How Dash Water turned wonky fruit into a scale-up success

Dash Water’s business journey began with a table set up in a London public park. Co-founders Alex Wright and Jack Scott offered passers-by samples of their natural fruit drink, with a vat of carbonated water.

“We saw a gap in the market for a product that didn’t have any sugar or sweetener, but still tasted delicious,” recalls Wright.

Both had backgrounds in farming but had gone on to work for large corporates in the food & beverage industry. However, armed with a novel idea, they decided to go it alone.

In fact, there was another twist to their drink, which they wanted to take to the mass market.

“We also wanted to raise awareness about food waste,” recalls Wright. “Forty per cent of fruit and veg doesn’t end up on consumers’ plates...it’s mad.”

So Dash uses so-called “wonky fruit” in its drinks, which would otherwise have gone to waste. In the early days, it worked with food waste charity Feedback, sourcing fruit which had blemishes or was the wrong weight. This meant it “didn’t fit the strict criteria of the supermarkets, so got rejected”, explains Wright. In time, they would enter a direct relationship with farmers.

Dash Water was launched in the summer of 2017, with an initial batch of 200,000 cans.

They started out by selling only in Selfridges, before slowly conquering more retailers. Wright would travel around with samples in a backpack, he recalls, using all his “persistence and charm”.

“People buy from people”, was one of his key learnings.

These days, the cans can be bought in many large retailers or consumers can purchase them directly, in bulk, online, giving them another route to market.

The business has raised £21m to meet its ambitions to scale and it is on track to sell 65 million cans this year, according to Wright.

Dash is Wright’s first business and he’s had to learn how to become a leader. Coaching has been key to his success, he says.

Wright has a paid coach who can give him “uncensored and non-judgmental” feedback. He prefers this method because the drawback of informal, specialist coaching, from people like friends or contacts in the industry, is that confidentiality can become a “barrier”, says Wright.

He runs an interesting exercise with his coach once a year. He asks him to collect 360-degree feedback from his leadership team, which is “anonymous and uncensored”.

The coach then digests this and relays it to him. Having an intermediary like this keeps it more honest, Wright says.

Wright’s ambition is to sell hundreds of millions of his cans each year and "lead Europe's healthy hydration revolution."