Jeffrey Klineman

Now that it’s bottled and available – for now, pretty much only in Boston, via Blue Coast distributing, but soon to roll out in New York – the company is looking for a full-time CEO to run the business.

Although there were mockups and flavors – even sampling — and an accompanying bubbly giddiness at the Honest Tea Expo East booth, there was no confirmation that the brand will be rolling out a line of carbonated soft drinks.

You’d think Carl Sweat, the hard-charging CEO of FRS, would have it easy by now. Strong investors, a dynamite functional additive, popular endorsers and clever marketing have been wrapped together into a very cold-box-friendly package. But the company is still fighting it out every day, trying to convince consumers that the quercetin compound that powers the product is worth its sometimes challenging taste and its hard-to-define health benefit.

The Healthy Brands Collective Corp. has acquired Living Harvest Foods, a hemp products company that makes a leading brand of hemp milk, Tempt.

Marketing whiz Matthew Kahn, who worked closely with Glaceau marketing chief Rohan Oza in the key growth years immediately preceding the company’s eventual sale to the Coca-Cola Co., Inc., is moving into a similar role at Heineken, where he will be the new VP of Marketing for Portfolio Brands.

Talk about piling on. During the same week that the New York City Board of Health passed its ban on serving jumbo sodas, a pair of developments in two other closely watched social and environmental causes are affecting the Coca-Cola Co., including calorie counts in fast food chains and a battle over Genetically Modified Organisms.

Sparkling probiotic drink KeVita has closed a round of financing. The brand is touted as a less-vinegary but still probiotic beverage co-founded by nutritional consultant Chakra Earthsong Levy and winemaker Bill Moses.

Ecuadorian energy blend Runa received a little stimulation itself recently in the form of a $3 million round of financing from a variety of investors, company co-founder Dan MacCombie confirmed to BevNET on Friday.

Here’s a win for former Red Bull honcho-turned Big Red owner Gary Smith, who managed to get Big Red into Pepsi Bottling Ventures’ North Carolina markets starting in July.

Expo East kicks off on Sept. 20 in Baltimore, and when it does it will be accompanied by the debut of a year-long research initiative, New Hope 360’s Next Report. BevNET had a chance to speak with New Hope editor Carlotta Mast about some of the trends that are particularly applicable to the beverage category.

The private equity company, which manages investments for the family office of a large German private label manufacturer, has made its third beverage investment in less than a year, adding fledgling premium soda brand SIPP to a group that also includes Cheribundi and Balance Water.

Remember that request for information from a state attorney general we wrote about not too long ago? According to the Wall Street Journal — which cited unnamed sources — the probe was initiated by New York’s attorney general, Erik Schneiderman.

Eric Skae, who stepped down last year as the head of New Leaf Brands, the tea and juice company he started and ran for several years, has re-surfaced with a new beverage business consulting practice.

J. Andrew Guard, a BevNET employee who had previously worked for OWater’s Tom First as Operations Manager, is returning to the beverage business. Guard is taking an operations position at Purity Organics, a portfolio company that works closely with First and is backed by investment from First’s new employer, First Beverage Group, which was started by investor Bill Anderson.

In a letter to Sen. Durbin, (D-Ill) the FDA said that most studies have not indicated any particularly harmful effects for caffeine consumption of up to 400 mg per day. While the agency said it was in the midst of conducting a review of recent safety studies on caffeine, “the available studies do not indicate any new, previously unknown risks associated with caffeine consumption.”

A high-profile hire and the gradual working out of supply chain kinks has created what VP of Operations Luke Zakka is calling “unprecedented opportunity” on the VBlast front. If he’s right, the addition of VP of Sales Bob Miller – a well-known and well-traveled commodity – will help VBlast capitalize on its vertical efficiencies and lend some density to an already wide-ranging geographic footprint.

It happened quietly and without much detail, but TSG Consumer Partners – the same private equity company that backed Vitaminwater and that currently owns a chunk of Cytosport – took a minority position in Neuro earlier this year.

He’s kept a low profile since helping sell early acai competitor Bossa Nova to Sunny Delight Beverage Co., but REBBL CEO Palo Hawken hasn’t been completely out of the beverage business, he’s happy to say. In fact, REBBL is the “sort of the brand concept I’ve been working on for a lifetime,” Hawken told BevNET.

It wasn’t slowed by the downturn, it has benefited from health and wellness trends and has been the category into which many exciting new brands have launched and grown. For each of those reasons, RTD tea is a category that remains at a rolling boil: total sales of RTD in the U.S. were up by 7 percent in 2011, according to Euromonitor International – and have moved from just over $5 billion to just under $8 billion since 2006.

Sports and nutrition brand FRS announced it is terminating its deal with PepsiCo at the end of the year and turning much of the responsibility for its chain account management to sales/distribution organization L.A. Libations. FRS uses PepsiCo’s distribution system to reach major grocery and drug chain accounts, however, the system is also employed by Gatorade and the arrangement has resulted in FRS failing to receive the kind of support it felt it needed, according to CEO Carl Sweat.

Energy Drink juggernaut Monster Energy revealed yesterday that it is facing a subpoena from an unnamed state attorney general concerning the brand — and also received notice it was being sued by a well-known rap group.

Regular readers of this column (all nine of you) are aware that I’m not one to blast regulation. In fact, my knee tends to jerk the other way, believing that, grandstanding aside, the social obligations of a business mean that most regulations are worthy of strong consideration and adoption.

One Drop is unlike the rest of the Marley’s Mellow Mood line in that it is not a “relaxation beverage.” The Marley brand has been growing – it’s up to more than 65,000 stores in the U.S. and 10,000 internationally, according to company president Kevin McClafferty, but so far One Drop is only in about 10,000 of those domestic accounts.

It’s probably too late to put together a company before Expo East, but according to the New York Times, a lot of the athletes at the Olympics this year are drinking beetroot juice and tart cherry juice to improve their performance.

According to the FDA, disease claims made on the Lithia site include that the product can help lower LDL cholesterol levels, can help lower blood pressure, and fight fungal and viral infections. And that’s just for starters. The product also claims that the lithium bicarbonate in the product can help with everything from Alzheimers to headaches, cancer and strokes.