Recipe for Greatness
Recipe for Greatness
Melvin Jay's Journey from Corporate Marketing to Sustainable Entrepreneurship
Curious about what sets successful entrepreneurs apart from the rest? Melvin shares his insights on the crucial attributes needed to thrive in the entrepreneurial world. From the importance of maintaining an open mind to rigorously testing business concepts through consumer research, Melvin breaks down his approach to navigating budget constraints and leveraging cost-effective strategies. You'll gain valuable insights into the transition from corporate life to startups, the art of fundraising, and the meticulous process of building a diverse and effective team.
As we dive deeper, Melvin sheds light on the pressing issue of sustainability in the beverage industry. Listen as he discusses the limitations of plastic packaging and the advantages of aluminum, which is infinitely recyclable. Melvin introduces the concept of the "eco nudge," encouraging consumers to make environmentally friendly choices with ease. This episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiring stories that will leave you motivated to tackle your own entrepreneurial challenges while making a positive impact on the environment. Don't miss this engaging and insightful conversation with Melvin Jay.
3, 2, 1, 0, and liftoff. Liftoff no.
Jay Greenwood:Welcome to the Recipe for Greatness podcast. I'm your host, Jay Greenwood, and today we are joined by Melvin Jay, the entrepreneurial force behind Gunner Drinks and the Sustainable Bottling Co. Melvin first made his mark by selling his marketing strategy firm, Clear Ideas, to MSC Saatchi for £18.4 million. Inspired by the craft beer movement, he has now launched Gunner Drinks, a craft soft drink brand celebrated for its bold flavour and commitment to reducing sugar. Beyond delightful beverages, Melvin is an advocate for sustainability, pioneering the UK's first aluminium bottling facility to combat single-use plastic. Melvin, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Jay. So I wanted to jump straight in and go back to the early years of your career and you started working in corporate jobs. What was your path leading you to become a founding partner of your own strategy consultant firm?
Melvin Jay:So my early career was in marketing. So I started out working for a company who made Nivea and Elastoplus as a marketing exec and then took my journey through lots of consumer goods marketing. Throughout that time I was always very interested in innovation, npd. So marketing in consumer goods and NPD at the time were kind of the same thing. The marketing team were expected to come forward with new ideas and I was always kind of fascinated by ideas generally, but specifically new products and stuff like that. So in a way I guess that's the kind of thread that runs through my whole working life. That's the kind of thread that runs through my my whole working life, whether it was working at um, danone or novatis or found in clear, which had a very strong innovation team, or doing this. I've just always liked the kind of the shiny new um product development and, uh, you know, behind that is really just this kind of sense of wanting to understand why consumers do stuff and try and find better ideas or better solutions for them.
Jay Greenwood:And do you remember that sort of moment where there was the opportunity to sort of go off and set up your own company? Was it like someone just approached you, or was it always in your head that you thought, right, I want to go and create my own consultancy firm consultancy firm.
Melvin Jay:Yeah, but my dad would always say that I was destined for it because I was. You know, I was ripping off the design of kites and selling um photographs of um autographs, of copies of autographs, um to people when I was at school. Um, but it kind of in the end it sort of happened by accident. Um, I was working in switzerland for nevada in a, you know, very nice corporate job, but basically we were being moved around as a family all the time and, frankly, we were just. I was working in Switzerland for Novartis in a very nice corporate job, but basically we were being moved around as a family all the time and frankly, we were just tired of it.
Melvin Jay:So we made a lifestyle choice really to come back to the UK from Switzerland. I didn't have a job and I hadn't really thought very much about exactly what I would do and ended up kind of finding some friends, some people who were interested in setting up a new type of marketing consulting company and just going ahead and doing it. So you know, and sometimes that's how it happens, it might always be in you, might not be in you, but at some point an opportunity might arise and you might think, great, this is going to be. This is really going to be good fun. It's going to be different. It's going to be different.
Jay Greenwood:It's going to be exciting, which it is, of course that leads me on to my next point, because I want to talk about how maybe some of the other once it, once the business was sold and some of the other sort of family partners. They went on to create other consultancy firms, marketing consultancy firms, but you sort of decided to look on the other side and maybe go down there creating your own consumer brand. What was that pull for you? Why did you want to sort of go create your own brand instead of following maybe the other route, maybe just sort of repeating kind of the success you had before?
Melvin Jay:yeah, but I think it's the feeling that in consulting, um, however good you're thinking, however good your ideas, it's up to somebody else whether they are going to do them or act on them, um, and usually they don't. I I mean every single shelf, every CEO's office is piled high with, you know, great thinking that hasn't been implemented and, you know, probably never would be. So I kind of like a desire to go back to some of the stuff I enjoyed when I was working in consumer goods marketing at the very beginning of my career.
Jay Greenwood:And you must have seen so many ideas through your career, like people approaching you, pitching you different things. What was it about sort of like Gunner Drinks? How did that sort of idea come to you? How did it stick? What was it about that sort of offering that you thought, right, this is it. This is what I want to focus on. This is what I want to do Because, like I say, you must have seen so many different opportunities across such a vast scale of things, so yeah, it was definitely the kind of craft beer movement, um, because if you think about it, that should never have happened.
