A View from the Top: Peter Harding, head of Lucozade Ribena Suntory

Peter Harding doesn’t look like the bad guy. He doesn't resemble the villain who is responsible for putting mountains of sugar into fizzy drinks and turning the country’s youngsters into a generation of fatties.

But that’s how Harding, who runs Lucozade Ribena Suntory - the UK soft drinks business owned by Japan’s drinks giant, Suntory - was made to feel by everybody from Jamie Oliver to health campaigners and the media.

“I was being stared at, at the school gates by other parents. Jamie Oliver was beating me up, so were other celebrities, NGOs and the media. They were demonising me as though sugar were the new tobacco. The criticism was not nice for anyone, including our employees.”

Eventually, the sting of the sugar lobby, and the personal abuse Harding was receiving, got too much for him. Two years ago – before the Government agreed to introduce the sugar tax which comes into effect next spring – Harding and his colleagues decided to drastically cut the amount of sugar used in its Lucozade, Ribena and Orangina drinks. With Suntory’s blessing and millions to invest, Harding asked his technicians to come up with a new formula for the decades-old energy drinks. They would taste exactly the same but with less sugar.

You probably wouldn’t know it but those gaudy, bright orange and deep purple drinks that are now on sale throughout the country contain half the sugar they previously did. The sugar content has been cut from about 10 or 11g per 100ml of liquid to just 4.5g. That’s less than the recommended sugar level at which the new tax will be levied.

Yet Lucozade Ribena Suntory (LRS) is not telling the public about the sugar cut on purpose. There has been no marketing or advertising around the cuts. This sounds so bizarre that I can’t quite believe why not. If sugar is seen as such an evil, why is LRS not shouting about how it is cutting out the bad stuff?

Harding explains that the silence – until now – is a conscious decision, one that came after talking to the Government’s behaviour insight unit, famous for the ‘nudge’ factor in changing people’s behaviour.

“We want it to be word of mouth. That’s the best way for the message to come across subconsciously. We’ve tested the drinks with the public in tasting sessions at rail stations and other places around the country. People don’t seem to be able to tell the difference; they taste just as sweet,” he says.

Harding’s voluntary lead is a powerful one as LRS is one of the biggest soft drinks companies in the UK with a 7.8 per cent share of the £7bn a year market – Coca Cola and Pepsi are the biggest. As president of the British Soft Drinks Association, the industry trade body, he hopes his move will encourage them and others to follow his example. So far they have not. Rather oddly, if not perversely, chocolate-flavoured drinks and fruit juices – which contain more sugar than most fizzy soft drinks – are excluded from the tax.

Being branded the bad guy is ironic because Harding is obviously someone who takes healthy living and exercise to the extreme. We meet in central London – his HQ is near Heathrow – and he looks as fit as a fiddle, has brilliant blue eyes matched by the colour of his shirt, and is as lean as a whippet after years of marathon running and hideous-sounding Ironman competitions.

“My wife has retired me,” says the 53-year-old, laughing. Instead, he has taken up golf with his four sons, aged between 12 and 18. “It’s a great way of making them talk as you have them with you for several hours. They can’t get away.” But he may still be tempted to try the Lucozade-sponsored Tough Mudder race.

​Harding has been running LRS since it was bought by Suntory from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for £1.3bn four years ago after the pharma giant decided to divest of non-core businesses. At the time, he was working as vice-president of marketing for GSK’s nutritional healthcare, so was a natural to lead the sale and move on into the hot seat.

Suntory – one of the world’s biggest drinks companies – is a great owner, he says, giving LRS both autonomy and responsibility as befits its slogan of “Yatte Minahare”, which is best translated as “go with the spirit” or “follow your nature”. Yatte Minahare was the favourite expression of Suntory’s founder – Shinjiro Torii – who started the company in 1899 with the purpose of creating and adapting western-style spirits to suit Japanese taste. He certainly followed his spirit, travelling to Scotland at the end of the 19th century to learn first-hand about the mysteries of whisky-making.

For Harding, his first mission after the sale was to modernise LRS’s factories in Coleford, Gloucestershire, where Lucozade has been made since the 1950s, and where many of its 350 workers are third generation. “Health and safety are of great importance to us, and we have one of the safest factories in the industry.”

Paradoxically, being liberated from GSK has allowed LRS to go back to its roots as Lucozade and Ribena were created as drinks for health reasons.

Although since branded an energy drink, Lucozade was first made in 1927 by William Owen, a chemist based in Newcastle who had tried for years to find an energy source for those sick with common illnesses, like colds and influenza.

Ribena has a similar story. It was created by Vernon Charley, a scientist at the University of Bristol in 1933, launched as Ribena in 1938, and given out to children free during the Second World War as it was so rich in Vitamin C. Both were bought by Beechams, which in turn became part of GSK.

Now Harding is coming up with a new generation of healthy drinks. Two of the latest include a cactus water that he discovered being made in the Arizona desert – which he claims is the new ‘coconut water’ – and a Luzozade Sport FitWater, with added electrolytes to replace minerals lost during exercise.

Premium mixers being sold under the Merchant’s Heart label are being ‘seeded’, Harding’s expression to describe new launches, and being tested in 150 top bars. As Fever-Tree has demonstrated so vividly, fancy mixers for spirits are a growing market. “And no,” Harding adds, “we are not buying Fever-Tree. It’s too expensive.”

Business is good, he says, with sales running at 5 per cent per annum since the sale. Turnover this year will be around £500m, and LRS now employs 600 people around the country. Bringing Suntory’s Japanese teas and coffees into the UK is another area being explored.

And Brexit? “Well, we’ve been agnostic on Brexit but we would prefer not to leave the EU. We have been hurt by the lower pound but we are more worried about what happens to the Irish border as we have interests in Dublin.”

Harding is clearly happier being the good guy. Yet he acknowledges that what LRS has done to help reduce the public’s sugar intake is a drop in the ocean. “I know what we have done will not make even a dent. But if we can improve people’s health by taking the right actions, and encourage others to do the same thing, then that has to be worth it. Obesity requires multiple solutions from teaching people about healthy eating, nutritional values to taking more exercise. It should be a private-public partnership and will take time.”

For what it’s worth, he and Jamie Oliver have made up. They’ve even taken part in a cooking show with none other than Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, for the UK Harvest charity.