Business of Drinks

Have you heard of the premium mixer company Badger Bevs? Maybe not – they’ve hardly done any brand marketing. So you might be surprised to hear about Badger’s scale: The company sold more than 100K 9L cases in 2025, growing more than 230%. And it’s barely at retail – about 95% of its sales still come from restaurants, bars, and hotels. Founder and CEO David Vogel chose that path early on. While working at The Chef’s Warehouse, he saw how carefully fine dining buyers distinguished between everyday and premium ingredients. He believed a mixer could earn a place in that decision. “I felt it was important to build the brand in that space first,” he told me in our latest Business of Drinks episode. But getting placements took more than a premium label. In New York, Badger’s first market, David would walk into bars and restaurants with samples, and get “thrown out of a lot of places.” Even when buyers liked the taste of its tonic and ginger ale, they’d ask: “Will you be here next week? Will you be here in a year?” That’s a real hurdle when a bartender is considering putting an unfamiliar mixer into a cocktail program. Badger had to win the tasting AND show it could keep supplying the account. Today, more than 1,000 New York venues order Badger. David describes the path there as “one tasting at a time, one conversion at a time.” The company now sells in 33 states. David says last year’s growth came from two sources: Expansion into West Coast markets through The Chef’s Warehouse, and growth within markets Badger was already serving. That might sound like a rapid national rollout, but David says it was an intentional sequence: “We literally went one market at a time.” His team staffed each market, trained the distributor, and worked with accounts before moving on to the next. Hear how Badger Bevs went from launch to 100K cases in just 3 years 👇 #drinksmixer #beverage #drinksindustry cc: Scott Rosenbaum

Billboards, digital ads, giveaways -- maybe even a free trip to Cabo for the distributor team. Early on, drinks brands can try almost anything to figure out what drives sales. Investor Jason Sherman, co-founder and managing partner of Top Shelf Ventures, says there’s room for that kind of experimentation when a company is below $1M in revenue. At that stage, investors are mostly looking for strong velocity and evidence that consumers come back and buy again. But as the company grows, the bar gets much higher. At $3M to $7M, investors want to see existing accounts buy more and reorder faster. They also want to see that the company knows how to support retailers and distributors efficiently. And the bar keeps rising as the brand scales. “If you do try to do a $10M round, they have to know exactly what you’re going to do with that capital,” Jason says. That means having nailed down a sales playbook, i.e. the plan the company will replicate in every new market and with every new distributor. Here, investors want specifics: How many accounts will the money open? How often should those accounts reorder? What will happen inside the stores and bars? How many salespeople will the company hire? “And it can’t just be a guess,” Jason says. The company needs evidence from prior markets that those tactics work. That’s a big change from the early days, when a founder might try five things without knowing which one will take off. By the time the company is raising $10M or more, experimentation is no longer the strategy. Jason gets into more of what investors need to see at each stage on the latest Business of Drinks. Listen to the clip 👇 cc: Scott Rosenbaum Noah Sanborn Friedman

“We probably won’t take a second call if you haven’t reached at least $1,000 a door per year.” That’s a performance indicator Jason Sherman of Top Shelf Ventures looks at when evaluating a drinks brand. The metric refers to average annual sales per retail door. His point is that velocity has to be strong across the board for the firm to take an interest. Let’s say a brand has 5,000 accounts. When Jason’s team digs into the data, they often find that 4,000 of those accounts are generating just $50-$100 a year. “And that’s not good,” he says. “That should be a warning sign.” Jason’s math is that with $1,000 per door as a baseline, let’s say there’s a 40%-50% margin, which leaves roughly $500 per account to fund discounts, sales incentives, point-of-sale materials, and everything else needed to support that placement. And for reference, stronger brands are doing considerably more. Jason points to Top Shelf portfolio company Gratsi (the boxed wine co we spoke with in Ep. 132), which generates closer to $4,000 to $5,000 per retailer annually. Just as important, its velocity keeps increasing. Interestingly, Jason has found that brands often don’t fully understand what's happening inside their existing accounts. As part of due diligence, Top Shelf checks hundreds of stores where a brand believes it is sold. The founders are often shocked by what Top Shelf finds: The product isn’t there, the shelf space is empty, the price is wrong, or the placement is sub-par. We get into details below -- listen to the clip 👇 CC: Business of Drinks Scott Rosenbaum Noah Sanborn Friedman