Melvin Jay:There was in. In one sense there was no need um for it. We already had craft beer um, it was ale um, not like the kind of craft beer that we had now. But just seeing how that kind of category kind of boomed out of really a lack of consumer need, there were loads of beers and they were all very, very good, but the craft beer guys basically, you know, cottoned on to something between lager and ale in terms of a product to bring flavour, in terms of a product to bring flavour. And then they kind of realised that in beer particularly, if you like, character, the kind of personality of the brand really was a very dominant part of the decision process for the consumer. So in a sense we were trying to do the same thing.
Melvin Jay:If you looked at the soft drinks market, then it was like a blob of empty sug sugary water um made by big soda um, the products had slowly been chipped away. You know, at one point tango probably had 20 orange juice in it and now it's only got, let's say, five, you know. So the products have been constantly kind of product engineered and we felt that the the core of the carbonates bit of the market was left as kind of product engineered and we felt that the the core of the carbonates bit of the market was left as kind of like this sort of blob of nothingness, um, with very little nutritional value, very little flavor, very, very little anything, even very little personality. Um, if you think about the, the brands, they're global brands and what a global brand probably has to do more than anything is what we used to say in consumers it has to find it's vanilla, it has to find an idea which is globally acceptable, um, and in finding something which is globally acceptable, it has to be in somehow bland, um and, let's say, meaningless, but not not very kind of contentious and not very different. So we just felt that this kind of kind of contentious and not very different. So we just felt that this kind of blob of blandness, um kind of created an opportunity to bring flavor back, to bring some nutritional flavor back into the, so it's an initial value back into the product, but also, um, it kind of gave us the opportunity, if you like, to stamp some more personality, uh, on the market as well.
Melvin Jay:So what I would say was and this is a very sort of important lesson for entrepreneurs that kind of lager or craft beer analogy just didn't work. We're not the only people who thought, oh, this is the right idea, it's done well in craft beer, let's do it in soda, in soft drinks. There are several other brands that come in and actually what you realize is that that really wasn't what the soft drinks industry was missing or needed. So it's a good thing, when you're looking at an analogy, be really clear whether or not it really will work If you take that idea from beer and bring it into into soda.
Melvin Jay:Be very critical and ask yourself really, will that? Is that true? Will it work? Are the dynamics the same? Um, will it play out in that way? Because it may not be true. And I think the other thing I would say is then, um, if you're wrong, be prepared to let, let go and kind of to pivot towards something which is more relevant to the category that you're in. And I do think it's a tendency for entrepreneurs in some sense to be deluded about the idea that they've got and to kind of cling on to it when they shouldn't do and end up failing and end up failing, not because they didn't create something interesting, but they failed, if you like, to kind of morph in a slightly different direction or a better direction for the business.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, that's really interesting. And the one thing I was listening to an interview you did and I think you said that even now you still reach out to people for advice, even though all the sort of career success you've had is that sort of a framework that you've always had, and you always continue to do that, even though or despite the success before, you still do that and reach out to people for advice yeah, all the time, all the time.
Melvin Jay:Um, I remember somebody saying to me once that the failure isn't really failure, it's failure to ask to help. So pretty much every problem that you need to solve as an entrepreneur has been solved by somebody else. Um, so I think the ability you know the one mouth, two ears thing, the ability to kind of listen and click on views, and also the, the willingness to kind of accept some things that you disagree with or you might initially feel is wrong, um to ignore some stuff which might be right but isn't right for you. So I think in listening, there's a kind of a important task of being able to kind of pick out the bits of value from the conversations that you you've had or the listening that you're doing. And the same with consumers.
Melvin Jay:I'm constantly people really dread coming to my house because they're going to get quizzed on drinks. You know it's not. It's not a nice, easy, um free meal because I'm going to get quizzed on drinks. You know it's not a nice, easy, free meal, because I'm going to want to know their views on my drinks, on other people's drinks. And that kind of constant questioning, constant challenging is very, very important.
Melvin Jay:So one of the things we learned in consulting is that, in the end, what you must do is have a very open mind about all of the different places that an idea could come from or where the solutions might be. It's fine to have a hypothesis about what you think the solution or the answer is, but the job of a consultant really is to kind of exhaustively pursue all of the different routes. Um, that could be the answer, um, to come to some kind of rational conclusion about, or logical conclusion about, what the answer is. So that ability to kind of have a very open mind, to be able to look at lots of different potential ideas and solutions but then make a decision and kind of go for it is, is really, I think, a core attribute of entrepreneurs and so you have the idea of going drinks and sort of relating it back to what we were just talking about.
Jay Greenwood:How did you then sort of go out and test the idea whether or not there was actually going to be real market for this, and maybe just from actually getting an idea of actually demand or interest in the product, how did you go about doing that?
Melvin Jay:and we put a lot of energy, a lot of money into the recipe development and we we took quite a uh, an innovative approach. Um, we used, um people that are called super tasters. So this is the one in 20 of us who've got ability to kind of describe a flavor in great detail. A sommelier would always be a super taster. So these people can say you know, this is flint, this is cut grass, whatever these flavors, they can pick them up. I'm just sitting there going well, it's really nice, I'm getting drunk and they're picking out all of these detailed flavors. So we use these people because they were able to tell us what flavors they were experiencing or enjoying in there and they were able to describe them.
