'm this i can totally see doing well but you're right but you know there are brands out there that have done a really good job of it and like trip yeah you know they're really in the entree now and they didn't have any of that before so they've managed to kind of really infiltrate and get into pubs when you do want a non-alcoholic so um i guess it's starting like just like with retail and stuff isn't it you start in the independence the wholesalers and you go from like the planet to the whole foods to the harvey next to self just oh waitress co-op tesco mori's like yeah it's all like that and i guess it'll be same as you know you go to the independent pub where you know because it's your local from where you're up and go come on take a shot yeah all that is how but that yeah it's organic growth as well too that's right I think once you have a really strong brand perception then you can start to explore those avenues that were closed off to you before um and you're 100 % well one of the things I love most about this um this this drink the product ginger beer in general is that versus most soft drinks that come onto the market that are functional in some way or give you energy or whatever it might be um these are really good for evening drinking you know like you can totally imagine an occasion where you want a ginger instead of a beer whereas you wouldn't necessarily have I don't know an energy drink instead of a beer or I'm trying to think of different examples or like a mushroom based drink instead of a beer this is what got quite a nice overlap for people that are trying to avoid alcohol definitely and we found that at our market store too we've had customers that anecdotally say oh I'm trying to avoid alcohol more at the moment or we've even had some people say that they are um used to struggle with alcoholism and have been trying to find different alternatives and that ginger beer is a good one i think it's because of that nice characteristic burn it gives you like a sensation thing as well as tasting nice i feel like that sensation thing plus the fact that ginger beer literally has the name beer in it i think it lends itself more to that um to that evening consumption which i like even though obviously it isn't on out i bet it works really well with alcohol as a mixer yeah i really like a musco meal i do release i don't have them often in all fairness but when i have them i'm like oh i forgot that this is so good and i don't know the ginger beer that i'm getting in my musco meal generally is probably really sugary and you just accept it because like whatever but this i can imagine would be really young yeah so we the sugariness is something we've really tried to address so we are we are not a diet drink we don't want to use any sweeteners that i mentioned before but we've tried to take our sugar level down we're going down to 4.5 grams per 100 ml in march with our with our production run we've tried to take it down to a level where it feels like i don't know i think maybe the average british consumer's palate is becoming more dry because they are trying to avoid more sugar in their diet i think because people are more health conscious so what's fun about this is if you mix it it does create quite a nice dry drink particularly around this time of year i always recommend it with dark spiced rum rum and ginger beer is a nice combo and you get the the spiced element of the rum and the spice of the ginger which feels quite warming um but Moscow mules are very very popular in summer tequila and ginger beer is nice as well so you can be pretty sure that I've mixed this with basically every alcohol there is at this point okay not wine though not no good point um but uh in terms of in terms of spirits and making a mixed cocktail the one thing that holds us back is that we're not super fizzy so intentionally because I think ginger is very good for your um stomach and there is a real health angle of helping travel sickness and helping nausea there i never want the ginger beer and haven't designed the ginger beer that we make to be nearly as fizzy as a coke which means that when you pour it into a mixed drink you often need to top off with a bit of tonic water or something a bit more fizzy so that you get that moscow mule that you're expecting that has the fizz because i think people i don't know when you're when you're drinking a sparkling let's say let's take prosecco as an example if you're drinking prosecco and it goes flat you're kind of disappointed yeah like if you leave it too long and it goes flat you're like oh this is a shame and I don't think the uh the cocktail that you'd make with our gingerbread would ever be flat but it's definitely going to be less fizzy than people expect so breaking down that expectation barrier is is also challenging definitely and tell me a funny story of a selling so like where did you where in the sense of like you rocked up at a farm shop or a independent and tried to sell and they just looked at you like i'm not sure because i started off my career in field sales yeah and um i had so many occasions where i was just like pushing water uphill and i was just thinking this is such hard work for like no return anyway like what are you going to sell one unit every 14 weeks or something but it doesn't matter i wanted the seller wanted it on the shelf right but did you ever have a really like do you remember is there one that you