Videos

While Natural Products Expo East often gets overshadowed by its massive sister shows, this year’s edition, which featured dozens of entrepreneurial beverage brands, certainly held its own. Offering a mild glimpse of post-recession recovery for natural beverage brands and the industry as a whole, Expo East featured a strong showing from beverage suppliers, distributors, and manufacturers, with many showcasing innovative ingredients and sweeteners seen for the first time at the show.

On a recent visit to Los Angeles, BevNET CEO John Craven and Andrew Guard, a beverage specialist, examined the growth of a number of nascent, higher-priced, better-for-you beverage categories, including cold brew coffee, high-pressure processed juices, and kombucha drinks. Craven and Guard also explore L.A.’s impact as a driving force behind the current health and wellness trends sweeping through the beverage industry.

BevNET's Beverage School is an on demand video based learn tool that covers a variety of key industry topics. Designed to help people get up to speed on the beverage industry and avoid common mistakes, Beverage School features hundreds of video clips that are all accessible for a nominal subscription fee.

In an interview filmed at Talking Rain headquarters in Preston, Wash., BevNET CEO John Craven spoke with Kevin Klock, the CEO of Talking Rain, about how the runaway success of Sparkling ICE is rooted in the company’s transition from one engrossed in beverage innovation to a more traditional beverage manufacturer focused on sales and marketing.

At BevNET Live Summer 2012, three beverage industry veterans who have had first-hand roles in establishing entrepreneurial beverage products discussed the roles and responsibilities of brand-building. The discussion featured a number of topics regarding the development of new brands and categories including an analysis of expectations for individual roles and key areas for collaboration between suppliers, distributors and retailers.

As one of the first all-natural energy drinks on the market, Hiball has steadily carved a successful niche within the natural channel, one whose consumers have slowly adapted to the booming energy drink category. Yet, Hiball, now armed with new packaging and an revamped formulation, is looking beyond natural retailers, and has set its sights on a dramatic increase in distribution throughout mainstream channels.

Engulfing New York City’s Metropolitan Pavilion with over 500 beverage entrepreneurs, suppliers, retailers, distributors, BevNET Live featured a whirlwind of education, networking, and growth opportunities in its biggest show to date. With some of the beverage industry’s best taking the stage as well as an industry expo packed with flavor houses, packaging suppliers, and bottlers, BevNET Live offered attendees a wide range of ways to learn how to grow and develop their businesses.

As soccer has edged closer to the kind of mainstream acceptance that – in the U.S. – has been elusive for so many decades, Golazo, a line of all-natural energy and sports drinks targeted to the soccer community, is hoping to tap into growing interest and enthusiasm for the sport.