• 🏝️ Shaka Signs Off
• 🏭 Better Booch's Factory Filled ‘Future’
• 🍹 Biden Ends Booze Brand Dispute
• 🌺 New CEO Takes Over at Campari
• ❄️ Q Mixers Get Frost(y)
• ✨ BevNET Live Teaser

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BevNET Live kicks off this Sunday, December 8, in Marina del Rey, CA! Don’t miss growth-focused presentations from leaders like Craig Dubitsky (Happy) and Heidi Dillon (Distill Ventures), plus one-to-one retailer meetings, product sampling, and the New Beverage Showdown. Get actionable strategies to fuel your success in 2025. Register now!

Spindrift is in advanced talks to be acquired by a private equity firm for a price north of $650 million, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Citing people familiar with the potential transaction, the Journal identified Gryphon Investors, a San Francisco-based group whose portfolio includes CPG brands like Dessert Holdings and Eight O’Clock Coffee, as the interested buyer. A deal could be announced as early as before the end of the year.

Newton, Mass.-based Spindrift has enjoyed sustained growth since developing its signature sparkling waters made with real squeezed fruit juice. That approach, which eschews natural flavors, has positioned the brand on the premium end of the category; NielsenIQ scanner data reported $263.3 million in dollar sales in the 52-week period ended November 2, a 22.5% increase. 

Stay tuned to BevNET for more updates on this developing story.

Hawaiian tea brand Shaka Tea is saying aloha (as in goodbye). The company announced yesterday via a message on its website that it is winding down the business due to “significant economic and technical challenges” leaving no “financially sustainable path” ahead.

• Shaka was founded in 2016 by husband and wife team Bella Hughes and Harrison Rice and was acquired in 2022 by King’s Hawaiian, a subsidiary of Irresistible Foods Group. 
• The abrupt end to Shaka comes after the brand has repeatedly sought to upgrade its portfolio, most recently transitioning from glass bottles to cans. But despite planning for over 20,000 points of distribution in 2022 it would seem that Shaka wasn’t able to break out in a beverage category that has generated rapid growth for later tea category entrants like Liquid Death and Just Ice Tea.
• Irresistible Foods Group got back to us by email this morning, clarifying that they expect the brand to still be available through the spring of 2025 until inventory is sold out. While the company has already closed operations, Irresistible has reassigned some of the Shaka team to other roles and that its “small marketing and operations team in Hawai’i will continue to play a vital role” in the organization.

🗣️ “Although this is not the outcome for Shaka Tea that we wanted, planned for, or worked toward, it is important to accept that setbacks are to be expected when building capabilities or businesses,” the company said. “What’s important is that we learn from these experiences and move forward. Thanks to the lessons we’ve learned from Shaka Tea, Irresistible Foods Group remains financially healthy and optimistic about our future.”

Insiders can read the full story on BevNET.

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The last time we spoke with the Future Beverage Group team back in April, the makers of Better Booch were in the midst of transforming the company into a beverage platform brand built around a mission of holistic wellness via the gut microbiome. If that pivot was about a change in mindset, the latest move is about adding muscle.

Under the auspices of a new business division, called FutureBev, Future Beverage Group has acquired a 100,000 square foot facility in Ventura, Calif. in which it plans to manufacture its canned products as well as co-pack for others when it goes online in January. 

🦘 It’s not an entirely new concept for Future Beverage co-founders Ashleigh and Trey Lockerbie; Better Booch has always been self-produced, and has made products for third-party clients in the past. Manufacturing is “a huge skill set of ours,” said Trey when we caught up with him last month, and when the opportunity arose to purchase the Ventura facility from previous owners Flying Embers, they jumped. 

💪 Now that it has a stronger machine behind it, the company’s next task is balancing co-packing with management of its own expanding family of brands, including LIVE Soda and CHA Tea.  

💬 “It’s increasingly rare to find brands that also manufacture their own products these days, and rarer still to find platforms like ours that can harness the synergies between both,” said Lockerbie. 

