Why I regret inventing the innocent smoothie brand

We all have secrets which, when we remember them, shroud us in shame. I’m afraid I have a particularly dark one that I’m forced to remember almost every day of my life.

Twenty years ago, I was a working in a big London ad agency with a smart and ambitious young man named Richard Reed. I liked him a lot and it was clear that he wouldn’t be constrained by the advertising industry forever. Sure enough, he came to me one day and announced that he and some friends were starting a business, making fruit smoothies called ‘Fast Tractor’. Richard explained that they’d chosen Fast Tractor because the tractor that transported the fruit from field to fruit crusher was fast. Or something. I wasn’t keen on the name and our conversation turned to the smoothies themselves. Unlike Sunny Delight, I said, which was cynically loaded with additives, smoothies were 100 per cent fruit, which made them kind of innocent.