Coca-Cola is bringing another of its juice brands to the bev-alc world. This time, it’s Minute Maid Spiked.
The Coca-Cola Company’s bev-alc subsidiary Red Tree Beverages is launching a line of multi-serve wine cocktails under the juice brand in spring 2024.
The launch adds to Coke’s “deliberate and disciplined experimentation in alcohol,” a company spokesperson said in a statement, and includes three flavors – Lime Margarita, Strawberry Daiquiri and Piña Colada – of ready-to-serve, wine-based cocktails with 13.9% ABV per 1.5-liter bottle.
The wine-based juice cocktails will be produced by LeVecke Corporation, a California-based wine and spirits copacker, and will be distributed by Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC), along with a network of other wine and spirits wholesalers.
Minute Maid Spiked marks the first time Red Tree is launching a hard product on its own, without collaborating with its other bev-alc partners Molson Coors (Topo Chico Hard Seltzer, Simply Spiked, Peace Hard Tea), Brown-Forman (Jack & Coke) and Constellation Brands (Fresca Mixed). The brand is also Red Tree’s first foray into using wine as an alcohol base.
Red Tree described the innovation as a “no-brainer” positioned toward a “large percentage of legal-drinking age consumers [who] are regularly mixing Minute Maid and other non-alcohol juices” with alcohol, a company spokesperson said. “Being wine based generally allows for broader channel availability at the retail level.”
Red Tree was established this summer as a “firewalled” subsidiary of Coke that would be the marketing arm and launching pad for the beverage giant’s bev-alc aspirations. Yet, Red Tree has laid out a different roadmap to distribution than its competitor PepsiCo has taken in establishing its own Blue Cloud Distributing.
In a discussion at Beer Marketer’s Insights fall seminar last month, Red Tree president Jenny Dowdy parroted previous comments by Coke’s North America chief of new revenue streams Dan White assuring distributors that neither Red Tree nor Coca-Cola is planning to move into self-distribution of beverage alcohol products, but is instead opting to work with wholesalers.
The bev-alc subsidiary “remains dedicated to the three-tier system and will utilize the best relationships, which include established distributors, to reach retailers,” the company said in a statement.
“We believe that established distributors are experts in their local markets and thus best situated to serve the communities in which they operate,” a company representative said.
Coke has increasingly gone further into alcohol using the expertise (and high-octane liquids) of bev-alc makers. Though slightly less ubiquitous as its recent partnership with Brown-Forman on the Jack & Coke RTD, Coke is using a similar playbook with Pernod-Ricard, licensing the spirits house’s Absolut Vodka brand to be paired with Sprite starting internationally (in this case select European countries as opposed to the Jack & Coke launch in Mexico last fall) and then bringing the canned cocktail stateside. Jack Daniels maker Brown-Forman recently reported that its Coke partnership is showing increased traction since it was launched in March.