BEYOND CAFE SOCIETY
Forget your extra-shot skinny latte to go. There's a new drink in town - and it won't send your blood pressure sky high. As Australia's fresh juice giant muscles in on Britain's high streets, Simon Usborne discovers why we'll soon be swapping our daily caffeine fix for crushed carrot and pulped papaya
In the Eighties it was the hamburger giants that duelled for dominance in the high street. By the Nineties, coffee culture had seeped across the Atlantic and names like Costa, Nero and, Starbucks appeared on every corner.
Now, the front line in the battle for our stomachs and wallets has moved with the unsaturated, decaffeinated times. Secret weapons with names such as Mango Magic and All Berry Bang are pitted against Bliss Blend and Green Goddess. In this war, things may get ugly - but at least they'll be healthy.
Tapping into a growing thirst for healthy snacks, an Australian juice bar chain, which has already taken the Asia-Pacific by storm, landed in the UK this week with plans to crush the competition in a growing market already reckoned to be worth more than £100m.
Boost Juice Bars kicked off its British invasion last Saturday, when it opened its flagship store in Manchester's Trafford Centre. It followed up with a second branch in Oxford on Tuesday, and the company hopes to be trading in at least eight bars nationwide by the end of the year, in venues from shopping centres to ski slopes.
Richard O'Sullivan, Boost's UK head, claims early trade has been brisk. "Phenomenal is the word. We're the best-performing store of all the 200 branches worldwide." Boost's road to riches in Australia has been equally dramatic. Since its birth in 2000, in a Melbourne garage, the chain has become the fastest-growing juice business in the Southern Hemisphere, boasting more than 180 stores in Australia, Singapore, Chile, Kuwait, and now the UK.
It was during a holiday in California that Jane Allis, who left school at 17 and once dabbled as a model, saw a hole in the Australian market for a healthy alternative to fast food. A busy mother of three, Allis, 40, was fed up with the daily struggle to grab a quick but nutritious fix for herself and her sons.
So with the support of her husband and friends, she raised the funds to develop, with advice from her children, a menu of exotic juices and smoothies that combined fresh fruits and vegetables but left out preservatives, artificial flavours and added sugar. When she opened her first store in Adelaide, Southern Australia, Allis's drinks were an instant hit.
A second outlet soon followed and within weeks Allis had signed a lease for a further 18. Now, with 10 times that number of branches, Boost Juice expects to rack up sales of £50m this year, sells more than a million drinks a month, and juices 35 tonnes of mangoes a year. At one stage, Allis claims she exhausted Adelaide's supply of bananas.
In Manchester, the entrepreneur has stumbled on a franchisee with an impressive track record. Richard O'Sullivan, from Bury, sold his Millie's cookies firm to catering giant Compass for £24m in 2003. After striking cookie gold, O'Sullivan says he could have "put his feet up".
It was his daughter who came across Boost Juice on her gap year in Australia. She phoned home to tell O'Sullivan, "Dad: you could do this." He got straight on a plane to judge Boost for himself. "It stopped me in my tracks. It was an explosion of flavour, tasted great, and you just knew it was good for you." O'Sullivan, 44, now believes the UK juice bar market is ripe for an Aussie invasion. But he faces stiff competition. Recent figures from Mintel show it has grown by more than 60 per cent in five years, with Britons spending almost £768m a year. As the fastest-growing sector of the UK soft drinks market after bottled water, we guzzle more than 2 million litres of juice a year.
And there's also competition from the booming market in bottled smoothies made by big brands such as Innocent and PJ Smoothies, which was bought by Pepsi for £20m in 2005. Together, they represent a major force in healthy, ethically sourced foods.
Alongside all of this, Mintel estimates the Fairtrade industry alone is worth more than £250m a year and will be £500m by 2010 - and in June, the US chain Whole Foods Market, which has 193 stores in North America and turns over more than £100m a year, will open its first store in the UK. It already owns Fresh & Wild, purveyors of pricey but eminently healthy products including specialist, organic cheeses and wheatgrass shots.
But in the shopping malls and on the high streets of the nation's metropolises, it's brightly coloured juice bars with cutely named drinks such as Good Morning and Berry Blast are making a splash, springing up alongside the ubiquitous coffee shops and noodle bars. The UK is home to 24 multi-site juice bar businesses of various sizes.
London-based chains Lovejuice and Crussh between them have 24 stores across England, with plans to open dozens more in the next few years. Crussh, which has so far concentrated its juice making in the capital, where it has 16 stores, leads the market. The company's managing director, Chris Fung, says he is unfazed by the prospect of an Australian invasion. "There's easily space for more than one operator," he declares.
