#175 1998 · Innocent Drinks · Beveragesproxy-test
Innocent's founders let a festival crowd's empty cups, not a survey, decide whether they should quit their jobs
the problem
No way to test real demand before quitting stable jobs
background
Three Cambridge graduates working in consulting and advertising had spent six months and about £500 on fruit developing smoothie recipes in a rented kitchen. Market research could tell them whether people liked the taste, but not whether strangers would actually hand over money for it in a real purchase moment — and none of the three wanted to resign from stable jobs on the strength of a focus group's opinion.
The standard move for an unproven consumer product was more research: taste panels, surveys, a business plan pitched to investors before quitting anything. All of it measures stated preference — what people say they'd do — which is notoriously unreliable next to what they actually do with their own money and time.
the move
Three friends sold smoothies from a stall at a London jazz festival in the summer of 1998, with a sign asking festival-goers to throw their empty cup into a bin marked 'yes' or 'no' in answer to: should we quit our jobs to do this full-time? They counted bins, not opinions — a real behavioral vote in place of a survey.
the payoff
The 'yes' bin filled; only three cups landed in 'no'. All three resigned the next day. The company they launched, Innocent Drinks, grew into the UK's leading smoothie brand; Coca-Cola bought a roughly 20% stake for £30 million in 2009, raised it to 58% for about £65 million in 2010, and held over 90% by 2013 — sources vary on the exact 2009 percentage (10–20% per Wikipedia, 20% per trade press), so it's given as a range rather than a false-precise figure.
what came after
The bin test is now Innocent's own founding myth, told in the company's marketing and repeated in entrepreneurship courses as an early, low-cost example of testing revealed behavior instead of stated intent before betting a career on an unproven product.
filed under
references
- [1]Wikipedia — Innocent DrinksWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]Gotta Be Marketing — Event Sampling: Innocent Smoothie & The Yes/No BinGotta Be Marketing, 2021gottabemarketing.co.uk
- [3]BeverageDaily — Innocent Drinks has no plans to crack US as Coke swallows new stakeBeverageDaily, 2013beveragedaily.com