Only 25 people work at six-year-old sparkling fruity water business Dash — and they sell 24 million cans a year. As ratios go, it’s an impressive one.
“They drink a lot of it too, the office goes through some 8000 cans a year,” laughs co-founder Alex Wright who, alongside Jack Scott, presides over a familiar-sounding culture for a young drinks start-up.
Dash’s Tottenham Court Road base is named “Wonky HQ” for the odd-shaped raspberries, lime and other fruit that flavours its drinks.
There’s astroturfed floor (of course) and a sign above a handwashing mirror reading “we judge on taste, not looks”.
With a second office in Sydney — 15% of Dash’s sales are in Australia — the entrepreneurial duo have come far since first meeting while working at a soft drinks firm after university. They bonded over food waste — as you do.
Scott grew up on a potato farm which — like all fruit and vegetable producers — saw 17% of fruit and veg binned at the farm gates due to blemishes.
“We were trying to come up with a product to use for this rejected, wonky fruit, and then we saw soft drinks stuffed with sugar and artificial ingredients. That was our lightbulb moment — infusing wonky fruit into spring water to create a delicious drink without sugar or sweetener.”
So in 2016, the duo quit their jobs in marketing and sales at a soft drinks business, won a small loan from Virgin Startup, worked with food waste charity Feedback to find wonky fruit, and spent every weekend for three months with a table offering samples in Battersea, Regent’s and Green Parks and Wandsworth Common.
“People were walking around carrying water bottles with their own choppedup lemon and cucumber, so we made it in a ready-to-drink format, using spring water infused with wonky fruit, and a SodaStream to add bubbles, and waited to see what people thought.”
At the time, Wright points out: “We were the only drink of this type in Europe which did not have any sugar or sweetener in it. When they tried Dash, only about 50% of people liked the drinks, because they had sweeter palates, but it’s changed since then with the sugar tax and more awareness.”
Scott and Wright were only 24 when they launched Dash: “We had very little experience creating a product, business and team, and the most challenging thing was overcoming the mental hurdle of actually launching the products and getting it out to the world. We learned to follow Eric Reiss’s Lean Startup model — start small, get a product out to the world, test it and iterate to continually improve.”
The first stockist was Selfridges — “it took 20 million emails” is how Wright says they got on the shelves.
Persistence became key: the entrepreneurs were desperate to get into Whole Foods, but its buyer didn’t respond to their emails. “So I went and sat in their headquarters’ reception at 6am, waiting for the buyer to come,” Wright says. “Only to find out after a few hours she was working from home.”
He got noticed, though, and launched Dash’s raspberry flavour in the store; now, Wright adds, Dash is Whole Foods’ bestselling drink.
Today the brand is stocked in 10,000 stores worldwide including Starbucks, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and British Airways, and in 20 countries.
Sales have more than doubled every year since launch, and fans include Richard Branson, Victoria and David Beckham and Maya Jama.
The founders have raised £21 million to date, from VCs including Beringea and angels including former Tyrrell’s boss David Milner and the founders of Beavertown Brewery, Links of London, Charles Tyrwhitt and Sipsmith Gin.
The duo are now focused on growing their international business: they launched in Australia during Covid, producing the first batches of Dash cans from Melbourne’s wonky fruit without the UK team meeting farmers, manufacturers, or retailers, or even tasting it until they’d been on sale for three weeks due to the pandemic restrictions.
“Fortunately the drinks tasted outstanding,” Wright asserts.
Their success hasn’t gone unnoticed: major soft drinks brands including Coca-Cola have created their own fruit-infused seltzers.
Dash’s founders claim they’re unconcerned: “We’re beating them because consumers connect with our brand mission. We use fruit that battles food waste, real fruit and vegetables not flavours made in a lab, and spring water not tap water.
“We have the genuine story and they don’t.”