Melvin Jay:And then we put that together with consumer research and it was based on the insight that consumers are very good at telling you what they like, so they can score something 1 to 10, but they're very, very poor at saying why they just do. I just really like that coffee. Why do you like it? It's got the right amount of coffee and milk in it. Well, that's not going to be a lot of help to an NPD team. So we came up with this idea of combining sensory analysis with consumer testing and using the two together to really narrow down very precisely what sort of ginger flavour would be in there, what kind of orange flavour, what kind of raspberry flavour, so that we could be very, very precise about exactly how we wanted the product to taste. And that meant that when we finished that process, which was exhaustive and expensive, and we put our products into testing, they just came out on top. You know, they literally beat everything that we tested them and still do. They beat everything that we tested them against in a taste test.
Jay Greenwood:And digging into the consumer testing. Is this you just bringing out some friends over? Is this actually like going outsourcing this to an external company to do the testing? How did you sort of structure this testing?
Melvin Jay:We use external companies. Again, there's a role for an external research company which is they are totally independent. They don't have any blinkers on. They're not trying to be your friend, they're just trying to tell you what the world is telling you. So I think there's a very important role for independent research. Even now, pretty much every big decision we make and quite a lot of the small ones are put in front of a consumer, so we are probably allowed to plug them. We use SurveyMonkey a lot. We do a lot of surveys using SurveyMonkey. For a few hundred pounds, we can test four different pack designs and get feedback from three or four hundred consumers on which one they like. We're constantly doing that, constantly trying to make sure that whatever we do is put in front of consumers for validation and for feedback.
Jay Greenwood:And is this grounded in sort of your consultancy days? Was that sort of the framework you were taking? You've sort of seen it work there.
Melvin Jay:So you bring it into your own consumer brand. Yeah, in in our consulting company, we believe that every recommendation needed to be founded in some kind of insight or data, so it was very, very sort of rigorous. A lot of the work that we're doing, say, big companies like Unilever. There would be, you know, quite a big piece of market research. Usually a thing called a segmentation study would sit at the kind of heart of the project and that would be telling us what the the market was looking for, or how the market split into different types of consumers. Um.
Melvin Jay:So there was a sense when I came into this that we needed to to kind of replicate that. But of course you you don't have the money to do it, so you have to find a more cost-effective and pragmatic way? Um to do it. So that's one of the big learnings coming out of corporate into consulting and then out of consulting into startup. Um, in both those worlds money really isn't a problem. Um, in the client side the you know the big global companies that are making too much money. And then in consulting, if you're doing the right sort of projects, you know somebody else is paying. Client side, the big global companies that are making too much money and then in consulting, if you're doing the right sort of projects, you know somebody else is paying quite a big check for some very, very heavyweight thinking. You're going to startup and literally, if you have money, it's your money and you really don't want to lose it.
Jay Greenwood:So your money is always a little bit more precious than somebody else's money, as you know, yeah and I read this is something I found on the internet, so you can't believe everything you read but sort of, when you approach the idea of businesses, you sort of I think you broke it down into sort of a few areas where it was sort of fundraising, and then, starting with sort of the end in mind, how you sort of see this business going, proving the concept, and then the team, do you sort of did you take that same approach to Gunner and think about sort of all those elements, elements and how to sort of structure the business?
Melvin Jay:yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's. Um, there are so many things to think about if you're an entrepreneur. Um, it's so multi-dimensional again. You know, if you go back to kind of corporate life, you're actually divided up into these little silos of activity. Um, you know, marketing is a great discipline in a business because it tends to touch most aspects of the business. But you're still in a little silo when you become an entrepreneur. You're starting a business.
Melvin Jay:Suddenly you have to know about everything. You know. You have to know about cap tables, shareholder agreements, all of this stuff. So you need to know about law. You're responsible, you're the HR department, you have to understand employment law, employment contracts. So the breadth of knowledge and understanding of different aspects of business that you have to have is is huge.
Melvin Jay:And within that you also then have to the ability to kind of really identify what actually matters and what doesn't. And that's sometimes harder when you come from a corporate background, because in a corporate background you just do a load of stuff that doesn't create value. But you don't realize. You know, you think it's genuinely valuable to be having a meeting about a meeting or writing a presentation about a meeting or a meeting about presentation. That's what you do you think that's value?
Melvin Jay:When you step out of that world you realize that's not value, that doesn't improve or significantly advance the cause of your business very dramatically. So being able to work out the cause of your business very dramatically, so being able to work out which bits of your learning from corporate are actually applicable to being an entrepreneur, is actually quite an important skill and a lot of people struggle with that. Coming out of corporate, I would say you've got probably you know, if you're doing well, you've probably got a 50-50 chance of actually making it as an entrepreneur because within a corporate life, most of the entrepreneurial um spirit that you had has been kicked out of you, uh, by the, by the internal process and the internal organization that's really interesting and I want to go back to the fundraising bit, because we've had a lot of founders on here who've always really struggled with, uh, fundraising.
Jay Greenwood:But it is, like you say, such a key aspect how do you approach fundraising and what's your strategy, like, how do you target the right investors? How do you decide how much money you need? What's your approach?
