After a busy six months for the newly established company, Generous Brands is launching a slate of new products as it positions itself towards an “all beverage, all-the-time” strategy, according to chief revenue officer Phil Kooy.
Generous Brands was created in May when private equity firm Butterfly Equity separated its fresh produce business from its salad dressing and fruit juice brands under Bolthouse Farms and Evolution Fresh, respectively. In June, the management entity entered an integrated manufacturing and distribution partnership with Sambazon.
Stepping into a variety of categories from refrigerated juice to energy to prebiotic soda, the company launched four new Sambazon products, two additional varieties of its Evolution Fresh Real Fruit Soda and a 4-SKU line of white label, cold-pressed juices last week as it takes a bigger swing at beverages.
Although Generous Brands still offers salad dressings, the focus has shifted to becoming a “dedicated beverage company” looking for new partnerships, mergers and/or acquisitions to leverage the company’s scaled production model, Kooy said.
“When you’re spending half your time farming carrots, you don’t have as many hours in the day to dedicate towards where the beverage space is going,” he added.
Building From What’s Already In Place
Whether it’s immunity smoothies and juices or digestive-health drinks, Generous Brands’ recent suite of products leans into healthy product innovation while expanding into different channels that the company hasn’t concentrated on in the past.
“You got to fish where the fish are,” Kooy said. “Where are consumers looking for these on-the-go opportunities? We are now going to drive availability there because that is what our customers and our consumers are asking for.”
In the process, Generous Brands hopes to put some momentum behind its Bolthouse Farms brand which showed dollar sales down in refrigerated categories like refrigerated drink smoothies (-11.4%), refrigerated fruit drink (-50.5%) and vegetable juice /cocktail (-8.3%), according to 52-week sales data ending July 14 from Circana.
Balancing those declines, blended fruit juice dollar sales were up 60.5% for Bolthouse with Evolution Fresh just behind that up 33.2% during that reporting period.
Not only is the company looking to increase its footprint in natural and conventional grocery but it is trying to find ways to meet its consumer base at airports, c-stores and in foodservice.
That focus was backed up by the Sambazon partnership, which derived from a co-manufacturing relationship for the last 18 months. Sambazon operates brick-and-mortar acai bowl locations in about 15 airports and has a foodservice platform already established within the company, which helps Generous Brands get a foot in the door with those channels.
In return, Sambazon has benefitted from Generous Brands’ production scale and distribution network to launch new innovation and bring it to market quickly using the company’s direct-store delivery in select markets as well as its high-speed, refrigerated rail system for transportation.
Generous Brands helped develop Sambazon’s new 32 oz. multi-serve Immunity Superfruit Blend as well as a 12 oz. single-serve original Açaí Superfruit Juice. The two companies also “renovated” the Sambazon canned Amazon Energy line.
Kooy said the company is looking to do one to two more of these types of integrated partnerships in the next 12 to 18 months.
Occupying More Territory In The Cold Case
Along with the Sambazon drinks, Generous Brands went deeper into pre- and probiotic sodas with the launch of two new Evolution Fresh Real Fruit Sodas: Cherry Cola and Pineapple Dragon Fruit.
The initial five sodas (Orange Squeeze, Strawberry Vanilla, Lemon Lime, Tropical Mango and Berry Burst) were unveiled in an 11,000-retailer launch in June. Now, as the company brings a familiar soda flavor like Cherry Cola to market, it is sending signals it is ready to compete directly with category leaders like Poppi and Olipop who are potentially shifting into c-stores and the center store-ready, shelf-stable options. Generous Brands is hoping to differentiate with its certified organic labeling and real fruit juice-based formulations as it attempts to occupy more space in the refrigerated set.
Expanding offerings in the refrigerated beverage case extends beyond line extensions. Generous Brands is also launching a white-label juice portfolio that it is shopping to grocery retail chains as a “turnkey solution” to expensive in-store juice bars.
In conversations with retail partners, “the conversation always spins around to ‘I have to win in fresh,’” Kooy said. “It’s the produce departments that differentiate whether your traditional grocer is growing or contracting. If they’re bringing in new households or not? What does their fresh offering look like?”
For many that has translated to a fresh-squeezed juice bar that is either customer-facing or operates in the back. The problem lies in the overhead that comes with that operation. The equipment is expensive and difficult to clean and needs a dedicated staff to operate pulling employees from the floor to make juice. To compound that, fresh-squeezed juice in the case only has a three-to-five-day shelf life, Kooy said.
Using Generous Brands’ high-pressure pasteurization (HPP) technology, the company is launching four SKUs (two lemonades, apple juice and orange juice) that will have about a 30-day shelf life. The company is also working on a celery-based green blend as well as seasonal offerings. The juices are available in 15.2 oz. single-serve and 59 oz. multiserve formats, all of which can carry the retailer’s own logo or branding.
All of these moves position Generous Brands’ various labels and partner brands to challenge other growing refrigerated juice makers like Pressed, Suja, Uncle Matt’s and Remedy Organics.
“We want to be a stronger partner for retail and foodservice customers where they’re saying, ‘Wow, you guys are showing up with winning solutions in just about every set,’” Kooy said.