New Beverage Showdown 23 - Finals: Plink!

Maxwell Luthi [00:14] Our final presenters for New Beverage Showdown 23, you might want to duck if you're in the front row, Max Lucy and Luke Montgomery Smith, the co-founders of Plink. Come on up, guys. Gentlemen, microphone, microphone. Quicker. Please keep eye on your timer. Alright, alright, alright. Hello, hello, hello, everybody. My name is Maxwell Luthi. I'm a reformed futurist and the co-founder of Plink. And hi guys, great to meet you all. I'm Luke Montgomery Smith and I am a reformed kombucherist. And Max and I have been working on Plink for a couple of years now. But funny fact for you all, this is actually only the 3rd time I've met him in real life. This business has so far been built on Google Hangouts. It's true, it's true, and we built this business to tackle, as I said yesterday, an absolutely massive problem anchored in the fact that humans love delicious drinks. We consume over 1.4 trillion L of them every year. At the same time, their cans and bottles litter our parks. And waterways. The three biggest beverage brands on the planet are regularly the 3 most found sources of litter in our parks, waterways, and oceans. At the same time, the carbon footprint of transporting, something that's at times 99% to 100% water, is also unfathomable. It's an absolutely massive and complex problem, but ours is a simple solution. Take a glass of water. Drop a blink in it and boom, you have a delicious beverage with 99% less packaging and a fraction of the carbon impact. But let's get real, we don't pick up drinks to save the planet. I don't. And I'm a barefoot hippie. We pick up drinks for a moment of joy to share with our friends, for something with great taste. And Plink is exactly that. We've crafted a simplification of an effervescent tablet with natural fruit flavors, a source of electrolyte, 14 calories, and 1 g of sugar. But it's got to taste great, right? Because otherwise, Max and I are just a couple of hype guys. With a huge vision and colorful brand, and it's a huge challenge, non-liquid beverages, but it's been a huge deep dive into the technology and micro encapsulation and scents and flavors that some of you guys work in. I mean, for our pineapple grapefruit. It was 4 different grapefruit flavors and scents we've taken from the pith, from the pink and the white fruit, from some of the peel, and I think after hundreds of iterations, we've kind of got that balance. This little mark on my, the gray patch of my beard was from that flavor, but it was worth it because we've got 3 banging flavors, which we've launched in a multi-pack. 18 plinks for 22 bucks, 122 a plink. So who gets this revelation rolling? Who takes us from bang to plink? Well, plink is a state of mind. From day one, we wanted this to have cross-demographic appeal. We genuinely have seen in our first month's customer data, three generations plinking within the same household. We have Mullet Ben over there on the right, who's a 15-year-old YouTuber. Uh, Mullet Ben Plinks, and so does the guy in the middle here who's literally America's preeminent quilt historian. I'm not lying. What unites Mullet Ben and the historian is they aspire to live healthily, earthfully, I made that word up, and joyfully. And for this consumer that Max has described, we just see a huge, huge opportunity for our value proposition in the just add water space all the way over here in 1927, Kool-Aid were kicking the door down to start a party. It was joy to all the way across here, we've got the more functional brands, liquid IV named after something you find in a hospital, but hydration, and we're right here in the middle with our value prop, joyful hydration. So how do we acquire customers without giving all of our money to Mark Zuckerberg? First of all, we embrace the verb, like literally, Mullet Ben plinked from a mountain bike while midair and posted it on YouTube. We didn't ask him to do that. This is an actionable product. It's experiential. It has an ASMR-like quality. Uh and we can sample like software. I remember my granddad had stacks of AOL CDs in the 90s because they used to mail them in envelopes. We can mail a fucking six pack in an envelope, and I know you're jealous. Sorry. I told Luke not to swear, and I swore, I apologize. We're going to claim the water cooler in Enterprise. This is an untapped opportunity which blows my mind in American offices. So this isn't just hyperbole. We are actioning all of this already. Yeah, it's true. We have a brilliant, unfair advantage in digital, e-commerce and enterprise, but we also know that like every beverage brand, we're going to find scale at retail. That's why we've designed these new hang cell packs where we have improved our sort of communication and. Value prop and bought it front and center for a national retailer that we will be able to announce very shortly. And if you're wondering, will this really change the way the world drinks, it's very hard to anticipate widespread change when we are neck deep in the routine, chucking cans and bottles left, right and center. We used to smoke on airplanes, and 2 years ago, you all thought it was normal to commute to work for 1 hour a day each way, right? Widespread change happens. Boom. Well done. Hey, you guys can stay up here, we, uh, the judges might have some questions for you. Uh, I told you to duck in the front row, so. Um, well done, gents. Danielle, uh, the package up, obviously we've seen hydration tablets in the past, but the, the way these are presented and how they're, uh, presented, uh, as a multi-pack, you know, what are your thoughts? I have so many things to say. OK, first of all, you guys are dynamic presenters and definitely founders that I would bet on for sure. Uh, that said, I think this is a positioning play. It's not that different a product, but it is a good positioning play. The brand strategy is brilliant. The design, in my opinion, is hard to digest and you're gonna lose people. I couldn't read your brand name. That's problematic to me. We've already chatted about the website. There's some stuff happening there. Um, what else do I have to say? Oh, I love the sustainability angle. I do think that, um, I mean, clearly you guys are marketers, but I do think you need to clean up that design. Thank you. That's great feedback, yeah. Mike, um, I, you know, I, I'm, I'm such an idiot. I still haven't had a chance to try Plink. Um haven't. No, I still haven't. I can't believe it. I, I'm sorry, guys. You're throwing 122 around here. I, I clearly have enough product to try it now, but, um, you know, what are your thoughts on the taste and sort of the, the ease of use,

