It’s likely you know the face of Sprinter, a new vodka soda from Kylie Jenner, but the influencer and entrepreneur had some help along the way.
While Jenner understandably draws all the attention, Sprinter’s early success – shipping over 140,000 cases and hitting 10,000 retailers and bars since March – belongs in part to the brand’s head of product development and supply chain Chandra Richter, who combines a Ph.D. in molecular biology and more than two decades of experience in the food and beverage industry at companies like E&J Gallo Winery and Drinkworks. We chatted with Richter about how she develops flavor to appeal to broad audiences, the lessons learned from working with major beverage companies, and what flavors are trending this year.
What was your process approaching flavor for Sprinter?
We ultimately selected four flavors – lime, grapefruit, peach and black cherry – for a couple reasons. The peach and lime flavors are very approachable flavors, very well known and well-loved. And then the black cherry and grapefruit are trendier flavors. So we wanted both to have a relevant variety pack.
Once we landed on the flavors it was really thinking through, what do we want the fruit flavors to be? When you think about a spectrum of the fruit profile, with something like a peach, you can be very candied, you can be very fresh, you can be very juicy, you can be dry, you can be cooked. So we talked about all the aspects of the fruits and tasted through examples of those, and ultimately, where we landed with Sprinter as a brand is that we wanted it to be very fresh, and true to fruit flavors versus taking a fruit punch type of approach.
The vodka soda segment is so saturated at this point, so why not a different drink or ingredients? How are you differentiating?
We thought a lot about it, and we wanted something that was refreshing and sessionable. And so the vodka seltzer made a lot of sense in the canned RTD space. And you’re right, it is saturated, right? There are a lot of players and there are newcomers all the time, but it’s also a category that has been growing and growing continuously, so we did feel that there was still space for a new brand to come in and play and offer a new, fresh perspective on what the vodka soda product could be.
How do you match a demographic, in this case a specific celebrity’s audience, to flavor? Or do you?
The goal was really to provide a good tasting beverage to as broad of an audience as possible. That’s how we landed on the four fruit flavors in our first variety pack, these are all very well loved and growing flavors in the U.S. market. And something like grapefruit has been gaining a lot of popularity and a lot of momentum over the last five years. And even this year, I’m once again seeing a lot of articles saying the Paloma is going to be the cocktail of the season. As we think about expanding beyond the U.S. market and going into new international geographies, we are thinking through what the right fruit choices should be.
What’s one of the best lessons you learned from over a decade at Gallo?
I got to learn a lot across the alcohol beverage space with them, which was great. And one of the mantras that we had there, that I always kept near and dear to my heart, is ‘the next drink should be better than the last’. So really focusing on that quality and making sure that you’re providing the best of the best in everything that you produce.
You also worked at Drinkworks, an AB InBev and Keurig Dr Pepper startup, where you created 80 different cocktails — what was that process like and why did that project go off the market?
We were creating the Keurig for cocktails, so we were both a small appliance company as well as an alcohol beverage company, and so I worked on the beverage side of the organization. We created concentrated cocktails that were in a pod that would then be put into the appliance. The appliance would add either chilled water or chilled carbonated water to create the perfect poured cocktail.
Our consumers loved us, but supply chain-wise and regulatory-wise, I think we were just maybe ahead of our time. If you think about even selling an appliance and alcohol, that’s a challenging thing, right? You don’t buy your appliances and your spirits in the same place, typically. And so that was something that was very challenging to overcome.
Overall what flavors are you seeing as trending now?
I think one that’s really fun is this nostalgic trend, so things like pink lemonade and flavors that are reminiscent of fun summer activities. Florals are still really big, so we’re seeing a lot of really fun floral beverages. I think there’s so much to do in the tropical space, and there’s so much to do in the berry space. All of these fruit flavors, no matter where they are on the spectrum, are still very popular.