A founder walks into a bar, tells the story, pours the product, and wins the placement. That’s how many drinks brands build early traction. But investor Jason Sherman wants to know what happens when the founder leaves the room. Questions like: Can the distributor tell the story? Can another salesperson win the account? And will the product keep moving without the founder personally involved in checking the shelf, talking to the buyer, and asking for the reorder? Jason has seen this transition happen from several sides. At AB InBev’s ZX Ventures, he was part of a team that completed about 200 deals and nearly $1B in investments and acquisitions. He later founded TapRm, an e-commerce platform and distributor serving close to 5,000 New York City accounts. Today, he’s co-founder and managing partner of Top Shelf Ventures. Jason says self-distribution can be useful early on. It gives founders a chance to learn where the product belongs, how to pitch it, and what gets it onto menus or shelves. But that approach eventually reaches its limit. “You have to teach the distributor how to pitch you correctly,” he says. “That’s a very different mindset” from personally showing up at an account and selling it in. The question is whether the founder can turn the things that worked into something other people can repeat. That’s the investor test -- and it goes beyond sales. Jason also looks for founders who understand their inventory, working capital, cash flow, and what their projections are actually built on. Yes, founder hustle can get a drinks company pretty far. But eventually, the business has to work when someone else is doing the selling. Jason explains how investors tell the difference. Listen to the episode 👇 cc: Business of Drinks Scott Rosenbaum

Bizzy Coffee spent nearly a decade getting to profitability ... and then the economics of the business blew up. In 2024, coffee prices surged, tariffs added pressure, and CEO Alex French says Bizzy went into “panic mode.” “It was dire,” he says. “I didn’t sleep for nine months.” Competitors weren’t increasing prices so Bizzy couldn’t either. The company had to absorb much of the increase and figure out another way through it. For about six months, the team went through everything: Supplier terms, freight, staffing, minimum order quantities, waste, routing, reformulation, and manufacturing. Bizzy already thought of itself as a pretty lean operation. But under pressure, the company found a roughly 33% improvement in coffee extraction yield. That’s a pretty massive savings. “We found a ton of opportunity to cut costs along the way and optimize the business,” Alex says. And this was far from a bloated company with obvious waste. Alex describes Bizzy as a “frugal Midwestern manufacturer.” They already thought they were operating efficiently. But the business got squeezed hard enough that they found another 33%. Bizzy is now back to profitability and doing more than $50M in annual revenue. And Alex says surviving that stretch changed how he sees the company: “If we can weather that storm, there’s nothing we can’t do.” We get into the full story on the latest Business of Drinks. Listen to the clip 👇 cc: Bizzy® Coffee Scott Rosenbaum

Supplier Math: How do one great endcap and one well-executed tasting add up to a missed sales opportunity? When the national accounts team wins the endcap and the field marketing team books the tasting - at a completely different store. In our latest Business of Drinks episode, Ian Ferguson, CEO of PINATA explains how easily this can happen. The national accounts team secures a circular, endcap, or floor display. Meanwhile, the field marketing team plans its own activations - sometimes asking a tasting agency to choose the accounts. If the national account programming lives in one tracker and the tasting schedule lives in another, the agency may never know where that display is. On paper, both teams did exactly what they were supposed to do. But in market, two valuable investments never had the chance to reinforce each other. Ian says PIÑATA has seen sell-through almost double when an in-store activation is backed by an endcap display. The opportunity comes from putting information the company already has into the hands of the people deciding where to activate. PIÑATA brings national account plans and field execution together, helping tastings land where the right inventory, displays, and promotions are already in place. Watch the clip 👇 cc: Erica Duecy Scott Rosenbaum

