Rachel Horton, Alice Webster and Poppy Brookes are in the process of launching CleanShakes while still studying for a business qualification at Newcastle Business School. They have secured £12,000 funding from the Innovation Strategy Board and Science City and are investing it in manufacturing techniques to make the best product possible. Here, Rachel explains what's going to happen next.

Sum up your attitude to this new venture

Running your own business is the biggest life adventure - every day is different and challenging. I’ve always been a fast paced, excitement seeker and business is just that. It’s great when we are able to over-come the seemingly impossible, striving forward when others have given up. We’ve developed a very self-directed determination.

We make our own processes and systems; we test, experiment, speak to customers and consequently CleanShakes is constantly evolving. That incremental, hands-on, front-line business building is what gets us out of bed in the morning, excited for the day.

The downs are mere pot holes in the road. My mum always taught me, if it feels like the end of the world today, sleep on it and attack it tomorrow and that is how I move forward. Other downs, and most entrepreneurs will say the same when starting, is the lack of money. Everything is ten times more expensive than you planned for.

You're formulating a brand as we speak, how are you approaching that?

We consider the business as a person: it needs to have personality, a voice, quirks and emotion. When you begin designing the brand, you think about it quite superficially but the business has to live and breathe it.

Our first CleanShakes logo looked like a fruit shoot energy drink. It took getting out there and speaking to customers to realise how wrong our branding was and how is has evolved over time. We know one food entrepreneur who is onto his 57th rebrand, which sounds insane when you’re on the outside, but it is a fact of good branding.

Launching this Autumn: The current CleanShakes brand is looking pretty sweet

At the beginning, your brand is fluid and flexible, you are continuously experimenting and evolving it and you will not get it 100% right the first time, more like the tenth time.

This is very much a health market product, are there opportunities to be had here?

You can’t be everything to everyone so we don’t view the health market as one united mass of needs, wants and demands. Within the market there is a spectrum of belief and reasons for following a particular diet. For some you will never be clean enough, or healthy enough, or sustainably sourced enough.

You need to learn who your customers are and their demands and craft an offering that satisfies them. Even the healthiest consumer will at some point have a ‘cheat’ day - don’t assume that a particular customer will act in a certain way the entire time.

How have you approached the thorny issue of supplying supermarkets?

At one point, supermarkets were seen as the ‘last leg’ of food business development. You spoke to them when you were ready to sell and never before. We’ve done the opposite – within three weeks of having this vague CleanShakes concept, we were sat in a supermarket sales meeting, pitching and getting feedback. It provided a lot of learning and gave the business a sense of what we had to do to get to that level.

Each supermarket will have very different demands, expectations and buying processes. You can only find this out through direct interaction with buyers. Boots and Ocado have been fantastic.

The finalised samples- what do you think of the colours Twitter? #almondmilk #dairyfree #tastethebenefits pic.twitter.com/hbphBzPwDK

— Clean Shakes (@CleanShakes) December 9, 2014

If you think about it logically, if supermarkets are the ‘last leg’, we figured that we needed to know what that entails. So be persistent, network, ring the head office and grab every opportunity you can.

I was at a wedding a few weeks ago with the head buyer at Sainsbury’s and of course, I asked lots of questions about their processes I asked for her business card and for a meeting in six months’ time.

A hackneyed question perhaps, but how does the land lie for women in business right now?

For CleanShakes, being a woman in business is fantastic. We are an all-female team and that creates a fantastic dynamic. We’ve actually found that we are getting invited to lots of events as female entrepreneurs or into schools as a female ‘role models’.

We really enjoy speaking to young people, especially girls who love business and it is an agenda that we want to shout from the roof tops.

How easy is it to create and sell a food product?

Let's say you create product at home and you want to commercialise it so it has pride of place on the shelves at Waitrose. That process is very complicated and lengthy so don’t do it alone.

We sought out a wide range of experts and professionals from microbiologists to food scientists, to food processing experts - and they have all been a fantastic help. Ask questions and don’t be afraid to say ‘I don’t understand.’

What other advice could you offer someone considering your route?

You’re often taught in the business world to plan before you act, but we rebut that. Get out there and experiment, do business, tests things and then use that evidential knowledge and experience to build a brilliant business. Sometimes, less thinking and planning and more action pays dividends.

Secondly, the team is the impetus for business success – so invest into it. The CleanShakes girls couldn’t be more different, we have different personalities, opinions and interests but by working together we have developed a potentially high-growth business.

We are looking forward to seeing where this journey will take us.