remember is there one i remember i'm trying to think back to because that is how once i've made all this ginger beer and realised that actually very few people were repeat buying on our website suddenly like right I better get out and sell this stuff so I was doing loads and loads of door-to-door field sales I'm trying to think of if there's one that particularly stands out there are a few that I immediately think of local to me um there's um a really nice set of cafes called the Finks cafes we still stock them actually they're up in north London and they had two sites at the time they now have four i turned up there usually in like bicycle lycra i used to do loads of elements of the business by bike that includes delivery as well as field sales i turned up there in in my like tight cycle lycra maybe like five or six times chasing for feedback on our samples before the owner of things or one of the co-owners a guy called matt was basically like you know what you've been in here so many times that we're just gonna try this on our shelves and see how it goes I think that was the end of 2021 and we've been stocking them since so that's quite that's kind of resilience that's a bit of like the persistent approach but I find the image of me going there in like my tight bottoms and checking and being like hi guys me again quite quite funny to think back on um I'm trying to think if we've had any like really brutal rejections that would perhaps to be more more funny there's a food hall in Suffolk this is actually this is a good example because you you imagine that maybe after like three or four years in a business for us this this story is made from one year ago so let's say I've been running the business for three years I'm like feeling pretty good about the credibility we got just certified as a b corp supplying lots of independent supplying some food halls I go to this really nice food hall in Suffolk which is kind of been an area where we have some other retailers and stockists and I sort of um not quite swaggering in but I'm imagining that it will be like hella easy to sell to these guys because they're very much like a similar retailer that we stock and I leave samples have a really good chat with them and I'm emailing to follow up as you do and honestly we just got brutally shut down and rejected and it's is i guess i must have said something like oh we're supplying this retailer and this store which is very much like yours and just fyi we're also supplying this retailer in london expecting that to really kind of spark some interest and the buyer for this food hall she wrote back yeah the the price point's just all all wrong um didn't think the product was amazing to be honest like no thank you and I was sitting there behind my computer just being like this is not how it's supposed to go you imagine that there'll be a point where in fact people are asking you to stop or asking you if if they can stop your drinks there might be some sort of inflow to this stuff um and the last thing you expect is once you've built up some credibility particularly in a specific area that you will be shut down so hard but it's good keeps us feet on the ground you know and i think that that's a really important important point actually about what you said when it comes to explaining if your product is stocked elsewhere because for some people that is really important and it is important to let them know that and explain actually we've got the credibility of being listed in tesco for example if you're talking to like a starbucks they want us to know that okay if you're listed in tesco you're gonna you're gonna move off the shelf yeah however in a food hall in suffolk where they probably really appreciate you know artisanal local brands that aren't stocked in supermarkets they don't really want to know that you're stocked in others they want to know that they're really special yeah and you're only thinking about them we basically made this for you mr suffolk food hall and you know you are our best we're really looking forward to working with you you know we're going to come in and sample manage literally like over and above that's what those customers really want they want to feel like that you don't have this kind of but they're like a second thought yeah and I struggled with that a lot at the beginning because I'd be like why why would not telling you where we're stopped be a good thing to say like you know jump on the bandwagon guys like we're wanted but not at all like even to this day when I'm talking to like some really big customers you've got to be careful about where I mean they can do their own research you're not technically lying you're just like not saying yeah and I've yeah I took like that is a really interesting point that I really struggled with at the start because I thought this is confusing because what who wants to know what and then you realize you start to work out the types of customers that do want yeah i mean this is just good field sales advice really that you're you're giving me here and i i feel like i should have probably woken up to the fact at that point that actually listing off trying to do this credibility thing and listing off all of our retailers may not always i mean it definitely won't always work in your favor if you go to a nice independent cafe and you're like hey i'm the founder of this drinks brand it's stocks and tesco they might be like good