BevNET Live Winter ’15 is less than 30 days away! Hundreds of beverage industry professionals, including investors, distributors and retailers, are already signed up for the conference, which is being held on Dec. 7 and 8 at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif. Seats are filling up fast, and if you haven’t already, now is the time to reserve your seat.
As for the hefty challenge of competing with Harmless Harvest or any of its distant second place contenders like UNOCO, Invo or Pure Brazilian, Sri Lanka Gold is looking to separate itself from the pack by hanging its hat on Sri Lanka’s orange (or “gold”) king coconut, indigenous to the island country.
Many beverage exhibitors at the 2015 NACS show indicated that convenience store operators are — like their counterparts in grocery and club — increasingly looking to add natural and better-for-you beverages to their shelves and coolers. It’s a trend that, for C-stores, has been bubbling at the surface for years, but appears to have achieved significant traction over the past 12 months.
Perhaps more than any particular hot new trend, what stuck out at last week’s Natural Products Expo East trade show at the Baltimore Convention Center was the visible growth and continued maturation of beverage categories and brands which were in their infancy just a few short years ago.
As demand for cold-pressed juice continues to expand, Goodnature, one of the largest manufacturers of commercial cold-pressing equipment, sees opportunity to make production simple and feasibly available for a wide range of retailers, particularly neighborhood cafes and small, independent grocers, with the launch of a new machine designed to fit on most commercial kitchen countertops.
“Since we started, we’ve shipped over 40 million bottles of Suja,” Church said. “With Coke and the right construct of an arrangement, we could go from 40 million to a billion. It just gets us super-excited about the pathway to building a much bigger business.”
Suja Life LLC. (Suja), named the #2 Most Promising Company in 2015 by Forbes, is pleased to announce an investment and distribution partnership with The Coca-Cola Company.
The manufacturing, shipping, and distribution capabilities for Campbell’s new Fresh division will depend on Bolthouse’s strong cold-chain capabilities, but the brand also plans to keep innovating.
BevNET has learned that the Coca-Cola Company will invest $90 million in Suja as part of a deal that will give the soft drink giant a path to owning the juice maker in three years.
A high-tech biohacker; a classic CPG entrepreneur; a turnaround artist who has turned the juice category upside down; a leader in the third-wave coffee movement. All four will take the stage to share stories and strategies as part of BevNET Live Winter 2015 in Santa Monica.
Fresh off the sale of Krave Jerky and the public offering of Shake Shack, consumer products fund ACG has put an undisclosed amount of money behind sprouted-grain platform Live Better Brands, which makes Way Better Snacks.
In part two of our Power in Beverages list, we detail our picks from N to Z.
When it comes to the beverage industry, power is diffuse. So we have zero repeats this year.