O'Sullivan is equally bullish, and vows that Boost will flourish by setting itself apart with its funky, Antipodean approach to juice. The company has built itself on an image of young, attractive staff who dance behind the counter and juggle fruit as they squeeze mangos, melons and grapefruit into shiny plastic cups.
O'Sullivan schooled himself in the Boost way by spending six weeks as a volunteer juicer behind the company's Australian bars with his wife (and retail director), Dawn. Now back in Britain, rather than the traditional interview, the couple held group auditions for staff. "We had over 100 16-25-year-olds and we created such a vibe with music and movement to find applicants almost at the level of stage school students. Our staff can wear five different types of headwear. It's a far cry from the McDonald's visor - we're marketing to the iPod generation."
The "local produce for local people" image pioneered by the American ice-cream makers, Ben & Jerry's, and later in the UK drinks industry by Innocent smoothies, has been wholly embraced by the juice bar chains. But with Ben & Jerry's recent $326m (£163m) sell-out to Unilever, and Innocent's whopping £75m annual turnover, will consumers see through the clever marketing? "When one company does it and finds success, everyone copies it. It's the same for juice bars, but already I think it's wearing a bit thin. I think if the chains want to survive, they need to establish a more distinct image," says Warwick Cairns, planning director at Brandhouse, a London marketing agency.
O'Sullivan says the key to the success of the Boost brand will be the quality of the product. "You don't open 200 stores in five years unless you've got something extremely special," he says. "Healthy food has a reputation for tasting bloody awful, whether it's having your mum ramming broccoli down your throat or chewing on rice cakes. It's fantastic to have something with the texture of an indulgent milkshake that tastes amazing and does you good."
Cairns agrees that juice has come along way from the days when it meant longlife cartons of pasteurised orange juice. "I remember when Tropicana was a huge step forward," he says. "Now that low-cost exotic fruit can be grown all year round and flown in, it's much easier to get hold of high quality juice."
Crussh's Chris Fung credits the rise of the juice bar with an increasingly health conscious society. Driven by a desire for products that are natural, nutritious and low on calories, today's consumer wants more than a short-lived energy burst from a caffeine-rich jolt of java, or a sugary milkshake.
So do juice bars spell the demise of coffee shops? "Probably not," says Cairns. "I'm not sure the market can support year-round, dedicated juice bars. And it will be so easy for the coffee chains to fight back by offering juicing facilities." Cairns also says the bars will struggle in the winter. But Boost's chief, Richard O'Sullivan, is unconcerned by the prospect of blustery days in Manchester. "We only trade in protected environments like shopping malls or airports, where the weather isn't an issue," he says.
Protected from a chilly spring morning in a shopping mall at Canary Wharf, London, sits at least one convert to juice. Gen Ford, a Canadian banker, is sipping on a Berry Blast outside a branch of Crussh. The store is within a mango's throw of Starbucks, Caffè Nero and Pret A Manger. Ford, 27, says: "I used to grab a coffee on the way to my office almost every day, but now I'm all about smoothies. They still give me a great kick in the mornings, but I know I'm also drinking something that's good for me and tastes amazing."
Boost Juice
Set up by an Australian mother of three in 2000, Boost Juice now boasts 200 branches in the Asia Pacific and opened its first two UK stores last week. The firm expects to rack up more than £50m this year with a range of drinks including Mango Magic.
Zumo
The Irish entrepreneur Cathal Power launched Zumo and filled a gap in the Irish drinks market in 2001 with his Dublin-based chain of Californian-themed juice bars. The firm is now Europe's largest smoothie and juice bar chain with more than 30 stores. Juice of the month: Amazon Acai.
Innocent
The smoothie behemoth started life in 1998 with a £500 basket of fruit. Innocent now turns over about £100m a year, sells two million smoothies a week in more than 7,000 stores around the world and accounts for more than 60 per cent of the market.
Crussh
Crussh has 16 stores in London and plans to expand to more than 20 nationwide by the end of the year. It turns over more than £6m selling drinks, as well as sushi, sandwiches and soup.
Lovejuice
Inspired by his travels in Asia, John Heseltine launched the Lovejuice chain in 2003. With eight stores around the UK and plans to open a further 50 stores by 2010, the London-based company has grand designs on the market for fresh juice and smoothies.
+ News Source: THE INDEPENDANT
+ Link: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/food_and_drink/features/article2469271.ece
+ Last Updated: 2007-04-21 12:03:15
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