• 🧑‍⚖️ Danone Slams Lifeway CEO
• ✨ Ex-Constellation Exec Leads Duckhorn
• 👋 Layoffs At RNDC?
• 💰 Reed’s Closes $10M Private Placement
• 🏈 Bo Knows… Beverages? Of Course He Does.

Odwalla is about to find out if there’s demand for an encore. 

The nearly 45-year-old juice brand is returning to stores this year, via a collaboration between trademark holder Full Sail IP Partners and Mexican juice purveyor Grupo Jumex. Odwalla is now heading out on the road again roughly 4 1/2 years after its prior owner, The Coca-Cola Company, dropped the curtain on it in 2020.

Grupo Jumex, founded in 1961, is best known in the U.S. for its namesake Jumex juice brand which largely competes in Hispanic markets and the international aisles of grocery accounts. The revamped Odwalla will operate as a standalone business, but the company told us that it’s also going to provide Jumex a more diversified portfolio that will play in other parts of the store.

The relaunch plans to lean heavily into Odwalla’s pre-Coca-Cola roots, mentioning its founding by jazz musicians (including the late Greg Steltenpohl) and presents a modernized, bubbly look. Marketing plans for the brand also lean into its clean label, using minimal ingredients and seeking to trade on better-for-you trends with two lines – smoothie blends and 100% juices.

Odwalla’s return may come as a New Year’s surprise, but it wasn’t exactly out of the blue. Full Sail purchased the brand shortly after its discontinuation in 2021 with plans to relaunch it, however, it has taken a few extra years to get it back into the market. 

Odwalla is returning to a totally transformed beverage landscape, one that has already passed through a pandemic-era juice boom. Much of the juice set has been in decline in recent years, and M&A trends have largely seen established brands change hands, whether it’s the sale of Evolution Fresh to Bolthouse or PepsiCo, much like Coke, divesting its Tropicana and Naked Juice brands to private equity.

Odwalla has some brand equity, but four years off shelves means Jumex will need to rebuild distribution from zero. We can look at the challenge that Zico Rising has had in re-establishing a discontinued Coke brand for some sense of how hard it can be, but Jumex is a large company with an established distro network and Odwalla had much larger sales during its first time around.

We’ll be sticking around to watch this encore.

Want to know more? Read the full story on BevNET.

Despite strong sequential growth over the past year, Chicago-based kefir king Lifeway can’t seem to escape from a spiraling leadership drama centered around CEO and board chairwoman Julie Smolyansky. The latest chapter sees dairy giant Danone North America claiming Smolyansky violated a 1999 Shareholder Agreement when she awarded herself nearly 300,000 shares last month. 

📈 The dispute is tied to Danone’s attempts to acquire the brand in-full last fall; Lifeway rejected Danone’s September 2024 acquisition offer, priced at $25 per share, and then rejected an improved offer in November priced at $27 per share, or around $306 million. 

• Citing an independent analysis, Lifeway said those proposals "severely undervalued” the company, though the board remained open to the possibility of a sale. 

❌ That analysis provided the basis for the Lifeway board to grant the CEO 283,337 new shares of company stock in December without Danone’s required approval, per the Shareholder Agreement. The kefir company is countering that the agreement is superseded by Illinois law, and thus cannot be (and should have never been) enforced. 

💸 Danone’s letter showed signs of long-simmering rancor with Lifeway’s leadership, pointedly noting “this is not the first occurrence of the board allowing Ms. Smolyansky’s personal interests to trump those of the company and its other shareholders.”

Read the full story on BevNET.

Start your 2025 off right by grabbing your tickets to BevNET Live at the lowest prices of the year! Super early registration pricing ends Friday, January 10, for our 2025 events in New York City and Marina del Rey. Don’t miss this chance to plan ahead and save $150 per ticket.

Following the close of Butterfly’s acquisition of The Duckhorn Portfolio for $1.95 billion in October, the private equity firm has named a new CEO to lead the wine portfolio. 

• Butterfly, focused on “seed to fork” food and beverage companies, manages a diverse portfolio including Chosen Foods, MaryRuth Organics, Orgain, and Bolthouse Fresh Foods, among others.
• Now, it's bringing in Robert Hanson, the former head of Constellation Brands’ Wine and Spirits Global Portfolio, to lead the wine group equipped with eleven wineries, ten state-of-the-art winemaking facilities, eight tasting rooms and over 2,200 acres of vineyards.
• Prior to his six years at Constellation, Hanson was CEO of American Eagle Outfitters, and earlier in his career had a 23-year tenure at Levi Strauss & Co.

🏃 In other spirits news: Tech executive Matt Swann has joined Heritage Distilling Co’s board of directors. Swann will also serve as chairman of the company’s newly formed Technology and Cryptocurrency Committee of the Board.

Layoffs may be on the way for bev-alc distributor RNDC, which like other major spirit companies, is feeling the pain from softer booze sales. The company called a national meeting yesterday, with employees speculating on Reddit that a “slimming of redundancies” would mean more layoffs after it reportedly made a set of cuts last May. 

🆕 Among national distributors, the eliminated positions often differ by markets: In Texas, a crop of new RNDC manager job listings only available to current or former employees went up yesterday. 

📧 The company put out a vague statement that it, “like many organizations in the wine and spirits industry, is navigating a challenging environment influenced by tightening margins, evolving consumer preferences, and sustained softness across market segments.” 

⁉️ But, there was no mention of layoffs: “While we are always evaluating our operations to stay agile and competitive, any adjustments we make will be guided by our commitment to long-term stability and growth,” read the statement.

💡 After distributors consolidated and expanded their national presence even further during the pandemic’s boom of spirit sales, RNDC isn’t the only major distributor reorganizing as the market contracts. 

Go Deeper: Layoffs Spook Wine and Craft Spirits

Ginger soft drink maker Reed’s announced it had closed a $10 million private investment of public equity financing (PIPE) on Dec. 30. The new capital is intended to go to a variety of initiatives to return the company to profitability in 2025.

💬 “The additional capital will support our efforts to invest in personnel and marketing resources, pursue accretive M&A opportunities and strategic partnerships, and expand internationally, all of which we believe will accelerate our growth,” CEO Norman E. Snyder, Jr. said in a statement.

🫚 The ginger beer brand spent much of 2024 attempting to right the ship by lowering input costs; yet, production issues and short shipments have eaten into potential profits.

🤑 Liquidity has been key to Reed’s turnaround story, previously raising separate PIPE financing in 2023 and a one-year revolving credit facility of $10 million with Whitebox in Q3 2024.

Bo Jackson, the multi-hyphenate sports icon and one of a handful of athletes to play both professional football and baseball, is tackling perhaps his biggest challenge yet – the beverage industry.

Listen to the episode now.