for you mate literally they'll be like but yeah exactly because they're not gonna they can't you can't compete with their pricing and their margin because tesco are ordering pallets and pallets at a time they're gonna be already in one case yeah the economy's a scale etc but yeah what um it's just like navigating people as well isn't it like do you have a funny story have you ever told your own funny story on this podcast no i haven't actually um because there's so many i've i'm i'm laughed out of places not quite like giggled out um no not quite giggled out but i did have so pre-coconut collaborative i used to work at a company called spoon cereals the granola brand yeah who i've actually had annie on the pod that was a bit full circle moment it was quite cool lovely um and i it was a it was a shop in chiswick um up towards shop in chiswick i will not name the name of the shop i don't actually know if it's still there i haven't been to chiswick in such a long time but it was on on the road up to the station it's quite it's full of some really lovely shops up to turnham green station that road yeah and there's a few of those like independent yeah i'm with you i'm doing like a google what is that called google yeah you're doing a person i can literally see around yeah there's there's a few up there up the road a bit there was a cafe that had one of our competitors in the time at the time I again don't know if they're around still haven't seen them but they were the granola of choice in the in the kind of used on the menu but also you could buy the pack of granola and that for me was ideal because that was a double volume whammy you can use it brilliant you use a pack there you use a pack there that's a nice case to you out CLF or suma yeah absolutely sorted um and I went in probably about nine times to try and get the time that the manager would be there or the decision maker and you're probably thinking why don't you just call first because every time i call no no not at all well that's then became my approach of like getting your meeting booked in prior to going because otherwise you can just waste your day yeah um but even if you call sometimes they forget or do something else or they've gone out and sometimes like generally no trip is ever wasted because you'll pick up something you'll see a product and shelf and go i didn't know that will stop there that's really good info you get a name from someone an additional name so that you can ask for someone in yeah but i went in about nine times on the ninth time or tenth time i um finally got to the the store the store manager and she just looked at me she goes you are so irritating that's great and i was like i was honestly like i kind of knew i was being annoying yeah but duh i'm in field sales you know i had like i think i got like an extra 10 quid every time i got a product listed like and i was living at home i wasn't living in london i couldn't afford london at the time so i was thinking yeah i am going to be irritating like you know this is important and i was quite used to rejection not in like i've been rejected my life because i've like you have been very lucky but i did modeling as a kid so you're constantly rejected you know shoots and whatever so yeah a no to me was it wasn't a big deal i guess um and i think i i was so arrogant or so cocky and i just i just went yeah i know but do you like you want to stop the product don't you and she literally her jaw like dropped to be like do you think you are like no like get out the shop um and i left and that was it never never i really heard that there would be some redemption or payoff from that story as in you would bravely say do you want to stop the product anyway and then no i kind of like sassy when you want the product though and she looked at me like you are not like nah literally get out and i was like right well you've called me irritating and you've given me a voice and a face that looks like thunder so i'm gonna leave i love how you dealt with that though that's excellent i just thought yeah well that's a proud that's a proud story you should feel proud of that also i think about it now and i'm just like manners are free and if you don't want the granola do you know what that's fair enough you're not going to be a bronze cup of tea just send me an email and go thank you so much Zoe you know we've tried the we're not looking at it right now I would have been like thank you James have a lovely day thank thank you so much for sending me an email because it saved me my further four or five visits I'm irritating because you're not replying yeah yeah basically fully created that situation for themselves yeah yeah and then not uh not field sales this was a buyer but I rocked up at their house right pretty rogue he's getting out the shower pretty rogue and he had to dress and it was so awkward it was horrendous in fact so hang on talk me through this actually so he's getting out of the shower but obviously you don't know i was in i was he had a driveway where you didn't go into the drive but i could see his driveway in his house right um and i'd parked up on the side and i could see his window and i saw him with a towel around him and i was like oh this is just mortifying but you still wet well i have to i've made the journey now i'm gonna do it yeah So I basically work up with some fruit and granola and yogurt and go like, I want to bring the bell.

