The beverage business is hard but not impossible, according to Lemon Perfect founder and CEO Yanni Hufnagel, who used his experience as a basketball coach to persevere as a first-time founder.
What has been his strategy building a brand in a challenging industry?
“Every day, every week, every month, every year just find a way to live another day,” he said. “Finding a way to survive and advance.”
In this video from BevNET Live Summer 2024, Hufnagel spoke with BevNET Editor-in-Chief Jeff Klineman about how the business has scaled to a 90-person team with over $90 million in funding including celebrity backers like Beyonce and professional basketball players.
Hufnagel reminisced about the early days of the brand when it felt like he was “driving a really, really expensive car down a one-lane road in the middle of the night” and then “flipping the script” to make the company more sustainable by transitioning from refrigerated to shelf-stable and pivoting from its original bottle format.
Much of Lemon Perfect’s success has come from building a team that can adapt and “execute,” he said. “You have to get after it, that’s what I’ve learned.”