Gerry Khermouch

Within the world of small startups, my ideal is the two-person shop, where you get the healthy push and pull of competing viewpoints but still keep the overhead miniscule. And if you look out on the field of entrepreneurial brands, two-person partnerships are legion.

For the past couple of years, stoked in part by the rich observations served up at the winter edition of BevNET Live, I’ve inaugurated a new year by offering some resolutions that beverage entrepreneurs might be wise to consider. I make no claim of infallibility in proffering them, and it’s easy enough to think of successful beverage companies that violated each precept (I can’t think of any that violated all the rules, and you’re welcome to aspire to be the first!).

As those of you who’ve learned to skip right over them will know, I often start my columns with an amusing or revealing anecdote, or even sometimes a mordant joke. You won’t get that this month, because that certainly isn’t appropriate when the topic of the column is the killer in our midst: Energy drinks.

A few years ago, when high-end bottled water got slammed with the twin effects of a deep recession and an environmental backlash, many of us called it the perfect storm. A sector that was riding high suddenly was in an impossible situation: only fairly affluent consumers could afford those brands any more, and within that social stratum it suddenly had become unfashionable to be spotted carrying around plastic bottles containing water shipped from halfway around the world.

As I write this column, summer is easing off and soon it will be time to stow the t-shirts away. (At least it will be for those of you for whom t-shirts don’t qualify yet as year-round “business casual” attire.) So I thought it might be fun to riff on t-shirts, given their inextricable role in the beverage business. After all, folks’ reception to t-shirts can be a great gauge of brand health, particularly in image-driven categories like beer and energy drinks.

Thanks to the miracle of smart phones, my contacts often zap me photos of interesting store displays they spot in their market meanderings. One subset that we occasionally flag consists of ridiculously hot deals on purportedly super-premium beverages. And despite rhetoric from top brass to the contrary, it’s easy to get sucked into brand-equity-draining deals when you’re trying to hit a volume number or appease an important retail customer.

Hey, readers: if you’re in the beverage innovation game and haven’t yet read Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), you ought to put it on your summer reading list. Not that the book utters a single word, to my recollection, about the packaged beverage business, but its insights into innovation are fascinating reading.…

A few weeks ago I had the unexpected pleasure of catching a preview of a new documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I don’t write much about non-liquid forms of nutrition these days, and I’m not particularly a sushi fan either. But the film proved to be a moving experience in ways that I think are relevant to beverages, particularly the innovation space.

With institutional investors getting a bad rap in beverages these days – the National Enquirer version of the complaint is they force you to juice your projections in order to get the deal done, then steal your company when you fail to hit those unrealistic targets – a lot of early-stage beverage companies have been in a quandary as to where else to turn once they’ve reached the limits of where friends-and-family and angels can take them.

It’s become one of the more overused words in the marketing lexicon: authentic. Yet there’s no denying that many consumers are looking to support brands that don’t seem to have been fabricated in a corporate conference room, that have something real about them – whether the persona of their founders, their local provenance or their retrieval of an age-old tradition – that might seem to help ground the users’ own existence. In beverages, how does it apply?…

In Part 1…, I made the perhaps counterintuitive case that distribution options for fledgling non-alcoholic beverage brands actually may be on the rise, even in a broader landscape where wholesale and retail consolidation continue unabated. Entrepreneurs, sometimes from outside the beverage industry, are launching new houses. Beer wholesalers, their core beer brands plateauing, are being driven to reconsider participation in NAs, despite the complications these bring to their business models.

At a time when so many Americans make their livelihoods by moving electrons around, dragging heavy cases of liquid from a warehouse to store shelves might seem to be an anachronism. Certainly, it’s not an easy way to make a living, especially since some of us consider a trip from our desk to the coffee machine to be exerting. After decades of wholesale and retail consolidation, the odds of failure are high, too. Yet in the past couple of years, the direct-store delivery options available to new beverage brands seem to have been growing again, albeit in halting steps and…

After getting my newsletter out in New York the other day, I rewarded myself with a bike ride to the Upper East Side in quest of a coffee or a beer. Turned out it was going to be coffee – or maybe hot chocolate – that day, once I spied a nicely designed corner place with the odd name Little Brown Chocolate Bakery & Coffee. It had recently opened and, wouldn’t you know it, the owner was perched on a stool, observing his customers’ grazing habits, monitoring activity at the Starbucks across the street, bantering with anyone who wanted a moment of his time. The bald head, alert, friendly eyes and thick earring certainly made him look familiar.

For a few years now the impression has been spreading – promulgated by folks like me – that natural foods are rapidly going mainstream and that it’s only a matter of time before you can grab a 6-pack of kombucha at the local c-store. Hyperbole aside, is there much truth to that sentiment? As an informal gauge, I’ve found it interesting to observe the growing (if still small) numbers of natural foods exhibitors at the Natural Products Expo West that turn up as exhibitors at the NACS c-store extravaganza in the fall not long after their Expo debuts. That migration simply didn’t happen in such short order in the past.

View the Photos >>…
NEW YORK, NY – JULY 11 2006 – The biggest beverage-related topic of discussion at this year’s NASFT Summer Fancy Food Show wasn’t a new product or company, instead, it was about a company that wasn’t there. A rumor that the IZZE Beverage Company was being acquired by Pepsi, an idea that was first reported two weeks ago by Gerry Khermouch, editor of Beverage Business Insights and a Beverage Spectrum contributor, was the chief topic of many a liquid merchant. Fueling the discussion was the observation by many attendees that IZZE did not occupy the $6200