You’ve a got a great new product, and you think it’s ready for distribution. But how does your brand find its way into a distributor’s portfolio? In this segment featured on BeverageSchool.com, Debbie Wildrick, a 23 year veteran of the beverage industry with executive roles at 7-Eleven and PepsiCo, talks about the importance of having a product that fills an unmet need in the market, and a thoroughly planned marketing and sales strategy as the best ways for a brand to find distribution.

While pricing remains muted, the carbonated soft drink category continued to slide with sales declining by 2.4 percent in a year-over-year comparison for the four weeks ending on October 27, according to Nielsen Scantrack Enhanced FDMx data released in a new report from Morgan Stanley. Yet while CSDs remain on a downward slope, the hottest category in beverages remains energy with category sales up 12.4 percent compared over the same timeframe last year.

Calling it a "new direction" for the company, Mexican beverage marketer Novamex has launched Alova, a new all-natural, sparkling aloe vera drink. Novemex, which produces and sells a range of Mexican-inspired drinks including Jarritos soft drinks and Mineragua water, has gradually expanded its footprint in the U.S. and will look to Alova as a point of entry into the natural channel via growing consumer exposure of aloe and its aura of health and wellness.

Here’s the issue: GNC is a well-known retailer, but the process of rolling a beverage brand licensed from GNC into other stores presented a bit of a design problem for Shadow Beverage and Snacks, the company that licensed the right to develop the drinks. To begin with, there’s complexity – the company envisioned three kinds of products—an enhanced water, a sports drink, and a protein drink – covering both the average, aspirational grocery consumer and the highly involved athletic achiever.

A few years ago, when high-end bottled water got slammed with the twin effects of a deep recession and an environmental backlash, many of us called it the perfect storm. A sector that was riding high suddenly was in an impossible situation: only fairly affluent consumers could afford those brands any more, and within that social stratum it suddenly had become unfashionable to be spotted carrying around plastic bottles containing water shipped from halfway around the world.