One of the biggest turning points for Bizzy® Coffee came from a consumer who was already buying the product -- and using it wrong! Early on, Bizzy sold a 32-ounce cold brew concentrate. Co-founder and CEO Alex French came out of consumer insights at General Mills, so rather than outsourcing all of the sampling, he knew it was important to spend time in stores himself -- doing more than 200 demos in the early days. One day, a shopper told Alex she loved Bizzy and bought it regularly. Great news. So Alex mentioned diluting the concentrate with water. Her response: “Wait, you dilute it with water?” That was the moment Alex realized that consumers liked the coffee, but some didn’t even understand how the product was supposed to work. He also noticed that a larger, lower-priced, fully diluted coffee nearby was selling much faster. His conclusion: “If we just lowered our price and watered it down, we’d sell a heck of a lot more.” That insight pushed Bizzy toward the 48-ounce ready-to-drink format that became the core of the business. Today, Bizzy does $50M+ in annual revenue, produces more than 1M bottles a month, and sells in 12K+ stores. I love how basic this breakthrough was! No big research project or new marketing campaign, just Alex standing in a grocery store talking to someone who actually bought the product -- and discovering friction he hadn’t yet understood. At Business of Drinks, we ask nearly every founder we talk with how often they’re out in market talking to customers. You’d be surprised at how resistant some are to doing sampling and sales themselves. But, as Alex's experience shows, sometimes that’s exactly where you uncover the insight that changes the business. 💥 Listen to the clip 👇 Business of Drinks Scott Rosenbaum

When Saint Spritz co-founder Ben Patton told me the brand manages a nationwide team of roughly 100 brand ambassadors, I had one burning question: How do you keep track of all that? His answer: PINATA. That led to this week’s sponsored Business of Drinks conversation with CEO Ian Ferguson -- and one of the most relatable lines I’ve heard on the show: “We joke sometimes that we are in the business of sunsetting the Excel trackers of the alcohol industry. Our customers have trackers for trackers, essentially.” Anyone who has worked in drinks knows some version of this. There’s the master tracker, the regional tracker, the agency tracker, and quite possibly another tracker created to reconcile all the other trackers. 👉 The problem is what those spreadsheets can miss. Take sampling. Let's say a brand runs 100 tastings and then looks at depletions. Some accounts show a lift, while others don’t. The results might suggest sampling had little impact. But one tasting may have been intended to generate new orders. Another might have been promised AFTER a retailer had already purchased 10 cases. In that second scenario, the inventory arrived before the tasting, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect another order afterward. So when you group those events together, the data can tell the wrong story. The brand tracked what happened, but missed WHY it happened. PIÑATA connects it all: The request that started an activation through to what happened in the field and what followed in sales. That gives commercial leaders a clearer view of which programs are working, where execution is falling short, and where to spend their next dollar. Listen to our full conversation with Ian Ferguson: “How PIÑATA Is Bringing Beverage Field Marketing Out of Excel” 👇 #BusinessOfDrinks #BeverageIndustry #FieldMarketing #sponsored Scott Rosenbaum Jordan Zimmerman, MBA

Bizzy® Coffee has grown 175% over the past three years to more than $50 million in revenue. The company produces more than 1 million bottles a month, is sold in 12,000+ stores, and is the #1-selling cold brew on Amazon. But co-founder and CEO Alex French says most people still don’t know the brand. “We haven’t done any brand awareness,” he says. For years, Bizzy has spent funds much closer to the point of purchase. They run aggressive promotions to get people to try the coffee, keep pricing competitive, and use packaging to do a lot of the work at shelf. “The pricing gets it into their mouth,” Alex says. From there, the product has to bring them back. And that appears to be happening. Even as Bizzy adds new doors, Alex says, “We’re actually increasing our velocities as we’re growing our distribution.” That’s an incredibly hard combination to pull off. Yes, distribution can increase volume quickly, but if sales per store fall as you expand, the growth gets harder (and more $$$) to sustain. 👉 Yet Bizzy is still adding both. Alex estimates there are roughly 25,000 grocery, mass, conventional, and club stores where the brand could ultimately sell. Today, they’re in just over 12,000. For most of Bizzy’s first decade, the focus was on making that engine work: Get someone to notice the bottle, try it, buy it again, then repeat that process in more retailers. Only now, at $50M+ in revenue (!!), is Bizzy starting to turn up brand awareness. We dig into how Alex built the company -- including the consumer insight that changed the product, the decision to bring manufacturing in-house, a brutal spike in coffee costs, and what comes next. Listen in 👇 Business of Drinks Scott Rosenbaum