From Idea to Reality

“The closer I got [to food and beverage], the more I realized that we’re in the middle of this huge revolution. My perspective on it is that we’re really at the beginning of something rather than at the end. We will spend most of the next 50 years—perhaps longer—figuring out how to feed and water our population with stuff that isn’t going to kill us.”

“We ended up with a system where the world’s leading drink has 50% more added sugar in one can than you’re allowed a day, and we know that added sugars are the primary cause behind two of the biggest health problems in the world, diabetes and heart disease. The food system is broken, and one of the worst parts is added sugar, and the worst behaving category in the whole of food and beverage is beverage. Soda and mixers are the worst of all of these categories.”

“I was running a strategy project in the UK, and I was struck by how different the next generation was in terms of what they wanted to drink. They wanted less alcohol, less sugar, everything, but they were still being offered exactly the same thing that we were being offered when we were students and when our parents were students.”

“I want to do something about it.”

“We just launched at Wegmans and are doing really well there. I suspect we’ll do as well at our retail launches at Sprouts, BevMo!, and hopefully at Whole Foods… We should go from a promising business to a good business within a year.”

“Branding is really interesting in beverage. If I would do it again, I would spend more money up front on it… I would have probably spent 50k on a brand in the beginning and just gotten a little bit more and then spent money updating it every year.”

“We knew we didn't want to be in the 12oz, because that’s a drink by itself. We knew we wanted to have a can supply that would work. We knew we needed a co-packer that could pack it. We experimented with the 8oz can, and it wasn’t quite big enough for what we needed, and the supply was just a nightmare. So we moved to the Red Bull can, which has been a much better fit for us.”

“It’s an elegant can, it speaks to our moment better.”

“We won a bunch of awards at Columbia [Business School]. We got 25k in grants. With that money, plus a bit of money from me and my cofounder, we got our first product round and our first brand. So, you can get it done pretty cheaply.”

“I’ve spoken to only one founder out of many who have successfully bootstrapped a beverage business in non-alc. It’s an incredibly cash-hungry business—cash cycles are long, minimum order quantities are high, mistakes are easy… In your first couple of years of business, there’s no way you won’t lose 10, almost 20k worth of stock somewhere: to wastage, relabeling, etc. You can do [bootstrapping] in certain categories like food, but if you want to move quickly, it’s a little bit of a myth in beverage.”

“Your job as an early-stage beverage founder is really to raise money.”

“The general rule is your trailing revenue should be roughly the amount of money that you’ve raised. For example, we’re going 2 million in revenue this year, and we’ve raised around 2 million dollars. That’s considered okay.”

“We launched in COVID. DTC was really our only option. We did me in a van for wholesale for the first 6 months to a year. But it was a different time—you would never do that now. We should have pivoted to focus on wholesale more.”

The roadmap is wholesale. We still do a good chunk of money on DTC and Amazon and expect to see that continue to grow, but out of every $200k, $140k is wholesale.”

“We launched with 5. Our cans are quite small, and they take up less space on a shelf. We don’t launch with a retailer unless we can get at least 3 SKUS, because we need to stand out.”

“Just sales. They have review cycles, and you basically get your deck and product in front of the buyer, turn up, chat with them… We’ve been particularly scrappy. I try and reach out and chat to the buyers individually, try and create some form of rapport. I think leaving it to chance in the review cycle is always difficult. Our winds have come when I’ve managed to get on a first-name basis with a buyer.”

“PR was really the only thing we did early stage that worked for us. The first thing about setting up a beverage business is that you have to understand what model you’re running. That’s the thing that people don’t do. Are you a spirit-like business? Are you a RTD coffee? Are you a RTD beverage? Are you a specialty item? They all have different routes to success and they all need to have different marketing strategies.”

“So, some people love demos. But our category almost never does demos because it just doesn’t work. Demos at Whole Foods are brilliant—if you’ve got a lineup of all your drinks at the counter in the fridge and you’re demoing, you’re going to sell 100+ cans in a 2–3 hour sitting. Whereas for us, you’re asking them to buy a 4-pack and not a single. It doesn’t work out.”

“The thing that makes AVEC exciting is the same thing which makes it difficult, which is we’re sort of making our own playbook. If we’re successful we might be really big, which is really exciting. The problem with that is that no one has really done it before—people have done parts of what we’ve done before but not all of it at the same time.”

“Are you a brand play, a.k.a. your category already exists and you’re just a new brand doing something slightly different, or are you reinventing part of the wheel? That’s where we struggle: Where do we work? What support does that require?”