Melvin Jay:I think being very, very clear about what you're trying to create you know, if you're building a business to exit, being clear about that and saying to investors that's our intent, we want to do something with an exit in mind is really important, because you know they're putting their money in generally because they want supernatural returns. Being very clear about what it is you're doing and how different it is doing and how different it is. I mean, one of the biggest frustrations I still have with people and other entrepreneurs that come to me is they really can't explain what makes their product different. And if you can't really articulate what it is that really makes your business different or exciting to a shareholder, he's going to be hit by hundreds of you know really good ideas. You'll lose that person quite quickly from having any interest in you.
Melvin Jay:And actually that's where this kind of analogy with craft beer and soft drinks did actually help us in the early days. We could sort of show an example of a category that didn't, if you like, deserve a new entrant or a new subcategory to be created, and that kind of created a way of explaining what we were doing against something that had already been successful. So there's a value in being able to say very, very briefly and very succinctly what it is you're trying to do in the market and how your product or your service is different in the market. I think the other important thing is there is that, honestly, if you look at most markets, your product or service is nowhere near as different as you think it is. You will pick up on one little thing and think that's the whole thing and it's going to make a big difference. It just isn't like that.
Melvin Jay:So I think being really clear about what that difference is and making sure that it's a genuine difference is very important, and that's maybe where you know, the craft sort of drinks analogy fell down a little bit In a way. That's not. That's a vision of how a category could look, but it doesn't explain why a consumer will stop what they're doing and switch to your product. Very well, what we've learned is the reason to swap in this market is going to be driven primarily by concerns about health and, increasingly, concerns about sustainability and being able to kind of bank your business in something that's much more tangible. We want to make soda that's healthier and better for the planet, is very, very powerful and very, very strong and easy to articulate to shareholders as being relevant against kind of megatrends. So I think that's absolutely crystal clear. You won't get money if people don't understand what it is that you're doing, the relevance of it and how it's different.
Jay Greenwood:And how did you pick up on that sort of transition from sort of that craft beer analogy to sort of like the health and sort of environmental aspects of why sort of drives consumers decision? Is it just you just simply doing the basic thing of just listening to what consumers are saying?
Melvin Jay:yeah, yeah, just just kind of listening and understanding. Again, you know, market research. We did a very um sort of fundamental piece of work, say two years ago, where we went back to the basics of the category and said, okay, what's actually driving decisions in in this category? How are people deciding what to choose and kind of what? You know, what not to choose? Um, in the market. And actually you know, mostly when you do research it tells you something which is bleeding obvious and in our case it basically said people really cared about taste, they really cared about health, because soft drinks were seen as being generally unhealthy and the one that maybe surprised us, that came through very, very strongly that they were increasingly concerned about sustainability in soft drinks, which actually led to a question like hang on a second, but we're not really like a, we're not an evil category. Um, from a co2 perspective we're not. You know, we're literally not burning up the planet.
Melvin Jay:When we dug into the city of sustainability, what we realized is that when people went to a shelf, they literally saw a wall of plastic bottles.
Melvin Jay:The 70 of a store fixture is plastic bottles and actually that's what they were reacting to when they were saying it's not a very sustainable or eco-friendly category.
Melvin Jay:They were specifically acknowledging that 70% of the products in soda and 90% of the products in water were sold in a packaging format which, to them, had become, say, bad or unacceptable because of concerns about plastic pollution. So in a sense, we kind of discovered something kind of a little bit unexpected and that led us to really try and say, ok, well, we really need to go back to these things and really try and build the brand back against health and sustainability much more clearly and don't drop the kind of craft soda idea. It's an analogy that's useful, but be a lot more specific about what it is that we're trying to do. In this category. We try to offer people great tasting soda which is healthier and is better for the planet, and that's directly connected to the things that we're driving their decisions or making them feel uncomfortable, in some cases, about their decisions that's really interesting and so, do, you think, for founders.
Jay Greenwood:Then it's sort of holding an idea, being quite firm on it but then holding it loosely, so, like you say, the property analogy, but then just be willing to drop it when that new information comes along, and then pick that up and just keep driving forward that way yeah, that's it.
Melvin Jay:You know you've got to be careful not to flip-flop, because it's very kind of easy to kind of keep following the next kind of new, new, shiny thing, um. So I think your words are great, you know, as you hold your idea firmly but loosely, um, you know, like the grip on a golf club, if you can't hit the ball, if you don't hold it tight enough, the club disappears off into the future. So you've kind of got to get that balance right. Um, and I think again, this is when, um, some kind of personal characteristics come in.
Melvin Jay:Just, you just have to be very, very self-critical. You have to look in the mirror and see the ugliness, um, and then be prepared to do something about it. And if you don't have that mindset, then you can't succeed because you'll hang on to a bad idea. Um, if you have the other, the opposite mindset, which is, you know, I'm going to keep changing it, then you know, eventually people just get tired of listening to you, um, that when you pivoted for the 40th time, they're no longer listening, uh, anymore one thread that I found consistent in your journey was, uh, team, and it seems like you've always surrounded yourself by great people.
Jay Greenwood:How do you think about, sort of when you sort of start something, about getting those people involved? Because I guess in one element there's, you know, there's a, there's a pie, so the more you slice it there's, the more there's like less you know, just for you. This is probably shared around, but then also the same time you're bringing that talent. So how do you think about the team and also how do you go about finding those people?