Speaker 2 [07:06] I guess,

Maxwell Luthi [07:06] for this product?

Speaker 2 [07:07] I, this is, I am the consumer for this. I am the powder guy. I, I like noon. I like all of this stuff, and I, this one is top class in terms of flavor. I mean, I, I, I will, I'll plink all day long. I, I love it that it's a verb. I got a few knits to pick, um, the yellow on the pack, not great, uh, pretty invisible, so and the logo kind of. Smoosh it planks together instead of planks the way you want it to, but, and, and I think, um, you know, the pack can get a little, a little gnarly, as, uh, Jessica Pratt would say, a little gnarly, you know, San Diego style, but. Other than that, I shout out. I, I, I

Maxwell Luthi [07:44] love this

Speaker 2 [07:45] product. I, I'm, I'm a user already.

Maxwell Luthi [07:47] Thank you. Yeah, great, great feedback on the yellow as well, we're working on that. I knew you would, yeah, yeah. Uh, Bonnie, you know, getting trials really important in this industry. Um, it seems like Max and Luke outlined, uh, a way to get this product into people's hands pretty quickly. What are your thoughts?

Speaker 2 [08:04] Um, I think that the fact that it's, you know, you can mail a six pack is gonna be really great for you guys, even from sampling perspective. It's really easy for people to take it home, probably if you are doing some field marketing. It'll be hard for people to try it on the spot, but I think what's really gonna carry your brand, since there are products like this on the market, it's gonna be your personality translating into your brand. It's gonna be you guys being as loud as your brand. Is it gonna get mauled in the mail? I mean it's dangerous. I mean I gotta think about things, um, but really, really fun brand that you guys have created.

Maxwell Luthi [08:42] Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, Matt, let's talk about the positioning. Uh, we saw a slide up there. We had Kool-Aid on one end and liquid Ivy in the middle, on the other end, and we had Plink right in the middle. Joyful

Speaker 3 [08:51] hydration. I'm sorry, joyful hydration, I think is the term. Yeah,

Maxwell Luthi [08:55] sounds good.

Speaker 3 [08:55] Yeah, yeah. Uh, look, the, the space is awesome, um. There is an enormous uh uh amount of runway for these non beverage forms of beverage like this, the, the, um, the low cost to serve from a logistics perspective you have such a competitive advantage over everybody else and ready to drink, uh, day one, and yeah, in terms of positioning away from. Artificiality to full functionality, uh, you, it'll be a, it'll be an economic consideration at some point because we know that people will pay, consumers will pay more for what they at least believe to be the highest level of functionality. Versus a flavor plus function play which if you're there it's better than just flavor but it's probably not all the way to bright on terms of fully maximizing your value so but if scale, if you can scale it in the middle, it's a great place to be too so that's,

Maxwell Luthi [09:51] that's really great feedback, great observation. Thank you, Bonnie. I just wanna come back to you real quick. Um, Max and Luke talked a lot about how there's a lot of waste out there and Plik helps to remove a lot of that waste. Um, did that come through in the messaging? Did that come through in the packaging?

Speaker 2 [10:05] I don't think you guys talk about it as much as you could um I think you had it on your box packaging but not um not as much on on these maybe it's, you know, one pack of these can compare us to however much plastic in the ocean or something like that you could talk about but I think through your social you guys talk about it, um, your, your guys' humor on your social is pretty funny, um. But yeah, there's lots of channels, maybe in your POS materials in retail, you could talk about that.

Maxwell Luthi [10:35] Yeah, we, we've tried to kind of hold that back a little bit to begin with, just because we didn't want to be the sustainable brand and we want to lead with joy, but sort of there's a few things that we can improve and just bringing that story. Once you're into our family kind of thing, well. Share, share all of that. We've just had it independently verified and we're constantly tracking our climate impact and things like that. Awesome. Outstanding, great feedback, great presentation, very well done. Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you very much. Hey.