There was no market data for canned sparkling rhubarb sales when Mark Palmer and his fellow Cawston Press co-founders hosted a live research panel at a barbecue, as they pressed early concoctions on a SodaStream to family and friends.
“There were no reference points to say that this was a good idea to go into,” recalls Palmer.
“But I remember writing the check off for the first production, which was about £80,000, so it was pretty scary. It was one of those moments around what started as a good idea at a barbecue suddenly became pretty real.”
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Cawston Press had originally started life as Cawston Vale in 1986, a Norfolk brand supplying wine boxes and selling apple juice on the side. Fifteen years ago, Palmer and his business partners undertook a management buy-in of the business, rebranded and initially believed that apple would outsell rhubarb when they relaunched with two products.
Today, the premium, healthy soft drinks brand has revenues of around £25m and sold over 45 million sparkling rhubarb cans since launching in 2014. It has since become the number one brand in rhubarb — pressing fruit rather than concentrate — and with 71% market share.
Cawston Press co-founder Mark Palmer has led the rise of the British independent brand. · Daniel Ogulewicz
“We felt it was just an opportunity to take the central theme of pressing fruit, pressing apples and blending it with other great ingredients, but to move that into more on-the-go formats,” says Palmer, who has held senior marketing positions at Pret A Manger, Green & Black’s and Burger King.
After their barbecue feedback, the team still had to work on getting the balance right between sparkling water and juice, the resulting soft drink in a can costing more than the industry norm.
“We felt why wouldn’t customers want this because it tastes great and hopefully we managed to present it in a beautiful way in terms of the design,” adds Palmer. “But it was quite a technical challenge to be able to put that much pressed juice into a can.”
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Once they hit the road with their “grown-up soft drinks”, the British market took to the drink, the nostalgia factor perhaps hitting home from childhood days of apple rhubarb pies, crumbles and sweets.
“The novelty factor was was much greater for people when they tried it,” says Palmer, a Brit who now lives in Melbourne. “There’s definitely a love and nostalgia around rhubarb, whether it takes people back to Sunday lunches, family moments or the countryside association.”
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Cawston also hit upon the children’s market after scoring its biggest brand partnership to date with Disney’s (DIS) Inside Out 2 last year, the first movie of 2024 to gross $1bn globally.
Cawston Press’ Brilliant Beetroot is now the firm’s second-biggest seller.
The move, a coup for an independent British brand, had been initiated by Cawston’s head of marketing Milly Tuck.
“We really liked the association with Disney but particularly the Inside Out films, that it was a force for good in terms of mental health and talking about people’s feelings,” admits Palmer.
“We’re not as big as some of the major national competitors and customers probably felt Cawston Press was growing up a bit and being able to do things like that probably surprised them a little.”
Since COVID, Cawston Press, which employs 32 staff, has doubled down on the UK market, which now represents over 90% of total sales, after losing around half its sales over four months.
You would be hard-pressed to miss the branding in UK stores too, a mark which has seen the company win several design awards over the years.
Cawston Press has become the number one brand in Rhubarb, with 71% market share, thanks to its sparkling can sales.
“I kind of wonder whether it’s time to change because we’ve had it for a few years but people are very fond of it,” adds Palmer.
As they are with its beetroot and apple offering in a carton, the company’s second biggest seller. After receiving hundreds of weekly correspondence, they then flipped beetroot to become the main ingredient and rebranded as Brilliant Beetroot.
“There are those that tend to have a little shot of it every morning, but there’s also a secondary audience of sports people as the beetroot properties are good,” says Palmer.
Cyclists and ironman athletes are now some of the consumers that Cawston Press had never envisaged. “I wish I could say that we were strategically ahead of our times and spotted that when we created the product, but we weren’t,” smiles Palmer.
“Green & Black’s was founded in 1991, by husband and wife Craig Sams and Jo Fairley. If you think of Anita Roddick and The Body Shop, Craig is like the natural food version of her and was doing whole food products back in the 60s before it became popular.
Jo’s job at the time as a magazine editor was all about how things look beautiful, do they work or are they desirable and so Green & Black’s was a joint creation of the green and ethical and luxury indulgence.
It was the fusion of the two things and almost saying you can have both of those in one package and I learned from Jo of her obsession around product quality, don’t cut any corners on the product quality, and if anything isn’t top notch don’t expect people to buy it again. She was ruthless about that.
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From her background, producing something that looks seductively attractive and how journalists might want to write about that and put it on pages, the design and the right vision was also important to me too.
I always admired their ability to not do what the market told them to do. If you were launching a chocolate bar in the UK back then, you would have launched a milk chocolate bar not a dark one.
So if you’re sitting in a big company and someone tells you that there’s a trend towards dark chocolate, the first thing you do is look at the stats and go, well, there is a trend, but it’s not big enough for us.
What Jo did was seize the opportunity and give it all their love and attention. It might be small for a big company, but it can be something as a small start-up, to champion it and stand for something.”
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