Melvin Jay:Yeah, well, you know, I think, that there isn't a single entrepreneur that has or will do it by themselves. You know the sort of days of a kind of a guardian leader, singular, creating a business and being successful long gone. It's always a, you know, a combined effort, and it's always about trying to fill the gaps that you can't fill yourself, obviously. So if you're very, very, very good at something, if you're very, very good at finance, then you know you need to find somebody who's very, very good at marketing and somebody's very, very good at sales. So there's a kind of a if, like a skills, experience dimension to building a team. But then there are other things as well.
Melvin Jay:I was always struck by I think it was Laurence Delaglio talking about the England rugby team in 2003, about leadership, and he said well, you know, the thing about the team was there was leadership coming from everywhere on the field, in the changing room, on the training ground. There wasn't a leader, which is, I think, a lot of people perhaps thought of it. They would say, martin Johnson, you know strong leader. Actually, no, there were leaders, and each leader took responsibility or ownership for driving different parts of the business forward, and that's exactly what we had at Clear in having a number of, you know co-founders. Each were very, very strong functional specialists or, you know, subjects matter specialists, but each were very strong leaders who were able to kind of drive their part of the business forward and that kind of added up to leadership. So there's a difference between leader and leadership. Leadership is something in a startup you need to have from all dimensions and all areas of the business. So if you don't have that because you don't have lots of resources, then stuff doesn't tend to happen very, very quickly. So that's that's one, one thing in the sense you're looking for co-leaders sometimes you might say co-founders, but I actually think you're looking for co-leaders.
Melvin Jay:You're looking for people who'll take the challenge, take the task that they've got and really kind of punch through, drag the people around them and the resources to bear to get stuff done, um in their, in their kind of areas of business, and that's that's key. And then you want people to disagree with you. You know you really want people who not want to pick a fight, but you want people who are challenging you and asking questions and, you know, doubting and um pushing, because the lack of challenge is generally what leads you to drive into the ditch, um, so you need that around you to have people constantly, um, challenging, questioning, checking, are we doing this right? Are we going into the right level of depth? Did we miss something? You know it's what you miss that's going to harm you, not what you see. So you've got to be constantly kind of thinking like that as an organization. You can't have a single challenger who is the leader sitting at the top of an organization expected to be successful.
Melvin Jay:And then I think the other thing is resilience. I mean, you know, I would say to somebody thinking of going into entrepreneurship for the first time you really shouldn't do it. It's the most ridiculous thing that you could possibly do. My friend of mine, who is a very successful entrepreneur, described it as, um, as somebody taking your wallet and punching you in the face. So this is, this is a difficult thing to do. It's exciting and it's rewarding, but it's also demoralizing and it's, you know, heartbreaking at times. So, um, I certainly remember novartis that the last big, you know, corporate job I had, would say. Literally, when you get to a certain level of your career, it's not about anything other than resilience, because all you're going to be dealing with is the biggest challenges and the biggest problems of the business, and if you haven't got the resilience to kind of stand up to it, you're going to be crushed by it quite quickly.
Jay Greenwood:That's really interesting because in my research I came across a quote from you and it said don't do it, get a job and let someone else lose their hair. So I guess, reflecting on sort of the journey from Gunner, from sort of getting it from that initial stage to sort of to where it is now, do you sort of still look back and think, oh my god, how difficult. I guess how, when you contrast that back to maybe sort of more like business to business, sort of uh company that you had before and consulting, do you sort of see the huge difference between the two, or sort of creating that business versus this, or is it just all the same?
Melvin Jay:really, you know, being in on being in an entrepreneurial environment is much tougher than most corporate environments. It's more rewarding. You can achieve more, you can do more, your ideas are going to be listened to, your ideas can be actioned. But also, you know, it's a lot more precarious, um, and then you know whether you're at the top of an organization of two people or three thousand, the the plate at the top is the most comfortable, uncomfortable place to be. Always, in the end, it's down to you, um, to make sure that everything that's not done gets fixed. In the end, however good the team is, the kind of poo rises to the top of the organisation.
Jay Greenwood:And we spoke then about how you create this craft, this amazing, beautiful tasting drink, which I can say actually is amazingly wonderful taste, because when I had it I actually tried to taste this across different sort of lemonades. You can really taste the naturalness and just the actual flavor of it versus the other stuff.
Jay Greenwood:So, I can vouch for that. Definitely you can tell that it's really good. So how do you then go from that to then getting that first sale? How did you sort of build that first like a thousand customers to actually start buying the product?
Melvin Jay:yeah, I think that's.
Melvin Jay:The other thing is that you know, at some point the the whole of the job of an entrepreneur becomes about sales. Yeah, if you've got the product and it's a good product you've got the proposition, it's a good proposition. You've just got to get out there and tell people about it. And actually it's one of the things I think again, um, everybody will always underestimate is the importance of the sales part of that, of that process, um, and how difficult it is. You know, if you're the buyer at tesco's, there's probably 100 or 200 people each week telling you that they've discovered the future of soft drinks and demanding that you see them. So you have to have a way of managing that. And, generally speaking, the way you manage that is to kind of ignore them all. So the resilience and the tenacity that you have to have to get into those conversations is really really, really important. So I tell a story about this that came from Clear, really important. So, and I tell a story about this that came from clear.
