CPG Week: Best Of 2024 Awards

[00:00:05] Monica Watrous: Welcome to the CBG Week podcast by BevNET and Nosh, your source for the latest food and beverage industry news. I'm Monica Watrous, Managing Editor of Nosh, here with my co-hosts, Brad Avery and Lukas Southard. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe on your listening platform of choice. On the podcast today, we're discussing the best of 2024. During our live events earlier this month, we unveiled the BevNET and Nosh Best of 2024 Awards, which recognized the year's standout individuals, brands, and products from across all categories of the packaged food and beverage industry. Let's start with the BevNET Awards. Can you guys tell me a little bit about how those discussions went and were there a lot of nominations that you received?

[00:00:49] Brad Avery: We obviously got a ton of nominations, which is always great. It just shows the power of the community. I think one of the things that stuck out to me in our conversations about. who were voting on this year was how to kind of weigh the poppy Ollie pop battles that we've all been tracking. Both brands have been doing incredibly well and have a lot of upside to them. And so it was, there was a lot of conversation amongst the Bevanette team about like, how do we address this? We can't really choose one or the other. Cause they're both doing so well. They're just doing it in slightly different ways. So what we decided on as a team was to do something that I think is fairly unprecedented, but seemed very fitting this year. And we had two brands of the year. So Olipop and Poppy shared the award, even though they are two very separate companies.

[00:01:42] Lukas Southard: It's hard to really just say one outperformed the other. They're both pretty close in sales for the most part. They're both building this category simultaneously. It definitely would have seemed wrong to award one and then it's like, well, why did you give it to Poppy but not Ollipop? Or why did you give it to Ollipop but not Poppy? We talk about them in conversation so much together. It was sort of impossible to envision one of these brands winning over the other when, at the moment, they're both neck and neck. I think Poppy has done a little more to get itself into the mainstream via marketing and their TV commercials, but otherwise, I see them in the store and their sets are both full of all their entire portfolio of flavors, even in mainstream grocery outlets.

[00:02:31] Brad Avery: Yeah, agreed. There is no clear winner at this point between the two of them. And I think they both done a spectacular job of really building up this category, like you said, and we're seeing that represented in terms of the recent news that Coke and Pepsi are readying to launch their own prebiotic gut health, next gen, whatever qualifier you want to put version of this category out on the market. And that's just very telling of what they have helped create. together even though they're not together.

[00:03:02] Lukas Southard: And as these brands do mature, we are seeing a bit of their differences become a little clearer. I think Olipop has leaned a lot more into functionality, whereas Poppy is leaning much more into its message of, you know, we're just soda for the future.

[00:03:14] Brad Avery: Yep.

[00:03:16] Lukas Southard: You are also seeing their approach and the founders of Poppy are a lot more forward facing, particularly Allison Ellsworth, who's really the face of the brand, especially on TikTok, versus the founders of Olipop, who seem to be more heads down running the business and growing it at a steady pace. We also see, just in their innovation approaches, Olipop is going a lot more nostalgic in their innovations. They're going a lot more after categories, like another award they got was for best new product for their Ridge Rush, which is this kind of Mountain Dew, in quotation marks, Mountain Dew-esque flavor that they're doing, versus Poppy also embracing a lot of those classic flavors, but also going just in general fruit forward base and, you know, flavors like Rose that have been in their portfolio for a long time. So they're carving out a space for the next generation of soda, but they're also establishing themselves as a bit of a Coke and Pepsi dynamic as well.

[00:04:15] Monica Watrous: I'm here for it. Cola Wars 2.0. You know, I will say personally, I was an Ollie Pop fan and then I tried Poppy for the first time this year and that's exclusively what I drink. So if anybody cares what I have to say about this, I think the winner is Poppy. You're drawing lines in the sand.

[00:04:30] SPEAKER_??: I am.

[00:04:31] Lukas Southard: There's the whole idea of the co-brand winning.

[00:04:35] Monica Watrous: I wasn't in that room when you decided.

[00:04:37] Brad Avery: I've got a grape Ollipop in my hand right now. So I won't say that I choose one or the other, but I do like the fruit ones from Ollipop. I'm a big fan of the Tropical Punch and their grape soda. So, you know.

[00:04:49] Monica Watrous: Well, I have a can of Magic Cactus in my hand, and that was one of the winners of the Best New Products Award.

[00:04:55] Lukas Southard: Well, Magic Cactus was one of the Best New Product winners for BevNET. It was the only product in that category that was a THC brand, but another THC brand, Breeze, did win in Rising Stars. So we are seeing this category continue to grow and expand as well, and I think that was recognized in the awards through those brands.

[00:05:13] Monica Watrous: Although we weren't allowed to sample THC-containing beverages because we were in California, which laid down the law.