49:29Yeah. This wasn't for granola. You didn't knock on the window and be like, no, no. I made sure he was like, Oh, I couldn't obviously see him get literally get dressed, but I assumed after five minutes he was out of the road. So I, then I knocked and delivered him some yogurt, granola. Um, I'm just thinking back. It was awful. And, um, he, um, he literally again looked at me like, hi. And I was like, hi, I've delivered you breakfast. obviously he was like this is so weird like imagine like so it's just quite early in the morning because you wanted to catch yeah it was breakfast time um and he i don't even know how i got his address which is also like probably now a total breach of gdpr or something like i think a lot of that stuff still happens though yeah probably and um he just looked at me and was a bit like right what who are you and i was like oh i'm from did it okay gonna club yeah i've been emailing and he was just like can you leave it there and like literally made me like put it on the floor like far away from him and he was like okay like have a nice day basically like i'll try it so you put you put it in the in the door no i put it on the outside the front door social distancing a thing or no this was post social distancing it's fine but i just then had to like actually i think it might have been pre-covid it was a while ago and i then just sort of like turned away and walked back to the car right and any any positive outcome no no no shame but they're just some of the top ones that i've had but oh plenty of rejections you kind of get used to them yeah i i find getting ignored tough i mean it seems like from your from the way that you're telling stories all the time yeah it's it i find i find it difficult though when you are someone that values responding to emails and being polite it's very difficult when you send out emails you put a lot of thought into them and or or send gifts slightly strange maybe when you rock up at people's house i think i overstepped the mark there probably maybe a little um but i think if you do these thoughtful things and you're handing over product that you love or that you're representing or in my case that that you created you kind of want someone to at the very least be like oh thank you for the samples i'll give them a try it doesn't cost much to do that i know although on the flip side i think about my inbox and the people trying to sell me stuff and contact me about whatever it might be web services seo pictures at trade events whatever advertising opportunities if i feel like those people have got my email from somewhere where i don't have a clue where it's come from sometimes i don't reply i'm trying to be better at it though so at the very least i can save them the time of sending a follow-up email but if you are i think it's all ai generated those though i don't even think they'll be thinking about you sat in your laptop personalizing it it will be blanket you'll be in like a book of emails yeah those ones i ignore all the time they just go straight to junk i mean i just block sender yeah um if it is something i'm really not interested in i just block sender and then they'll just probably get a bounce back but yeah you're right it is really it's disheartening it's frustrating especially when you're on a mission to like do something good and educate them on what you're doing and why it's better and why delicious cereal yeah at the time it was but yeah you just sort of like you go quite thick skin and you just realize actually okay but also I think the key is not wasting time on stuff like if it's not working move on yeah if it's not working to move on like there is enough opportunity out there that you will find someone that likes you and is receptive yeah have your like internal boundary of like right three emails and a visit okay if I get nothing after that you're not right fine yeah within reason right so like there's a couple of forecourts that I'm kind of like trying to get at the moment and I've probably been with them way more than three times I haven't visited because I won't now hence why because previous experiences but you know three emails is still to me i'm early days yeah because these are big customers i'm not going to give up easy but if it's something like yeah you have to like learn don't need to be no no no i like this though because there are lots of i think there are lots of professions lots of walks of life but you do not deal with rejection in the same way that you do if you are repping a product or a brand or in sales and if you speak to sales people about these challenges they're like oh my god i get it totally and you have a really nice interesting discussion about all about rejection and that's quite nice to share rejection with other people because lots of people are ashamed of being rejected yeah but i feel like so many people in so many jobs don't have to deal with rejection at all and i actually think that developing a fixed skin through turning up to a shop and getting laughed out of it or getting these emails where you think it's going to be an easy win and they tell you to f off that i i really feel like that is good for you personally and good for your soul character building right and i'm thinking of like people that probably don't get rejected that much in their like work life i guess maybe would be a massive brand like coca-cola yeah you know if you work for coke in the sales team as a national account manager you're never getting rejected like every shop in the world has coca-cola right so you can't really get rejected from a retailer there so it'd be interesting to do a week at coca-cola i'd love to to be honest with you just to like try it and do blue chip and big business and lots of red tape whereas I'm reactive and right I can do that yeah autonomy brilliant so it would be quite fun but yeah it is mad how we are like quite especially in small FMCG you're like your skin is that yeah versus like you know and it's good for the rest of your life it is I feel like rejection has similarities across you know relationships friendships yeah whatever it might be rejection from anything it hurts but when you've been rejected many many times in your professional life it hurts a lot less yeah definitely um team wise just for you uh i have an employee