Melvin Jay:When we started clear, um, we knew that to be really successful, we would have to win work with unilever, because unilever was the sort of the university of marketing, of consumer goods and that if you had them on there on your you know your um client list, it would be a big draw and other clients and you know, frankly also you would learn from them, they would learn from us that you know your client list, it would be a big draw to other clients and you know, frankly also you would learn from them. They would learn from us. But you know we would learn from them. So on day one we started, you know, this job of landing a Unilever project and it took us probably three years before we landed one. We never stopped trying to get into that conversation because we knew that it would be a valuable conversation.
Melvin Jay:And I think that's the other thing you have to remember that you know you're going to get told no a thousand times. But actually no doesn't mean never, it just means generally not now. And you can take a no and you can turn it into a. Maybe you can turn it into a yes if you have a process and a tenacity to do that. But if you give up when somebody says no, then you won't get Unilever, you won't get Tesco, you won't get Sainsbury's. So you kind of have to keep sort of chipping away at it, and you also have to see no as the second best answer, because sometimes you're spending so much time investing in trying to get a yes from somebody that you're kind of literally going nowhere, just putting more and more energy, getting more and more energy, getting more and more frustrated. When they say no, you can sort of treat it a little bit as a relief. Go okay, right, there's another half a million customers out there. One of them doesn't like it, so it said no, it said no, not. Now we are in a conversation with them. No is a conversation, so there has been a point of contact between us. Let's go and see if we can get one of the other 499,000 customers out there and come back to the one that said no in three months, six months or nine months.
Melvin Jay:And things do change. No often means not now. We're not looking at changing our range now. We don't want new products now. We're too busy now. It doesn't mean that they're not looking at changing our range now. We don't want new products now we're too busy now. It doesn't mean that they're not interested ever. So I think that again, that kind of tenacity, that resilience, that ability to kind of keep going at it is really important.
Jay Greenwood:Incredible. And I want to sort of ask a bit broader question which I guess maybe might relate to what we've been talking about, sort of about chipping away slowly, slowly. But how do you think about being competitive in such a competitive category with such big incumbents there? How do you think about sort of taking it from you know a brand to sort of scaling it to compete with these sort of big players?
Melvin Jay:Yeah, in a way you're not really competing with Coke and Pepsi and people like that. You might think you are, but you're literally a bit like my Sunday League team football, thinking that they're competing against the Premier League. They're just not. They're in their league and they've got to win their league and if they win their league they go up a league. So that's how you have to think of the journey of competition in a big category like soft drinks, and you have to be very, very focused about, therefore, where you want to play.
Melvin Jay:You know it's a big market. There are literally half a million places in the UK that sell soft drinks which are the bits of that market that your product has a sensible, realistic chance of getting into. And be really clear, be really focused about which bit of the market you're going after. And then, as soon as you do that, your competitive field narrows dramatically. When you say I'm not competing in the market, I'm competing in this bit of the market and in this bit of the market I'm going to come up against dalston, nixon, kicks or you know that's my competitive sets. They're all nobody's like me, so it's it's kind of a level playing field. So I think that's how to think about competition. Think about who you actually are going to have to fight against in the channel or the place that you're going to fight, because you're not actually fighting the army, you're. You're fighting a different sort of set of people incredible advice, incredible advice.
Jay Greenwood:Now I want to jump on to a big aspect of, uh, what you're doing and sustainability. We've all touched on sort of how that came on your radar listening to consumers so how did that sort of go from just listening to actually becoming a real driving force to what you're doing, in the action you're taking?
Melvin Jay:yeah. So we think, yeah, we're listening and we're getting this feedback. We were very surprised that the others, others, the uk and the us business and um, the order was taste, health, sustainability and sustainability wasn't that far behind health. We're like well, this seems really surprising to us, so we better understand this a little bit more, which is how we got into depth and understanding the way consumers saw the market is it was it was actually a plastic bottle market, not a soda market so that's, that's kind of an interesting way of looking at it.
Melvin Jay:And at the time, you know, plastic bottles are becoming um, a major, major issue through um, david attenborough, uh, general kind of awareness about the damage that plastic is kind of causing um to the, to the environment. And even today people often say to us, we don't get it. Why are you talking about sustainability in soda? And we're saying it's because plastic dominates the category. People will say, well, yeah, but you make cans, you know already, which are made out of aluminium. Yeah, but 70% of the market is in resealable screw top bottles. A can is not a resealable screw top bottle. They are a completely different usage occasion and a different moment of consumer interaction. Where they're on the go, they're looking for something they can sip and reseal which is not a can. So, understanding that detail, that there's a massive difference in the consumer's mind behind the utility of a fizzy drink in a screw-tilt bottle and a fizzy drink in a can, you have to get to that kind of level of detail of kind of really understanding why sustainability is an issue because of the plastic and why the solution that you've got is just wrong because it doesn't meet the usage occasion very, very well at all. So I think that's the the kind of joining up of thinking that that kind of happened. And then we went out and said, okay, right, well, surely somebody is all over this. This is like a global issue if you look, if you look at the um, the outcome of you know sort of global conference and summits in places like davos sustainability is right up there as like a global issue.
Melvin Jay:When you go down to consumer level, it's a massive issue for consumers, I think consumers saying they're making choices based on sustainability, that they're willing to pay more um products that are more sustainable. So it's like a, it's a huge thing and the industry's not doing anything about it. In fact, they're doing the opposite. They're trying to do the. Our industry is trying to convince ourselves or somebody that plastic isn't bad because it can be recycled. You know it can be.
