By: Ian Reynolds-Young
Canny Drinks Founder Liam Watson is under no illusion. ‘Had I not been a local lad’, he says in his rich Geordie brogue, ‘they wouldn’t be taking a risk on me. I mean, it’s the top price in the vendor and it’s coming from a start-up company.’
‘Vending’s favourite wholesaler’
He’s talking about ‘vending’s favourite wholesaler’ Automatic Retailing and despite that self-effacing assessment, he does allow himself to dream. ‘It could change our business overnight – with the sort of reach that Automatic Retailing have, our product will be available to around 90% of the UK’s vending machines.’
The product in question is ‘Canny’. It’s a premium quality, artisan produced milk-based drink that’s a real box-ticker when it comes to ‘healthy products’ and ‘natural ingredients’.
You can easily imagine Liam pitching his business to The Dragons: his effortless enthusiasm for Canny would surely engage with them as it did with me. Not only that: Liam has the best back-story you’ve heard since Levi Roots…
‘At school I was massively overweight’, he says. ‘Like all lads I was into drinking lager, but unlike most I didn’t do lager and sport so I ballooned.’ It was only when girls came onto the scene that Liam became uncomfortably conscious of his weight. ‘I walked into a room with my first girlfriend and you could see people wondering, ‘what’s she doing with that fat so-and-so?
‘I set out to lose a stone’, Liam says. ‘I ended up losing eight-and-a-half.’
With that kind of success in the bank, it’s hardly surprising that Liam became fascinated with his body: how to control it, nurture it and make it tick. Curiosity led him to the study of herbalism and by the age of 20, he was a fully qualified herbalist, supplying health products to the likes of Tesco and Amazon.
‘…a great-tasting drink consisting entirely of natural products.’
He was drinking gallons of milk and milk-based products at the time and he was so appalled at the proliferation of E-numbers, artificial additives and so on that he started to experiment. By calling upon his knowledge as a herbalist and his admiration of milk as a food source, he set about creating a great-tasting drink consisting entirely of natural products.
Progress was slow but sure and finally, Liam developed a drink he really liked. More importantly he thought the public would like it, too.
A side thing
‘It started as a side thing’, Liam says. ‘I was a herbalist all during the week and then I’d rent an ice cream factory during the night. It had a 60 litre batch pasteuriser, so it took eight hours to make 200 bottles. I’d work during the night, then sell them in the morning before I went back to manufacturing herbs.’
It was frustrating. With limited means of production, Liam’s drink was in danger, of going down the drain. ‘I knew a name and a factory that could take the drink and pack it into a carton, which would open up so many other avenues, because I wouldn’t have to keep it refrigerated’, Liam said. ‘So, I went on LinkedIn and reached out to this guy. He got back to me within forty minutes, and even though the factory was based in Bristol, he lived down the road from me in Newcastle. Unbelievable! I met him that Friday and then every Friday for the next eighteen months. We re-developed the product together and then brought it back out, as ‘Canny’, just over a year ago.’
How Liam sold Canny to Virgin Trains is a story in itself. It takes a particular kind of self-belief to take your ‘kitchen-table’ business to one of Britain’s best-known brands and have them say ‘yes please’. Overnight, Canny went from being a niche brand in the north-east to a nationally recognised presence.
But let’s concentrate here on how Liam developed his Canny relationship with Automatic Retailing. He picked up the phone, dialed their number and asked who could help him. As luck would have it, Automatic Retailing MD Allan Walker got wind of the inquiry and because he was already following ‘Canny Drinks’ on Instagram, he returned Liam’s call himself.
‘When we spoke, Allan told me ‘I’ve followed you since you started, I follow you on Instagram and I’ve tried your drink before’, Liam said. ‘So I went to meet him, and yeah, we did the deal.
‘Automatic Retailing are totally behind us.’
According to Liam, the market for milk based products stands at £292m, of which chocolate-style drinks take almost one-third. ‘The natural products sector is growing with every day that passes’, he said.
Of course, if getting your product into a vending machine is a Big Ask, it’s an even Bigger Ask to get your message of ‘top-quality, natural ingredients’ across to consumers at point of sale…
‘They want to really push Canny out.’
‘The thing is that Automatic Retailing are totally behind us’, Liam said. ‘They want to really push Canny out; they want it to work for us. I know everybody there. I went to Vendex North with them and people were keen. We just want to get some good volume out that will allow us to reinvest in the brand so it can grow from where it is now into something really exciting.’
Bearing in mind Liam Watson’s singular track record of making things happen, together with Automatic Retailing’s eye-watering roster of vending operator customers, you’d be a brave man to bet against the success of Canny…
*For more information about the availability of Canny Drinks, please contact Automatic Vending. Just click here.
