The founders of entrepreneurial Southern California distribution company Gourmet Purveyors International have left the business and started LA Distributing Company, a new Los Angeles-based enterprise. By focusing primarily on LA – where the pair have developed strong ties to independent and chain accounts, they say – they hope to be able to help small brands reach critical mass.

After a seven-year run with a private equity group transformed it from a family-owned agricultural concern into one of the country's fastest-growing juice companies, Bolthouse Farms has been sold to Campbell's Soup Co. for just over $1.5 billion.

Campbell’s Soup Co. is offering up between $1.5 and $2 billion for juice maker Bolthouse Farms, Inc., which is currently owned by Madison Dearborn, a Chicago-based private equity group, according to Bloomberg News.

It's been a while since we've seen one of these, but Oskar Blues Brewery, which has always been unconventional (they're the ones who started the whole canned craft beer thing, for those of you who've slept through most of the past two years), is again going against the grain, rolling out an RTD version of a root beer that's available on tap at their brewpub/restaurants.

Long the manufacturer of an imported brand of canned, sweetened coconut juice, Foco, a Thailand-based company that sells largely to ethnic markets in the U.S., has debuted an all-natural, unsweetened coconut water in PET packaging -- and it is working with Exclusive Beverage, one of the chief builders of the category in Manhattan, as its distributor.

Skinny has been searching for additional funding for a while; this came in the form of a sale of $9 million in preferred and common stock to investment firm Trim Capital, as well as a $6 million line of credit extended by the investment firm.

... and they're using the same folks who came up with the old Harry and Louise ads that helped kill Clinton-era health care reform to spearhead the campaign.

Henry Schimberg, who helped build CCE to such a level of prominence that it handled 75 percent of the entire case load of Coca-Cola in North America, died over the weekend while traveling in Europe.

Monster Rehab and Absolutely Zero both hit all-time highs of $21.4 million and $12.9 million over the last 12 weeks, while the addition of Red Bull Zero to that brand family was the most likely source of a 30 percent increase in Red Bull sales in the four-week period ending June 9.