The great-grandson of the founder of Cottee's cordial says one day he would like to buy back the brand.
Morgan Cottee, 24, has inherited his ancestor's get up and go, starting a health food company and opening his first juice bar, called Blendco, in Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn.
The menu includes "blends", or smoothies, and "bowls" of ingredients such as chia seeds, almond milk, dates, bananas, mint and coconut water. Blendco also makes and sells salted caramel and vanilla macadamia energy balls.
Blendco already has 20 staff and sells the energy balls to more than 70 cafes and health food stores. Its growing online business sells "juice cleanses" – bottles of cold pressed fruit juice – and organic smoothie ingredient packs of nuts, fruits and seeds.
But Morgan has big dreams.
"Once Blendco is up and as successful as it can possibly be, my mission is to bring Cottee's back into the family, somehow," he says.
He would give it more of a health-food emphasis.
Morgan is proud of how in the 1920s his great-grandfather, Harold Warnock Cottee, took a backyard peanut packing business in Lismore, NSW, and turned it into a household name, making Passiona fruit drink, and later cordials, jellies and jams.
It was sold to multinational General Foods in 1966 and its products are now owned by Asahi and Heinz.
Morgan says while they contained vitamins from fruit, the cordials evolved when less was known about the potential health affects of sugar and additives in foods.
He is aware of research released last month by Nielsen Homescan reporting that national sales of cordial fell by 5.8 per cent by value and 11.2 per cent by volume in the year to October 2015.
It found that 53.7 per cent of Australian households stock the drink, down from 56.1 per cent in 2014 and from 58.7 per cent in 2013.
Morgan says it's time for change. "You're not going to be able to use sugar syrup to make cordial in the next 10-15 years because people are going to become aware that that isn't healthy for you."
When Morgan's father, Harold Alfred Cottee, was a teenager in the late 1960s he would spend holidays picking fruit at the company orchard in Renmark, South Australia. So Morgan embodies the famous advertising jingle: My dad picks the fruit/that goes to Cottee's/to make the cordial/that I like best.
But Harold Alfred became a barrister, no Cottee has returned to the food and beverage game since they sold the business.
"My dad always says I'm very similar to Harold Warnock [Cottee], my great-grandfather," Morgan said. "The business mindset, taking risks and doing what I believe in, what I want to achieve.
"It's always something I've wanted to do – to run Cottee's cordial, to bring that back into the family. You'd need a lot of money to do so and things to go your way. But I think it's possible."
