innocent’s veg pots: update

Quick update on the post I did last week on innocent's new veg pots. My view was that this brand from fruit smoothies into chilled food would struggle. One of my concerns was that the veg pot I tasted was nothing to write home about.

Few impressive things about innocent's response to the post:
1. They read it, which shows they are one company tracking the blogosphere. They are smart to know that their online reputation is a key driver of brand and business growth

2. They quickly sent me a personal email from Annika, offering to send me a range of veg pots to taste – I had commented that the taste of the one I tried was a bit bland

3. They sent the pots, as promised, the next day

4. They had bothered to read about the one I had tasted, and sent me the other three to try

Is that cool or what? All this within 36 hours of the post.

So, what about the pots?

Made me smile 🙂
– The Moroccan squash tagine was quite tasty; the nicest of the bunch
– Seeing the range did reinforce the strong health positioning: 3 full portions of veg, and for the tagine, only 0.9g of saturated fat
– Nice plastic pots for the pack, with plenty of innocent-style storywriting on the card wrapper

Made me frown 🙁
– The Thai coconut curry was average. And the Pea and brocolli rice was, well, what you would expect peas, brocolli and rice to taste like.
– The recipes do seem to be a bit fancy-pants, for a brand that I think needs to carefully make itself more accessible to more people. Apparently they did the recipes with wacky, ultra-pricey restaurant The Fat Duck (signature dish: snail porridge).

And I still think the value proposition will limit potential. They are quite nice, but what a price: £3.50 a shot. Net, still worry they will struggle to survive long term.