HOW TO START A BEVERAGE COMPANY? Have you ever wanted to start your own business? A few months ago, I bought this basil seed drink in the supermarket and tried it. I really liked it. It had these jelly balls that makes it yummy to drink. Then I had a thought. "let's make my own drink and sell it!". (PAUSE) I want to have a go making my own drink and sell it. Since then, the idea has been floating on the back of mind. So today I will be talking about 'How to Start a Beverage Company'. This speech will be useful to you because you will learn about how one company did it. You will see that to start a successful company you need to do the really hard things. --- My story is about a company called Sweet Leaf Tea. It was started by a guy name Clayton Christopher. Clayton always wanted to start a company since his father was an entrepreneur. He took some time to search for ideas. One day he decided to focus on a tea drink business after meeting and talking to a tea merchant for some time. He began be doing a number of really hard things. The first really hard thing he did was to built a drink production facility at home. The health regulation of the state requires him to build a fully enclosed room to make his tea drink. So he just went ahead and build a new room in his home. He then installed a range of equipment to do things like extract chlorine from water, filter the water, heating and cooling the water. The drink is then bottled with his hands by himself. That was pretty much his factory. I didn't realise this but, real world beverage drinks can be made by hand, by yourself. You do have the power to mass produce drinks without millions of dollars. --- The second really hard thing was to develop a great tea drink blend. He needed to develop his very own tea drink flavour. Clayton spent five months sourcing tea leaves from all around the world. He tried more than 500 individual teas and another 500 blends to find something he really liked. That is a lot of experimentation. Imagine spend 8 hours a day drinking tea for a whole year. Every day you would be trying new tea drinks. I would never thought of doing that. That is a great example of dedication. Don't do things the lazy way. Do things the hardest way. --- The third milestone is to get his product out there and sell. So how do you get you drink in the shop for customers to buy. He started by distributing it at convenience stores. They put his bottle on the bottom of the shelve. And only 1 or 2 bottle was sold every week. He then persuade 10 stores to let him place a large tub of ice and his drink at the checkout area. This was a success. People started to buy more of his drink and notice it. But it is still very slow. Years later he found his first major customer. A supermarket chain in Texas. To achieve this they called and sent free samples for more than a year to each of the large customers. Soon after other supermarkets followed. It is then that success is apparent. He finally was able to mass produce drinks and sell it in store. He has spent years developing his very own drink. As the company grows large. They hired college students to brew and bottle the drinks while they made deliveries in an old van. They market their drink by giving free samples to customers. To grow even bigger, they had to shut down their plant and signed up with a bottling company to develop his drink that had a longer shelf life. The bottling company have the ability to pasteurise the drink, which means to heat the drink for an a period of time to destroy certain microorganisms and prevent spoilage. Now Sweet Leaf Tea is real world beverage company that was bought by Nestle in 2011. --- So that is the story of how Clayton Christopher started his very own beverage drink company. Many of the big companies in the world started from just an idea. It is often created manual by hand. It was created with lots of care. With time and much hard work the company will grow. In the end it is possible for anyone to create a world class company. REFERENCE: Buchanan, L. 2009, Inc.com, How to Start a Beverage Company, URL: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090701/how-to-start-a-beverage-company.html

• published: 13 May 2015
• views: 6094