For more about how Future Beverage is leveraging production to grow, read the full story on BevNET later today.

President Joe Biden has passed a law putting an end to a long legal dispute over who has the rights to an iconic rum brand.

❌ Enacted on Sunday, the law bans the recognition of trademarks confiscated by the Cuban government and weighs in on decades-long feud between Bacardi and Pernod Ricard over the Havana Club rum brand. 

✅ Bacardi sells the rum stateside, while Cuba's state-owned Cubaexport sells Havana Club rum outside the U.S. with Pernod Ricard as its distributor. The new law grants Bacardi the rights to the Havana Club brand in the U.S., which has been the subject of multiple legal decisions that have at times favored both sides.

⏪ Rewind: Bacardi has been selling Havana Club made in Puerto Rico since 1995, after purchasing the recipe and rights to the trademark from the original creators, the Arechabala family. But the drama goes back to when Bacardi was exiled from Cuba after the Communist revolution, and claims that the Cuban government unlawfully seized the Havana Club name and assets from Jose Arechabala SA in 1960. The Cuban government meanwhile kept producing small amounts of rum under the name Havana Club and in 1976, Cubaexport took over the brand and registered its trademark in the U.S., which expires in two years. 

💬 Pernod Ricard in a statement emphasized that “this legislation does not immediately revoke the current rights to the Havana Club trademark in the United States, which will remain under the ownership of Cubaexport until their expiration in 2026.”

The Campari Group has brought in a new CEO after the brief five-month tenure of its previous CEO, Matteo Fantacchiotti, who stepped down in September due to personal reasons. 

• Simon Hunt, previously the CEO of William Grant & Sons, is expected to take over the Italian spirits company on January 15. Hunt began his career at Diageo, worked at French spirits giant Pernod Ricard and, in 2022, he was appointed as CEO of global spirits incubator Catalyst Spirits.
• He’ll be tasked with remedying Campari's latest Q3 drop in profit and sales. In October, the Campari and Aperol owner laid out plans to sell non-core brands and cut costs.
• International spirits groups are also up against possible tariffs: The U.S. market is a major one for Campari and its imports from Mexico into the U.S. (Espolón) have been a bright spot for the company.

Q has a new leader. The New York-based premium cocktail mixer brand has named Betsy Frost as CEO, who brings over 20 years of CPG industry experience to the business as it’s faced declining retail sales on some product lines in recent months.

❄️ Frost takes the reins from outgoing CEO Bob Arnold, who joined the brand in 2022 after taking over from founder Jordan Silbert. The company called Frost’s appointment a “new chapter” and board chair Bob Nakasone said her “thoughtful approach to building brands,” strategic vision and past experience “will be instrumental in driving exceptional results.”

🫧 Frost comes to Q after a two-year term as CEO of Hoplark. She also has some experience in the sparkling RTD mixer set from her time as an exec at premium CSD brand DRY Soda. Before that she spent over 13 years at General Mills.

📉 Could it be a symptom of declining alcohol use? Circana reported the cocktail mixer category declined 7.1% in U.S. retail in the 52-weeks ending August 11. Although liquid mixes, where Q competes, were down just 0.6%, the brand’s tracked products in the set dropped 17.1%. Its tonic waters and club soda fared a bit better, though were still negative by 5.8%. Remember, that data doesn’t reflect all channels (notably missing ecomm) and may not cover every product the company makes.

It’s that time of year when red-and-white is not just in honor of Santa’s impending sleigh ride around the world… it’s time for BevNET Live! The CPG Week podcast team took some time out of preparing for both Nosh Live and BevNET Live to discuss the exciting slate of speakers and panels taking place Dec. 8 through 10 in Marina Del Rey, Calif. Along with respective speaker discussions focused on retailing THC beverages and innovative marketing strategies, the team also talks about buying expensive Erewhon smoothies and getting tattoos.

Check out the full episode here.

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