• 🍫 Is A Cacoa Water Moment Coming?
• 🦊 Foxtrot Assets Sold At Auction For $2.2M
• 🥃 Tip Top Cocktails' “Unreasonable Innovation”
• 👽 Seaview Bev Head Turns to the Brand Side
• ☕ Sprouts Taps Klatch For New Cafe Concept
• 🥤 Coca-Cola Launches Insights Platform

Will consumers ever sweeten up to Cacao Water? Entrepreneur Oded Brenner believes that after five years of growing his cacao products brand Blue Stripes, consumers are ready to buy in; the company has now reached a running revenue rate of over $10 million.

🧑‍🍳 Brenner is a trained chocolatier who previously founded restaurant chain Max Brenner. He launched Blue Stripes in 2019 with a range of food and drinks created from cacao, the fruit that produces cocoa beans used to make chocolate.

🆒 There’s one big catch: Cacao doesn’t taste like chocolate. While that’s been an education challenge for Blue Stripes, which makes the drinks as well as cacao chocolate bars, granola, trail mix, chocolate covered whole cacao beans and snackable dried cacao fruit.

🧊 Brenner is now working to get consumers past that expectation and will be transitioning the brand’s leading Cacao Water line from shelf-stable to cold chain in order to secure cooler placement and drive trial with a fresher product.

💰 Blue Stripes’ cacao water retail dollar sales were only around $45,600 in the 52-weeks ending December 31, 2023, but the company has expanded to more than 2,000 doors.

We caught up with Blue Stripes last week. Read the rest of the rundown on BevNET.

The future of Foxtrot is once again in question after assets belonging to the shuttered convenience chain were acquired on Friday by Further Point Enterprises via auction for $2.2 million, according to a report from Crain’s Chicago Business.

• The auction was conducted by JPMorgan Chase Bank, a debtor of Foxtrot, via Microsoft Teams.
• Assets belonging to Dom’s Kitchen and Market were also put up for bid but were not sold.
• Further Point’s portfolio includes non-alcoholic beer Athletic Brewing, Boston-based taqueria Borrachito, and celebrity chef Bobby Flay’s cat food brand, Made by Nacho, among others.

Read the full report for more details.

For a small company (and even smaller can size) Tip Top Proper Cocktails has big aims when it comes to innovation. 

🍸 We caught up with the founders who shared their upcoming lineup for the year, which includes six new releases like mezcal libation Naked & Famous and early 2000s favorite, the Cosmopolitan. 

🆕 At this point the company’s marketing relies heavily on its innovation churn, with each new release tee’d up with its own brand world, press, influencers and hype at the distributor level. That creates some challenges (like when mezcal gets stuck at the border, yipes) but being nimble helps with pivoting. 

Read the full story on BevNET to learn more about the innovation strategy.

In just 30 days, leaders in the beverage industry will meet in New York, NY for BevNET Live Summer 2024. The two-day event provides a platform for beverage entrepreneurs and industry experts to network, learn, and drive innovation within the beverage sector.

📣 We’ll hear from leaders at Diageo, Icelandic Glacial, Gopuff, Lowes Foods, Lemon Perfect, Full Frame, Equitea, SPINS, KDP and others. Check out the full attendee list here. 

🤝 Brands also have the opportunity to meet leaders from Whole Foods, Lowes Foods, and Gopuff in one-to-one meetings and sample their product – the deadline for sampling is May 30. 

Register now to receive the sign up form for both retailer meetings and sampling.

Bill Butrymowicz’s entire past has been in beverage distribution. Now, the head of Jersey Shore DSD house Seaview Beverage is using that experience to launch the “Juice of the Future,” a new startup brand called Loom.

📦 Seaview Beverage was founded in 1989 by Butrymowicz’s father and he spent much of his childhood observing and participating in the company, which he has run on his own for around 15 years now. Seaview will begin distributing Loom on its trucks this summer.

🌌 Loom will begin production of its better-for-you drink in the coming weeks. The liquid  contains 15% to 20% real fruit juice and no added sugars, bearing futuristic flavors like Aurora Orange, Beyond Apple, Moon Punch, and Cosmic Candy Grape.

👾 Butrymowicz, also an investor in brands like Lemon Perfect and Recess, said he wanted to create his own company and believed he has developed a strong sense over the last 35 years for what qualities help brands to succeed. 

BevNET Insiders can access the full story and learn how this distribution vet is upping his game in the industry.

Look out Erewhon, Sprouts Farmers Market is coming to Southern California with its own cafe concept in partnership with Klatch Coffee. The SoCal-based coffee roasters iced, drip and espresso drinks will be featured along with shakes and specialty food items like Berry Ricotta Toast.

😊 Launching May 24 at Sprouts’ Fontana location, the new in-store cafes will roll out to four additional Los Angeles area locations throughout the rest of the year.

👉 Klatch was founded in 1993 in Rancho Cucamonga by husband-and-wife team Mike and Cindy Perry. The company operates seven standalone locations in addition to the new Sprouts rollout.

🗨️ “Between more opportunities to meet our customers where they are, enhancing the Sprouts shopping experience, and introducing offerings that incorporate local ingredients, this partnership is more than just coffee,” said Klatch CEO Heather Perry.

The Coca-Cola Company today unveiled a new insights platform aimed to help operators in the foodservice and retail industries make data-driven decisions, dubbed Coca-Cola Lens. The platform leverages “proprietary” tools and data as well as insights from second and third-party sources.

👀 At launch, there will be 16 unique thought leadership stories spanning topics as broad as macroeconomic trends and as tailored as premium water trends. New content will be added every quarter.

🏪 According to Coca-Cola, the company is “uniquely positioned to provide valuable, real-time insights” as its business spans more than 250,000 retail outlets and 500,000 foodservice outlets in North America. 

💭 “We are launching Coca-Cola Lens to deliver on the promise to create value beyond beverages to our customers, while serving as thought partners and consultants,” said Pamela Stewart, chief customer officer, retail, Coca-Cola North America, in a statement.