• 📉 NIQ: Memorial Weekend Fails to Boost BevAlc
  
• 🚚 UNFI Up For Sale?
• ☕ Westrock’s Southern Expansion
• 🏈 Gronk Invests in Casa Azul

Consumers want more from energy drinks—hydration, focus, mood enhancement and muscle support. Manufacturers are responding with functional ingredients like ashwagandha, BCAAs, and natural caffeine to meet the growing demand for healthier options. Learn more

CPG isn’t for the faint of heart and in fast moving categories, today’s efficiency-over-everything climate can mean that product development timelines are the difference between bringing an on-trend beverage to market, and missing the new category wave altogether. 

But Matthias Laudico and Charlotte Mizrahi, partners in full-service product development house Ley Line Labs, have been well served by following a simple goal: “We're really doing this because we want to make cool products for passionate people.”

The Brooklyn-based company’s “collective model” leans into being lean. Under the guidance of co-founders Laudico (head of research) and Mizrahi (formulator and herbalist), Ley Line offers a holistic suite of product development services for early-stage CPG brands, enhanced by a network of collaborators across specialties like sales, marketing and legal. 

The idea is “to make it possible for a brand to spend only what is necessary to get what they need,” said Laudico. 

Where have those needs led Ley Line? Toward plenty of new NA beverages and into partnerships with the Adult Non-Alcoholic Beverage Association (ANBA), Zero Proof Nation and Dry Atlas. As the NA beverage community grows, these formulators have started to notice early category trends including a split among purchasing drivers between “pure deliciousness and pure function.”

We spoke with Laudico and Mizrahi about their deepening ties to the zero-proof movement, why they are bullish on non-alcoholic bottle shops and what granular insights they’ve gleaned into this growing trend.

BevNET Insiders can access the full interview to hear directly from Laudico and Mizrahi in the full story later today.

Total BevAlc sales declined in the two-week period ending June 1, with dollar sales down 1.6% compared to -1.4%% in the four-weeks, according to an analysis of NielsenIQ data by Goldman Sachs Equity Research. The data offers a glimpse of fast moving categories and brands like:

• Spirit-based RTDs, up by 8.3% in the two-weeks, but down from +10.5% in the four-weeks and +31% in the 52-weeks.
• High Noon continued to excel with a 13.7% increase in the two-weeks but cooled. On the other hand, lapping its one-year anniversary, Jack Daniel’s RTD dollar sales growth dropped sharply.
• Meanwhile in the hard spirits-based tea race, Stateside’s vodka-based Surfside lemonade and hard teas and Boston Beer’s new vodka-based iced tea Sun Cruiser held a 0.7% and 0.5% share, respectively, in the latest two-week data, with ACVs of 5% and 4% respectively.

Read the full report rundown on BevNET.

Beverage makers have new pressure to decarbonize their supply chain, requiring innovation. To lower costs and decarbonize supply, tea, coffee, lemonade, soft drink, and alcoholic beverage makers have switched to Sugaright’s liquid cane sugar. Learn more about our sugar & new fermentability study. Learn more

It's been a rocky past few fiscal years for United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI). As profits remain in the red, the natural foods distributor has tried a few tactics to get its balance sheet back on track – including reorganizing its corporate structure, remapping service regions and implementing new programs intended to help boost margins.

🤔 But this past week, a report in Supermarket News sparked rumors that the publicly traded company may be heading for a buyout that would take it back out of the public’s (read: shareholder’s) watchful eye and aims to smooth out challenges from its 2018 acquisition of SuperValu.

❌ UNFI CEO Sandy Douglas countered, telling the publication that the company is not for sale; however that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from churning with other unnamed sources claiming UNFI has been approached by numerous consulting firms seeking information for potential buyers. 

UNFI suppliers, what have you heard? Send us tips at adeluca@bevnet.com.

Westrock Coffee Co. has opened its $315 million, 570,000 square-foot “roast to ready-to-drink” manufacturing facility in Conway, Ark., ahead of schedule, the company announced this month.

🌎 Headquartered in the same state as its new plant, Westrock also operated offices in 10 countries around the world; the new manufacturing facility marks the company’s largest production facility in the U.S. to date.

🤖 The Conway site is expected to create around 600 jobs and will utilize end-to-end automation to roast, grind, extract and bottle coffee.

Casa Azul has added another celebrity athlete to its roster of partners. 

🍹 Rob Gronkowski, former American football tight end and four-time national champion, has joined as an investor in the tequila company’s line of tequila sodas.   

💰 He joins actress Eiza González; Taylor Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce; and golf champions Michelle Wie West and Brooks Koepka. 

🏖️ Casa Azul is also launching its new Playa Pack, featuring two new flavors, Pineapple Coconut and Spicy Margarita.

🏆 The news follows a win for Casa Azul's founder and beverage innovator Lance Collins, who recently won a trademark trial against long standing tequila brand Clase Azul.