called sam okay uh he's my uh team member uh we are a team of two nice and what's sam's role sam's role is multi multi everything yeah i shouldn't say multifaceted because i would look at myself and be like you a-hole okay but he basically does everything just like I do which is kind of great I think one of the best things about starting a business like this is the fact that you do lots and lots of different stuff all of the aspects of the business and I feel like it's quite important to try and have some knowledge of each of them because if you hope to build a team one day it's quite handy being able to say oh yeah I remember when I did this and have quite a good either be able to help the person that's now tasked doing doing it or have quite a good sense of how long things take managing expectations correctly figuring out workloads I feel like trying everything is quite good um there and there are things that you try and you're like god that is definitely not for me and someone else would do a much better job but I think the evolution of this brand and this business you asked about the branding earlier i started off designing the labels for a gingerbread on powerpoint okay because i thought i've just come out of a management consultant job and i'm really good at powerpoint yeah have a look um they're longer than i thought yeah they're long boys they are long boys i don't know why but i thought they were like um were they ever that big those ones are mini they're light blue mini ones fine yeah um but basically i was naive maybe slightly arrogant in this particular sense of thinking great I can make a really good slide on PowerPoint that works visually so why can I not design a label on PowerPoint so I generated our label like PDF that you send to your label producers honestly from a PowerPoint slide I made it in the right dimensions and I was like great these look so good and now in hindsight they looked absolutely awful or not terrible terrible but like pretty bad from a graphic design perspective what's nice is that you can sort of chart your personal growth with design same as you can with like film and with photos because you can look at work that you've done previously and be like god that was terrible which tells you that you must have come some way to understanding how branding should be and how it can work so I designed I think for up until batch four we're now this is batch seven of our drinks up until batch four I was designing myself on first two on PowerPoint and then I worked with a local illustrator called Maya and I started I used her illustrations and started designing on Adobe InDesign yeah big step up for me at the time and then we actually got an agency called Office of Overview to help take the branding from where it was to where it is now and we still make tweaks to it so all of the can labels they sit on my computer I tweak them with Sam we change the nutritionals we change we add the b-corp symbol when we got B Corp certified and having because I've done elements of the design those edits if I want to make them there I don't have to be like oh my god design agency can you do this quick thing for me and bother them I can just do it myself which is kind of good but I wouldn't be able to do that had I not had this journey through yeah so it comes it comes good you make mistakes but it it's come good and I would say that is actually a separate and important point which is that I I think on these journeys, often people are given really short amount of time to make a product work.

58:39And I feel like there is so much learning and development from just extending that time horizon. When investors are funding a brand, for example, they want to see results within 12 months. And really, I think that that time horizon should be massively drawn out because you make these learnings, you make these updates, the packaging, and they are really valuable. they can take your brand from being 80 of the way to 100 of the way there and that can often unstick a problem that was sticky before you know something that wouldn't a listing that wouldn't happen by just making those small incremental changes and I feel like often brands aren't given the time I've been very lucky that I've had the time to take it from terrible PowerPoint design in this case to where it is now yeah I think yeah but you you I think having that understanding at the start is really key because you're right it gives you that like okay I know how to do that and but also the the being able to like react quickly so if i said to you i'll make i don't know if i was a customer and i was like i really like it but it'd be great if you pulled out the calories more on pack because i care about that you can go oh interesting you can play with it yeah you can see oh yeah that would look really cool and oh i can move that there and being nimble to make those changes quickly as well is important and hence why doing a smaller production run sometimes is better because actually that might not work and and stuff like that so yeah there are difficult dynamics on that front because you if you do smaller production runs you pay more for everything as well so you have to kind of play off that flexibility but certainly as far as the design goes I'm literally getting the mental image of myself and Sam we've been clustered around my computer screen quite a lot recently making these like small incremental changes to our labels to the multi-pack packaging we do all of it but having the ability to think about it and try different things as you say and visualize it literally on a computer screen very helpful so what's next for the root co yeah good question um so honestly 2023 was a pretty uh pretty bad year for like a whole bunch of reasons we missed out on opportunities it was the year that my dad passed away so emotionally a difficult time um but we did make lots and lots of progress which kind of underpinned then the success we've had last year so we managed to get B Corp certified which I'm so proud of it's amazing yeah and we I haven't um I haven't explained our supply chain but we basically source all of our ginger from a single farm and we have sorted out in Tanzania that's uh dead right so we have sorted out a supply chain where we can work with a single farm and then juice the ginger in