Founded by husband and wife duo Jodie and Andy Howie 20 years ago, Shaken Udder is the number-one premium milkshake brand on the UK’s shelves. To get a sense of the company, its ethos and what it can offer the vending channel, Ian Reynolds-Young spoke to Senior Brand Manager, Paras Arora.
Paras Arora is one of those guys who’s more than enthusiastic about his job. Think, ‘effervescent’: lively, exciting and entertaining – even when the conversation is all about milkshakes…
He starts our conversation by going back to the roots of Shaken Udder: ‘For Jodie and Andy, it was always about ‘what business are you going to start?” rather than, ‘what job are you going to go into?’ They’re entrepreneurial people by nature. When they met at the Agricultural University in Essex, they found that they had a mutual interest in music and loved going to festivals.’
It was at the V festival that the couple had their ‘lightbulb’ moment… ‘They were looking around at the food and drink stalls and they just felt really uninspired by what was on offer. There was nothing that excited them, just ‘a lot of rubbish stuffed with artificial ingredients’, which was pretty uninspiring for two people brought up around a farmhouse kitchen table.’
There was very little available when it came to milk. This was bad news for Jodie who was, and still is, ‘a self-confessed milk addict who would readily swap a fizzy drink for a glass of the white stuff.’ So, they looked at each other and said, ‘what if there was a stand that was selling really thick, creamy, delicious, fresh milkshakes? And what if it was our stand, and our milkshakes?’
Jodie and Andy thought it was a great concept, but when they shared it with friends and family, the reaction was ‘why on Earth would you want to do that? It’s a rubbish idea!’ The crux of the negativity they encountered was, ‘who buys milkshakes anymore?’ But, characteristically, the couple stuck to their guns and decided to go for it, as Paras says: ‘They bought a blender, they bought loads and loads of ingredients and they went into Andy’s mum’s farmhouse kitchen and just started blending up a load of recipes for milkshakes. They got a stand together, kitted it out, booked themselves in for various festivals and basically spent a year going up and down the country selling milkshakes to festival goers.’
In terms of customer reaction, their business was a success from the get-go. Those endless days of experimentation in the kitchen had paid off. ‘Their delicious, fresh milkshakes were a stand-out amongst the rest of the fare that was on offer at these events’, Paras says, ‘but the clincher with the discerning crowd was that the milkshakes were made with real ingredients. There was no ‘essence of this’ or ‘concentrate of that’ or E numbers. They used real fruit and real Belgian chocolate. People absolutely fell in love with the product.’
What’s more, if a product is to ‘have legs’, it needs a distinctive identity and the off-the-wall branding also went down a storm. ‘People loved the name Shaken Udder and the ‘quirky cow’ merchandise that went with it. It wasn’t long before they were being asked, ‘where can I buy this outside of festivals?’ In those days, of course, the answer was ‘you can’t’. But that wasn’t a probem, it was an opportunity. Jodie and Andy quickly turned to supermarket shelves to see if there was anything to compare with Shaken Udder products available in mainstream retailing.
‘There were other products on the dairy aisle but one thing was immediately obvious: they tasted nothing like the milkshakes they were making’, Paras says. ‘There were flavoured milk offers, but they were of a really thin consistency and didn’t taste anything like Shaken Udder. More often than not, they contained artificial ingredients, a choice Jodie and Andy wouldn’t even contemplate, because they prided themselves on having real ingredients in their milkshakes.’
Talk about ‘taste the difference’!
It was clear what needed to be done. The couple needed to find a way to bottle their products and get them out onto supermarket shelves, where they would be readily available to the general public. ‘Anyone who’s ever tried to get a new product listed with the big supermarket chains knows that it’s no easy task’, Paras says. ‘They had a bit of a job to do and it took them a few tough years, but they were resolute. They stuck to their guns and put their heart and soul into it.’ And it wasn’t just their hearts and souls, either: the funds they’d been saving for their wedding – and for a marital home – were sacrificed for the good of their mission…
‘Basically, they invested everything they had into the business because they were convinced that they had a winner on their hands and eventually, in 2008, they got their first listing.’ What a first it was: The first for Shaken Udder in retail was Harvey Nichols.
Soon, other up-market doors began to open
‘It was an extremely exciting time’, Paras says of the auspicious beginning. Soon, though, other up-market doors began to open in the form of Harrods, Selfridges and Waitrose. ‘That’s when the business really started to snowball to where we are today. Shaken Udder milkshakes are now available in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Co-op, Boots, Booths, Ocado – in fact we’re in every single major supermarket in the UK.’
*Next time, Paras talks about the addition of ambient products to the Shaken Udder portfolio, how that moved the business into the market sector’s premier league, and why the time is right to concentrate on the burgeoning automated retail sector.
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