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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
