Text: Russel Wasserfall
Images: Courtesy Real Smooth
Subscription smoothies. Seriously? You pay a monthly subscription and get smoothies, packed and ready to blitz, delivered to your door. What a time to be alive!
The ‘rona has thrown up some amazing new business ideas, especially in the restaurant and catering arena, and this one’s a doozy. You know how you’re always left with stuff like half a banana and nineteen peanuts after you’ve made a smoothie? Or you can’t be bothered to make a smoothie because all the measuring and cutting and opening this bottle and that container is such a schlep?
Imagine if you could just open the freezer, tip a bag of ingredients into the blender and seconds later be sipping a delicious smoothie through a reusable straw? That’s what the cool kids at Real Smooth have worked out.
First there was a conversation on a dance floor way before the pandemic hit. One human said to another human: “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could have a smoothie right now?”
It grew and grew. Possibilities were considered and rejected. A mobile kiosk floated into view but drifted away again when the hassle of portioning and keeping ingredients fresh sunk that idea. Nattering about recipes and favourite fruits, equipment and environmental impact turned inevitably to the myriad reasons why you wouldn’t do something cool like that.
This lead to the difficult thing about smoothies and why more people don’t make them at home… even though they are awesome. Nothing is more satisfying than the right smoothie at the right moment, but measuring ingredients and using half a banana, 16 almonds and a third of a cup of berries is a pain in the butt. It’s also wasteful.
Which is when the light bulb snapped on.
This crew is all about can, not can’t. What if they sourced sustainable or organic ingredients, portioned them and then in compostable bags then froze them? Then they could deliver perfect smoothie kits for the cool kids to assemble and enjoy at home.
Even better, what if the customers subscribed to a service where there paid for a weekly delivery of frozen plant-based smoothie kits? And that is how a conversation on the dancefloor became a fabulously innovative little business called Real Smooth. It’s exactly the kind of business that corona lockdowns made space for. Habituating people to food delivery models and creating time and space for people to test and float clever ideas, lockdown has to take a bow here.
Real Smooth has come up with a range of 10 smoothies, each with a different health or lifestyle benefit. If you sign up for their monthly subscription, every Monday the doorbell goes and you receive a package with the ingredients for 6 smoothies. On the 7th day your blender can rest waiting for Monday to roll around again.
You pop them in the freezer when they arrive. When it’s smoothie time, choose your daily dose and blitz it. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. The Real Smooth team even has you covered if you only have a stick blender. Just bash the bag against the wall 3 times and then blend. Sorted!
Each plant-based smoothie pack will render a 400 ml serving on average. If you like a wetter smoothie just add water or oat milk. They’re testing the water now, but there are plans to introduce a range of complementary wholefood, sustainable products like a granola and whole seed mixes.
Who says a shouted conversation on a dancefloor can’t lead to greater things?
To check Real Smooth out, got to realsmooth.co or mail [email protected]