Melvin Jay:You know I can be a golfer, but I'm not um. You know I. I. A plastic bottle can be recycled, but on average, only 16 of the plastic bottle will end up being turned into something new. The other 84 will be incinerated, uh, buried in the ground where it'll create microplastics, or it'll end up in the um the environment. So being kind of really able to understand there's a very, very big unmet need specifically in our category around this area of sustainability that nobody else is really building their, their business property, um proposition around it, um and again I do think our industry is guilty of making excuses for ourselves.
Melvin Jay:We think by using recycled PET, suddenly this problem is solved. It's so far from being solved. It's delusional to think that moving from virgin PET to recycled PET is going to make a really big difference to the problem. It can't, so the solution can then only be other types of product and other types of packaging. That has to be the solution, and I think again, being really, really clear about this delusional nature that categories or industries can get into, and being clear that you're not the delusional ones, that you really do get it and that you're prepared to do something about it, is, um, it's absolutely essential and I imagine there's a big education piece around it, because for me, for example, I'm now becoming more and more aware by how bad plastic is.
Jay Greenwood:But then I was so amazed at sort of how much better aluminium is and sort of that that's offering versus plastic, and it's just incredible. I mean, there's some stats you sort of share about, sort of like I think, is it 100% aluminium can be reused, right? That's one of the things.
Melvin Jay:Yeah, I mean. So I think the most important number is 80% of the aluminium that's being made is still out there circulating around the system. It's infinitely recyclable. So if an aluminium bottle comes in the recycling bin to a recycling centre, aluminium is aluminium. So picking out aluminium and putting it to one side, it's very obvious that it's aluminium and you just literally put it into a pile.
Melvin Jay:Contrast that to plastic. Plastic is not plastic. Plastic is hundreds of different sorts of plastics which are all different and have to be identified, separated out, cleaned and then reprocessed. So the job of recycling plastic is very, very, very complicated, very expensive, very difficult and very voluminous compared to aluminium. So because aluminium is relatively easy to handle and has value when it's recycled, it has a very high market value. It's immediately, therefore, easy to deal with and valuable as a by-product of the recycling process.
Melvin Jay:Plastic's almost the opposite. It's very difficult to deal with and when you eventually do end up with recycled plastic, it's worth 4 or 5p, but it's cost you six or seven p? Um to recycle it. So you've got something which is worth less than the energy you've put into it or the effort you put into it to recycle. Plus, you've then got virgin plastic, which is cheaper than recycled plastic. So the whole system is really completely stacked against plastic. It really is as a as a material, whereas aluminium is just. Aluminium is just easy to deal with and it's valuable, so it gets treated differently in the system.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, once you dig into it, you just realise, like you say, it's just so obvious that aluminium is the right route. But yeah, you say there's just so much other stuff going on that just stops it from being the mainstream.
Melvin Jay:Yeah, and what we're doing is well, well, the kind of the big insight behind the bottle is that, um, people effectively want what we're calling an eco nudge. Okay, so they want to take something that they're already doing, which is buying a screw top bottle, um, with, you know, an isolating liquid in it, um, a screw top plastic bottle with an isolated liquid in it, and they want to buy something that's not as bad. So getting them to go from a screw top plastic bottle to a screw top aluminium bottle just isn't a big change for them. So they will make it. Whereas if you think about the other type of initiatives that are going on in store, like these refill centres, where you have to remember to take all your Tupperware or empty bags with you in order to refill your rice and your cornflakes and all of these things from these retailers, it's just expecting far too much from the consumer. They're just not going to do it. So I think that's the other thing that we've really focused on is how do we make the switch from something bad to something good as easy as possible for the consumers? And if you make it easy, because their heart is genuinely in sustainability, they definitely want to make things better. If you make it easy for them, they will do it. If you make it hard for them, they won't. So we think the solution to sustainability is to find lots of little nudges that you can use to push consumers in a more sustainable direction.
Melvin Jay:So plastic bottles are the second biggest or our category is the second biggest contributor to plastic waste. Out of the whole supermarket. The biggest contributor to plastic waste in the supermarket is actually the fruit and veg aisle, because all of the fruit and veg is pre-packed with a barcode um with film on it, and the film is very difficult to use. It's almost useless um once it's been used as film. So you could imagine that you just have more loose products and you give people paper bags to put it in and they weigh it themselves.
Melvin Jay:Now, not everyone's going to do it. A lot of people are like I haven't got time to weigh out. You know, work out what sort of lemon it is or what sort of potatoes. But a lot of people face by the opportunity just to put loose potatoes into a paper bag and stick a barcode on it will do it because it's a relatively low friction change. It's a nudge towards a more sustainable life and we think that the food and drink industry really needs to think more about how we can kind of nudge behavior in the in the right direction and so you're already, you know, working on kind of you're driving this business.
Jay Greenwood:You say it's a stressful being an entrepreneur, and then so how do you then decide to like create another business to tackle this sort of? How do you sort of approach that decision making? Because there must? There's a big sort of a pull to sort of driving that eco, yeah, but there's also that push of being like a pause or being like, oh, actually can I take on another challenge?
