Despite two failed businesses to his name, Adam Pritchard still had the appetite to raise £250,000 from friends to start another. It wasn't an impulse gamble though. Pritchard says he spent six months "on and off" in the British Library researching the market. The result? His juice business Pomegreat turned over £15m in 2007.

Having left school at the age of 16, Pritchard says he had always had high aspirations for himself, but he didn't think he could achieve those by working for somebody else. When a friend (now a major shareholder) said he should come and check out a juice he'd found in Pakistan, he went for it.

"We developed the idea and ran with it," he recalls. Back in the UK he learned about processing techniques, where the fruit grew (he travelled to India and Iran), and its medicinal qualities. "I thought, 'if I'm going to give this a go I really need to understand what I'm doing'." When his friend became ill and left the business on a day-to-day basis, he took over on his own.

He says for most of 2004 the business looked like it was going to go bust. But in 2005, Sainsbury's gave the product some shelf space and Pritchard says Pomegreat's "PR machine" started to yield some results: "The sales took off. It quickly moved from a £600,000 turnover company in 2005, to £15m in 2007."

Although a venture capital company initially structured the financial, operating and marketing sides to the business, Pritchard says in the last year he has replaced that with "a more internally based, traditional structure-a board of directors and a management team."

Pritchard still "outsources" a couple of key functions, as he explains: "There are elements where we feel the business is better served by being outsourced. The juice comes from a variety of locations. We still only have a full-time staff of eight people. We don't own our own manufacturing facilities (we manufacture in Durham, Shepton Mallet and Germany), and we don't have an in-house PR agency."

He admits that while it's challenging to supply the major UK retailers, Pomegreat wouldn't be in the position it's in without them. "I wanted to bring pomegranate juice to the masses, which had never been done in the UK or Europe before," he says. "If you think you can achieve that by not working with the major retailers then you're sorely mistaken. They're the toughest retailers to deal with in Europe, but at the same time they give you the volume of opportunity you can't get in any other country in Europe. If you get your offer right and manage it carefully and diligently, then these relationships are worth having," says Pritchard.

His aim is to emulate the success of his competitor, Ocean Spray (he reckons US company PomWonderful will "soon be going home with its tail between its legs" because UK consumers don't like the taste). And to build a long-term relationship with suppliers. "If there's a problem with the supply chain it's mine to manage, and the better relationship you have, the less problems you have," he says. "We don't have many problems because one of my main roles is to ensure that the relationship's as good as it can be."

As for his own success, he says he doesn't remember setting out thinking, 'I'm going to make a lot of money'. He explains: "When I sold my first litre of fruit juice I thought, 'Wow, this is amazing'. Now we sell a lot of juice but for me, it's not based around money, it's about what you've achieved. I think it goes hand in hand. If the brand's successful, the money follows."