[00:05:20] Brad Avery: Yeah. Unless you brought your own, which some of us might have. But what's interesting about the inclusion of both Breeze and Magic Cactus is this category has moved very closely into a positioning around non-alcohol alternatives and being a social tonic that you can have while you're out and socializing at a bar or at a dinner party or something like that. Recording a podcast. Or doing a podcast for that matter. And they weren't the only ones that were highlighted in the best of this year. So Recess, we had them as a rising star in terms of their mocktail line, which I also think is really good. Little Saints was also included in there, who has done RTDs, they were part of the best packaging design, so they moved from a multi-serve large bottle into these single-serve cans, which I think they did a great job with the packaging, as well as Lappos, which is a NA Negroni, and all of those kind of represent another Similar to the next gen soda that we were just talking about another category that seems to just have so much momentum behind it. And it was represented in the best of.

[00:06:37] Lukas Southard: I think broadening out on the rising stars as well, because that's always one of the most interesting categories, and it's sometimes one of the most risky categories, because you're making a bit of a call about the future of these brands. But there were five winners in that space this year, and what we see are brands that are representing forward-thinking ideas in their categories. We had Nguyen Coffee Supply, which is a Vietnamese coffee brand that is focusing on really reclaiming Robusta beans, which have been, in their view, unfairly downplayed or even demonized, depending on how you want to say it, to Arabica beans. And it's, yes, they've got the condensed milk classic, what we think of as Vietnamese coffee in America, but also a black cold brew. And it's still a small brand. It's a fast-growing brand, but it's still very small. But it's one that's really thinking about coffee in a new way that we haven't seen here in the US, perhaps in old ways across the world. We also have Barco, which is another early stage brand that has just made some big moves in the sports drink set and has really thought forward with branding, with partnerships, getting some really tight NBA deals that have been important for the brand. And in formulation, in the wake of Body Armor and then Prime, and now we're seeing more moves to bring the sports drink category forward. That's another example, and the last one we haven't mentioned is Just Iced Tea, which, of course, we've talked about that a lot over the past couple of years since they launched. Seth Goldman's post-Honest Tea reclamation, it's just sort of been an amazing story to get that brand to where it is so fast and having developed it from effectively nothing in a matter of months to a launch that is impressive as a story, but now they have the sales numbers to show it. All five of these winners in Rising Stars, yes, they're early, yes, anything could happen, but I think we see them all thinking about their categories in really inventive and forward-thinking ways.

[00:08:45] Monica Watrous: I'm not part of the deliberation process for the BevNET Best Of Awards, but I would put Seth Goldman as Person of the Year every single year if I could. Well, he won it two years ago. Why can't he win it again? How many terms does he get?

[00:08:58] Lukas Southard: I mean, he could potentially. There's no limit on it, but I do think there's some variety is helpful. This year's winner was David Crouch, the general manager for non-alcoholic beverages at Diageo and the CEO and co-founder of Ritual Beverage Company. And I think that was an interesting choice to come through as well, because he's someone who hasn't necessarily been a big, flashy mainstream name in the industry, but is someone who has made a lot of difference and impact in a short amount of time for a category that is still making itself known to the space beyond just us beverage nerds and into the mainstream consumer space.

[00:09:45] Monica Watrous: And of course, we're talking about non-alch beverages, and ritual is probably the leader in non-alch spirits alternatives, right?

[00:09:54] Brad Avery: Yeah, I mean, after seed lip was acquired by Diageo as well, ritual was is basically the most well-known I would imagine for your everyday consumer when it comes to non elk spirits. And it seemed like. A very natural fit for Diageo to acquire Ritual and especially considering how much success that brand has, has had, as well as just kind of Diageo diversifying their portfolio in that way to create this NA spirits category that they're going to be one of the figureheads of.

[00:10:33] Monica Watrous: It seems like the BevNET person of the year has some parallels to the Nosh person of the year, which was Miguel Garza, the co-founder and CEO of Siete Foods, which was acquired or will be acquired by PepsiCo for $1.2 billion. Siete is a decade old and is a Mexican-American food brand that uses quote-unquote cleaner ingredients like avocado oil, coconut flour, that sort of thing. And that was one of the most exciting acquisitions I think we saw this year. Our brand of the year for Nosh was Good Culture, which plays on the cottage cheese trend that we've really seen accelerate over the past year, thanks to TikTok and all of the influencers who are creating viral recipes with cottage cheese. I'm also excited about the rising stars for the Nosh Best of 2024 awards. We have EMI, the ramen brand, which is expanding into additional formats and they unveiled vegetable toppings for ramen this year. Rhinestacks, which invested in vertical integration with its acquisition of Small Batch Organics, the granola company, earlier this year. as well as olive oil brand Graza, mac and cheese company Goodall's, and the plant-based nutrition brand Aloha.