across the border in Kenya and now we're sea freighting our juice which is even better for the environment than air freighting which was what we were doing before of course um so that's that supply chain is something i'm super proud of it did not exist before i started the business so that has come up from scratch i have no connections in east africa aside from my friend from my last job older sister jules who was very kind and helped me kind of find some original exporters but it has grown and developed over time into something that i think is pretty fantastic and very transparent so anyway we've got b corp certified and then we listing with Whole Foods which we'd been chasing for a long time and then we got a listing with Booth Supermarket up north and then we found out about our Ocado listing and this all kind of happened in the space of like three weeks in May pretty much we also went on television we were on the show called Aldi's Next Big Thing amazing and it all happened in such like a weird condensed period that I was feeling I was feeling like nervous and there were so many logistical production and things running around in my mind that I feel like I probably failed to appreciate it but at that moment in time I was like wow this is this is mad and then we've kind of managed to fulfill and deliver on all of those opportunities through the year and we are hoping that in 2025 we will be able to continue to engage bigger retailers basically so we listed with Ocado in November that's our biggest to date the best known so some people haven't heard of Booth some people haven't heard of Whole Foods or Planet Organic particularly if you live outside London but most people have heard of Ocado and that's really cool it's a proud moment for me if I think about it and we want to get more listings I think that allow us to grow our volume so that we can keep on finding efficiencies in our supply chain make the business more profitable be able to offer lower prices to our old customers as well yeah there's there's lots we want to achieve this year but the way it works in this industry and you know it's way better than I do is that these opportunities they're off and then they're on suddenly or they're just never on and you kind of there's no no necessary or no necessarily like rational path to success it's not the case that you're like great I how I imagined it from the outside I was like okay cool if I can list the drinks in Planet Organic and in Whole Foods then surely Waitrose will take me on next once you're in Waitrose and selling well in Waitrose and I don't know maybe you also look at Holland Barrow or you look at Ocado or something like that and then you can approach a bigger supermarket and it is very much like a stepping you just step up take incremental steps up and weirdly that's kind of the way it's shaken out but just like by blind luck in fact what actually happens is you have to convince one person or maybe two people in an organization that your brand is worthwhile these are people with very limited time they have no uh no like debt to you they don't owe you anything they don't have to read your emails they don't have to take your meetings you have to somehow convince them if you're speaking to a major supermarket that you are sitting on a brand that has loads of value to them can sell really well and you have to be able to stump up the cash and the marketing spend and the business knowledge like business acumen experience in the industry to be able to convince them that you haven't effing clear what you're doing just in case they list the brand and it goes nowhere at least then you've got a plan to fall back on of how you're going to get it in front of people and drive trial but you know it's really hard because I think buyers particularly in the drink space they can often list uh what was it there was like an oreo coke that landed on shelves I think at some point last year yeah there was they could list an oreo coke and know 100 certainly that the oreo coke would sell better than our drink even though we've thought about it really carefully and the the formula's more relevant and the ingredients are few and there are no processed foods, it will sell better.

1:05:03Coke has such a hold on brand and people and it's just like a... Yeah, I don't know how you crack that one. No, it's tough. It's very tough. Coke is just... It will eventually, you know, unless it stays relevant and brings out healthy stuff. Probably will stay relevant. Yeah, but I wonder how that one day will really shift at the moment. It does seem to be like they are in every single... I mean, yeah, they must have, like, 100 % household penetration. Yeah. Or at one point in their life, everyone would have tried a Coke, unless you're under the age of three. Do you still drink Diet Coke? Do you drink Coke?

1:05:34I do drink Diet Coke. Yeah, I drink Coke Zero and Diet Coke, but it's not often. Like, I'll have it when I really fancy it. Like, I seem to have it on holiday. Yeah. And particularly in the glass bottles. I really like glass bottles Coke. Oh, yeah, cool. Can I do taste the aluminium in it a bit? Oh, right. Especially if it's been sat around a long time, you know, and you, like, get that, I don't know, that metally taste but if i'm on holiday and i'm by the beach then yeah i really do like a proper coke in a with in the glass bottle with ice and a straw yeah and a little bit lemon it's very holiday to me but then yeah if there's go if there's one in the office i'll sometimes grab it but yeah i have tried to really cut back because obviously i know it's really bad for you and there's lots of stuff in it but i eat my veg right so i'm picking my battles yeah absolutely um but yeah i guess all all that to say the coke zero example is i would love to say that we are on a sterling track to break into the supermarkets and in 2025 you will find our drinks on the shelf of the supermarket but truthfully i don't have a i don't have a scooby do i have no idea what is going to happen well tbc but you heard it here first all supermarkets will's coming for you yeah in a very convincing yeah well thank you so much for coming on getting to grow it's been so fabulous catching up with you and um yeah wishing you all the best thank you for having me zoe nice That was it too.