Ever since those nice young chaps at Innocent Drinks sold a controlling stake in their smoothie-making business to Coca-Cola, Ella’s Kitchen founder Paul Lindley has become something of the poster boy for the ethical grocery start-up generation.

Ella’s Kitchen has been powering ahead in recent years at home and abroad with lucrative contracts in Australia, Canada and Scandinavia helping it grow sales by 36% to £41.2m for the year to 30 June 2012.

Now today it seems that Ella’s is being wooed by its own US food giant in the shape of Hain Daniels. Reports today were unclear as to the nature of the deal that Hain is after or for that matter what Lindley would be comfortable with.

After all Ella’s is a very personal brand: it doesn’t carry his own name - more importantly, it carries that of his daughter. Something we have seen more and more of in the post-Innocent grocery world.

When these brands become a success they inevitably come to the attention of bigger, more established and - dare I say - less touchy-feely fish.

You only have to look at the recent travails of Debbie and Andrew Keeble to see what can go wrong when small brand owners cede control of their business. Having sold to Vion, the couple were powerless to prevent the further sale of the brand to ABP when the Dutch meat processing giant decided to cut its losses in the UK.

The brand is still on sale in stores up and down the country, with packs featuring key info on the founders who have simply nothing to do with the product inside the pack.

Lindley will no doubt be shrewd enough to avoid such an outcome in his negotiations with Hain, but he could do a lot worse than follow in the footsteps of those lads at Innocent.

While critics will only ever see its tie-up with Coke as a sell-out, Innocent was smart enough to see that it needed a big fish to take the brand to the next level. In so doing, it not only maintained the jobs of those involved in the business, but also secured its future growth and generated better support for charitable causes - one of its raisons d’etre.

The lads from Innocent worked closely with Coke to see that this was all in place - gradually allowing Coke take greater financial control of the business until earlier this year when Coke increased its stake to more than 90%. But the key was that this only happened as and when the founders were ready.

They are now free to move on to spend more time on other important projects. This is certainly something that Lindley will have taken note of - especially given his own crusade against childhood obesity. There are clearly some very big decisions ahead for Ella’s dad.

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