[00:11:56] Lukas Southard: I think what's good to note with a number of the rising star winners here, and even good culture, is they're not necessarily reinventing the wheel of their category. They're just doing a better version of it, a cleaner or more authentic version of it. They're going for something that is familiar, that is understandable, like packaged ramen. I mean, how many of us have had those packaged ramen brands and you read the ingredient deck and you're like, I have no idea what this even is, but I'm gonna eat it anyway. Uh, but I think, uh, you know, having a more. Authentic version of that in that format, uh, or even something like good old, just as a taste, good, creamier, more authentic kind of Mac and cheese, uh, then, you know, craft, it's just sort of coming at a classic in a very approachable way and just saying, Hey, it's, it's better than the process stuff.

[00:12:49] Monica Watrous: bringing more nutrition, a cleaner ingredient deck, and a modernized flair to it. I mean, with Graza, it's just olive oil. I don't want to downplay it. I mean, it's premium olive oil. But the real innovation here is the packaging with the squeeze bottles and now with the beer can refills. And that's really what helped this brand, which, again, isn't doing anything that's super crazy. It's olive oil at the end of the day, but it's getting a lot of attention and interest because of its unique approach to the category.

[00:13:23] Lukas Southard: You know, with Goodall's, I just want to know, has anyone really observed how much of the modern packaging trends have kind of become just 70s retro? Oh, big time. It's kind of fun, and Goodall's is doing a little bit of that. I mean, it certainly feels modern, but at the same time, you're looking at the font, you're looking at the colors, and it feels a little bit like, I see how that has a little bit of that 70s pop and flare.

[00:13:47] Brad Avery: Embarrassingly for someone who has young kids and makes a lot of instant mac and cheese and mac and cheese in the South, I had never actually tried Goodall's, but I was happy that they were giving out some samples at, uh, I think at our cocktail hour at one of our breaks and coming around with the ideas. Yeah. I got to grab a couple of little cups of Goodall's and it is, uh, it is quite good. It is quite Goodall-ly. I don't know how you would Goodall-ly that. Don't give me that look, Monica. So one category that we do have on the Nosh side of the best of awards that we don't have on BevNET is the Changemaker of the Year award, which this year went to Everybody Eat, which is a Chicago-based snack maker. They do everything from crackers to cookies. I guess cookies are a snack, I've been told. I don't consider it that, but I consider them cookies.

[00:14:40] Lukas Southard: That's a discussion for a different episode. Snack depends on the context. You could have a ribeye steak as a snack.

[00:14:48] Brad Avery: That'd be quite a snack.

[00:14:50] Monica Watrous: But now, is a hot dog a sandwich?

[00:14:52] Brad Avery: All right, you know, we're not doing this here Anyway, I don't care everybody eat is a really amazing company and they're co-founded by Nicole Wilson and Trish Thomas who are both really wonderful people to talk to and you can tell they're also just very very Intentional and conscious amazing business people and they have a really down to earth approach to their hiring structure and, um, and how they've kind of built the brand. So it was, it was really nice to see, uh, everybody eat, get the change maker of the year, because I think they really deserve it. And I look forward to seeing how that brand continues to grow. It's it's been, it's been really impressive to watch.

[00:15:35] Monica Watrous: Yes, and I'd also like to point out the winner of the best marketing campaign, which is Fishwife. And this is a tinned seafood brand that has done a number of unique things from a splashy billboard in LA to an appearance on Shark Tank. to a cookbook that's coming out next year featuring the brand and the biggest of all I would say in terms of powerful activations was its pop-up shop in New York over a couple of weekends in the fall. They partnered with other food brands to execute this pop-up and sold its own products and merch alongside serving some unique dishes and I gotta say, I really like this play here. I mean, we know Poppy has done a pop-up. There have been other brands. Heyday Canning did a pop-up last year. We're really excited about the potential of that because what a way to get a lot of buzz on Instagram or TikTok very quickly. But Fishwife is also just a really delicious brand and the founder, Becca, is great. And Pierre, who's now on the team, we love him as well. So kudos to Fishwife, our best marketing campaign award winner of the year. And with that, this is our last episode of the year. We look forward to bringing you more snackable news and insights in 2025. Thank you for listening.

[00:16:58] Brad Avery: Do those snackable news include cookies or not cookies?

[00:17:02] Monica Watrous: Obviously not. Cookies are clearly a snack. They're not a snack, they're cookies. That wraps up this edition of CPG Week by BevNET and Nosh. Thank you to our audio engineer, Joshua Pratt, our director is Mike Schneider, and our designer is Aaron Willette. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe on your listening platform of choice, and we will see you next time.