The Brooklyn Nets’ home at Barclays Center is shaping up to be a destination for emerging beverage brands to launch into on-premise sales.
Los Angeles-based Saint James Iced Tea is the latest brand to sign a multi-year partnership at the Barclays Center. The deal brings with it prominent advertising opportunities, sampling activations, and, most importantly, the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of attendees at the over 160 events hosted annually.
“To be perfectly frank, I’ve always been a little hesitant on how exactly iced tea plays in that traditional sports space,” said Saint James CEO Brad Neumann, whose background includes running sales and distribution at sports and hydration brands like Recover 180° and ROAR Organic.
“We’re not a hydration beverage, we’re a lifestyle beverage. How do we fit?” he said. “Then we took a step back and said: If our brand strategy is focused on experiences, events and in-person activations as a way to drive both trial and loyalty, this is a great opportunity.”
The Barclays Center is not only the home of the Brooklyn Nets and the most recent WNBA champions, the NY Liberty. The arena hosts a variety of music and entertainment shows that can seat around 19,000 people.
The deal places Saint James’ Passion Fruit & Peach, Red Raspberry, Classic Black Tea and Blood Orange & Hibiscus flavors in every concession stand along with four dedicated refrigerators and a permanent branded cocktail bar cart. The iced tea brand also has rights to courtside LED signage both in-game and on television as well as five pop-up activations per year where it can do exit sampling to attendees.
It also solidifies Saint James’ partnership with its New York distributor Manhattan Beer Distributors which also supplies beverage alcohol to Barclays. The deal shows that the iced tea brand has the “ability and willingness to invest in making New York a successful market,” Neumann said.
Barclays will be both a beachhead and a test run for other arena or stadium deals as the brand is engaged in talks with at least four other professional sports franchises on similar deals, he said.
The move follows a similar approach to other insurgent brands like Olipop, Poppi, Barcode, and Open Water which have all been part of a wave of new beverages carving out distribution in places long dominated by big strategics. When Saint James started looking into the opportunity in sports arenas largely controlled by Coke or Pepsi brands, it found that iced tea was often included in a contract but not sold readily on-site.
“The big guys were blocking the iced tea category, but not utilizing it,” Neumann said. “They didn’t care about it and weren’t pushing it.”
The timing was right for Saint James to fill that void when Barclays began restructuring its deal with Coke. The opportunity also fits the iced tea brand’s “larger tentpole marketing initiatives” for 2025, Neumann said.
“In 2023 and a little of 2024, everything was buzzy brand-building,” he said. “Now, we’re shifting our focus. Anything that we do or invest in has to have a direct tie to retail.”
The company hopes that Barclays will help it and Manhattan Beer move deeper into the independent c-store channel and local grocery chains in the New York City area. Saint James will also be employing a marketing approach to utilize partnerships like the Barclays Center or with the Stagecoach Music Festival to drive higher volumes in local retailers. The iced tea brand has found that IP like a popular sports team and experiences can efficiently increase velocities with point-of-sale sweepstakes, digital giveaways and shipper programs.
Adding to this approach, Saint James is poised to launch a special variety co-branded with HBO’s hit show The White Lotus. The limited edition Black Tea Mango will launch in January with special packaging and will be followed by a wellness retreat hosted at the Four Seasons in Westlake Village, Calif.
Between Barclays and The White Lotus, Saint James is preparing for a big year. It landed a national placement in Target that will put 4-SKUs in every store by March. The brand will also be launching in Canada in February and has a number of Costco rotations lined up both in previous markets and new regions.
For Neumann, 2025 will “open up the door” for the brand as it is also preparing to launch new packaging and branding that will be unveiled in the next three to four months.
Since it launched in 2022, Saint James has been in Tetra Pak cartons. The company would not comment on if that was expected to change.