Melvin Jay:yeah, well, introducing, before we launched the aluminium bottle, the screw top aluminium bottle, we'd only been in the can and somebody else had made it for us. Like most startups, we didn't have our own factory. We went to one of these big, you know, third-party contractors and they filled our can for us. So our first instinct when we decided we needed to do the bottle was to go and find somebody who could fill the bottle for us. But nobody could. Literally nobody in Europe had all of the bits of the production process that you needed in order to put our drink into that type of bottle. So we went to them and said well, you know, we're going to do this. Can we, can we get you to invest in the kit that you that we need to be able to put it in this bottle? And then, yeah, yeah, of course, we're very happy to buy these new machines and just give us the 750 000 pounds and we need to buy the new machine, um, and you can have as many bottles as you like.
Melvin Jay:So at this point we're thinking hang on a second. We're going to give them best part of a million quid um to make our product and we won't own it. So that's completely nuts. Why don't we go to our shareholders and ask us if they'll give us the money to build our own factory? So we, we did it out of necessity, um, because nobody could do it for us, so we had to do it for ourselves. And when we then realized we're the only people in the the whole of europe that can make these type of drinks in that type of bottle, we then quickly realized that there was another revenue stream on the table, which is offering our service to non-competing brands who also wanted to be in the aluminum bottle. So, in a sense, it was out of necessity. You wouldn't choose to build a factory to do something that could already be done, would you? You'd only do it because there was something unique or different about what you were doing that couldn't be, um, couldn't be done by by somebody else.
Jay Greenwood:So, um, pragmatism at the end of the day incredible and yeah, I think, um, yeah, it's a great movement and how have you found sort of that? Has there been any conflicts at all? Sort of other people wanting to, you know competitors wanting to use the bottling facility and sort of how you thought about sort of how you know you want to drive revenue for that business but at the same time, you also want to focus on the gunner drinks business. Driving that, has there been any conflicts?
Melvin Jay:Yeah, we do get to choose who we're going to fill for, so it's our decision. So far we haven't had a direct conflict where a product that we think is very close, you know, direct competitor, has come to us. If we did, we'd still look at it because the purpose of the company, really we want to put a big dent in the plastic problem. So if you want to put a big dent in the plastic problem, fill up your factory. You know it could fill 20 million bottles. That's probably 100 million less plastic bottles because they get reused. So if you, if your mindset is, my purpose is to put a big den in the in the plastic problem, um, you could argue that you you'd fill it for your competitors very happily because you're you're kind of solving a problem which is taking plastic out of the system. When you, when you help a competitor as well at some point, then you have to kind of balance your purpose, which is put a big dent in this problem, with commercialism, which is to to make sure you have an unfair advantage.
Jay Greenwood:But so far we haven't had to make that choice uh, I want to finish on one final question and ask about that sort of like the future of gunner, because I imagine sort of this like innovative, uh, aluminium approach. There's so many opportunities that potentially you can pursue. How do you decide sort of what to focus on versus, like, the other potential? Like you know, you could go down all kinds of avenues and really disrupt those categories as well. Like well, how do you decide what you work on and what you're doing?
Melvin Jay:so I think we've've sort of looked at where we think the aluminium bottle is going to be most relevant. And an important learning on that we didn't mention is that in America the water market is where the aluminium bottle has really found its natural home, not actually in the flavoured, healthy soda market healthy soda market. So in the UK or in the EU we're launching a water brand as well, called Water Almighty, which is an aluminium water brand with functional benefits like added minerals or gut health or something like that kind of built into it as well. That's a learning from America that we're applying to the EU market and saying well, if it's how the market for aluminium has grown in America, it's a fair old bet that water will play a significant part in it.
Melvin Jay:So that's just kind of strategy seeing what's going on and predicting that it might be a driver over here as well. And then I think we're kind of leaning into what consumers want more and more, understanding that you know different uses. Occasionally they might want a slightly different size, they might want a smaller bottle or a bigger bottle. Making sure that we've built a factory that can deal with different pack sizes, different bottle types. The aluminium bottle is more expensive and within that there are very expensive ones like the one that we're using and some slightly less expensive ones that are coming out of Japan. So being kind of really aware of what's going on in the aluminium packaging supply market is very important as well, because it creates different opportunities. Refillability is obviously very important in water, slightly less important in flavoured soda, because your flavoured soda bottle will always have a little bit of raspberry flavour left in it for three or four runs around the cleaning cycle. So it's back to being in touch with consumers and in touch with your markets really.
Jay Greenwood:Well, that's incredible and a great place to uh finish this interview and I want to say one thank you so much for all the work you're doing with the sustainable bottling it's amazing and also the stuff with the gun I think it's an amazing product and just the amount of actionable advice you've given in this interview is incredible. So, thank the listeners, we're going to love this. So thank you so much for taking the time to actually get on this podcast, share your journey and give so much advice no, thank you and um, you can come back.
Intro:If there's anything else you know you feel like is useful, then um, you can always reach out as always, guys, thank you so much for listening, really appreciate the support and if you guys like it and you're enjoying what you're listening to, please like and subscribe and write a review. We'd really appreciate it again. We'll be back doing this weekly and, yeah, if you want to know more about starting a food business, head to wwwjgreenwoodcom. But, guys, as always, thank you and be great.