Happy Planet happy to remain sustainable innovators

Happy Planet co-founder Randal Ius recalls that particular sunny day 15 years ago on an organic farm. It was like so many sunny days for he and high school pal Gregor Robertson. They were making juice. Natural and simple. Pure and organic.

It sounds like myth today. A couple of friends mixing up concoctions in the kitchen, hoping to hit the happy formula, then hitting a home run and launching an organic behemoth in a company called Happy Planet.

“That’s a true story,” says Ius. “We held up the carrot glass one day and looked at each other and asked, ‘Why aren’t the people in the city drinking this stuff?’ ”
Not only did the pair take their juice to the city, they went themselves and knocked on every door and shook every hand and told everyone they could about that juice.

“We hit every single grocery store and consumer show to talk to customers,” says Ius. “There was painstaking interaction with the consumer for four or five years. We met thousands of people.”

The networking paid off handsomely. Happy Planet now ships tens of thousands of fruit juices and smoothies a week and has expanded its line into drinkable yogurt, organic soups, and coming this April, Happy Planet Shots: 100 per cent “action packed” natural herb, vitamin, and mineral beverages to boost energy, immunity, detoxification, and even better skin.

Ius explains that filling a massive void in the marketplace allowed Happy Planet to literally explode onto the scene, experiencing a virtually unsustainable growth rate of 80 to 100 per cent a year for the first six years.

“Our first products hit the shelf in 1994 and we didn’t think we were that far ahead of any curve, but looking back we were the pioneers, not only for Canada, but in North America. We were the first company to put blue-green algae in a smoothie, for instance.”

Innovation has kept Happy Planet... well, happy. The funky branding, cool product names, and recognizable bottles have meant incredible customer loyalty. And having one of the founders sitting in the mayor’s chair in Vancouver hasn’t hurt company profile either.

But it’s been a commitment to farmers, to the environment, and to sustainability that has likely been Happy Planet’s greatest marketing success.

“We’ve stayed true to our roots, which are natural foods and organic,” says Ius. “We’ve never wavered from our mission of uniting people with the best tasting and most nutritious foods on the planet.”

Nutritionally potent and nourishingly drinkable, every sip of a Happy Planet juice is like biting into fresh fruit. In fact, each juice contains five to eight pieces of whole fruit. Basically, they pack a flavourful wallop.

Extreme Green is, naturally, a powerhouse of extreme greens like spirulina, spinach and kelp, but blended to taste great with apple, plum, lemon, and banana. Extreme Purple is loaded with the anti-oxidant açai berry, free radical fighting green tea, grapeseed extracts, beta carotene, and enough vitamin C to keep you going for a couple of days.

Ius laughs at the way public perception has changed. When Happy Planet started out, he says, the consumer mindset was that organic and natural foods had to taste terrible.

“One of our goals was to demystify that.”

Mission accomplished.

With a head office on the edge of Vancouver’s trendy Gastown, a production facility in nearby Delta, products that are 100 per cent certified organic, and a policy that still sees the company purchase 60 per cent of its produce from small organic farms – many of them local – Happy Planet has become an icon and is firmly entrenched in the pop culture lexicon. Not bad for a couple of guys mixing up juices.