What A Melon: the UK’s most high-tech drink

3,793. That’s how many followers What A Melon has on their Instagram. Sure, it’s a long way off Brooklyn Beckham’s 11.5 million but, for context, this is a soft drink brand whose posts are almost entirely centred around a juice bottle in the colours of a watermelon. There’s a bottle on a pair of trainers. A bottle in a ball pond. A bottle sailing on an inflatable pink flamingo in a swimming pool with the caption, Come on in, the water’s fresh. It’s ridiculous – yet this feed, combined with What A Melon’s other canny social media games, is making serious waves in the expanding world of healthy soft drinks.

‘I was on the phone to the woman running the Waitrose bar two years ago, and she was beside herself. She said, ‘Olly, I’ve not enough time to talk to everyone, let along get back to them.’ The number of functional drinks, health drinks, flavoured waters and such was overwhelming’ – and that was then, says Olly Bolton, co-founder of Alibi, the soft drinks company which released the What A Melon two years ago. Today the soft drink space is busier than ever. Big corporations have cottoned on, with brands like Volvic and Danone all releasing flavoured waters to compete with those producers biting into their bottled water market. What Alibi and its brands What A Melon and Fact Water are doing, however, tells a different story: one with sustainability, traceability and community at its core.

What a Melon comes in tetra pack. The juice doesn’t need refrigeration, which significantly reduces its carbon footprint, and the carton is easy to recycle. Its ingredients – watermelon juice and a squeeze of lemon – are sustainably sourced, as are those in Fact Water, and contain only naturally occurring fruit sugars. Their trump card, however, is that all this is traceable thanks to a blockchain platform called Almond Olly himself developed, in a bid to further consumer trust by promoting transparency in companies and sharing that with customers. Consumers scan a unique code hidden on a product, which then rewards them with brand tokens (that can be redeemed for cash) and reveals the scanned product’s personal history and story. ‘The platform gives brands a way to digitise their products, giving consumers access to detailed supply chain data and product information,’ he explains. ‘Almond gives people an economic incentive to buy profit-for-purpose brands and gives them a way to authenticate their ethical and environmental credentials. They can trace that journey.’