The Startup CPG Podcast

Startup CPG Daniel Kopman
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[00:00:00] Daniel Kopman: I'm from St. Louis, which is a beer town, obviously, and a great beer town. So beer was an interest, right? I loved beer. But I wasn't aware that it was more beyond beer than American light lager. And I got to Edinburgh and all of a sudden, wow, it's like there's all these amazing beers that don't look like light lager, don't taste like light lager.

[00:00:30] And so I was really interested in it and studied that. I had to choose an industry to study from a history. economic history perspective did that and then just decided this is what I want to do. I want to learn all I can about this. I want to learn to be a brewer. That was a goal.

[00:00:48] Daniel Scharff: Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast.

[00:00:50] I'm your host, Daniel Scharf. On today's episode, we interviewed Dan Kopman, who was a serial beer entrepreneur and has now transitioned to full time academic [00:01:00] and industry advocate and policy advisor. I was really interested in his lessons on entrepreneurship, since he was one of the original craft brewers in the country, taking on the beer giants.

[00:01:10] And also, later in the episode, he tells us about the trends he's seeing in the industry, like beer versus liquor share, the emergence of non alc in the US. As compared to other countries like Europe where the trends are really different. It's a really fascinating episode and I hope you all really enjoy it.

[00:01:27] Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the Startup CPG podcast. Today we have the privilege to have a seasoned entrepreneur, thought leader, and brewing industry expert, Dan Kopman. With a career spanning over 35 years, Dan has been at the forefront of transformative changes in the beer industry.

[00:01:43] Dan is the co-founder and former CEO of the St. Louis Brewery, which is renowned for brewing Schlafly beer in St. Louis. Additionally, he served as the former CEO of Heavy Seeds beer in Baltimore, and has played key roles on the boards of the Brewers Association and the Beer Institute. [00:02:00] Currently, he's a professorial lecturer at the Kogod School of Business at American University and a senior policy advisor to the World Brewing Alliance.

[00:02:08] Dan and I actually have a lot in common. We have the same name. We both went to a tiny liberal arts school called Kenyon College, as well as did stints at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and are both former beverage CEOs. And on top of all of that, Dan is my cousin. So without further ado, Dan, welcome to the show.

[00:02:28] Daniel Kopman: Hey, it's great to be here, Dan. Thanks for the invite. And

[00:02:31] Daniel Scharff: we're joined today also by Grace Kennedy. Grace is the editor for Startup CPG and has a particular interest in the ALC and non ALC space. So welcome Grace as well, making your debut appearance on the podcast.

[00:02:44] Grace Kennedy: Thank you. I'm very excited

[00:02:45] Daniel Scharff: to be here.

[00:02:46] All right. So let's jump in. So, you know, Dan, I just always really idolized you and your career as I was kind of growing up and getting into the industry, anyone who I ever met that was from St. Louis, I would really proudly say, Oh, [00:03:00] my cousin is the brewer for Schlafly. And people would be amazed by that. I even got to check out the tap house when I was visiting St.

[00:03:06] Louis once. So I wonder just jumping in, can you tell me a little bit about how did you get into the industry and, you know, what was your. Career like in the early days when you were getting your

[00:03:16] Daniel Kopman: start. So luck has a lot to do with everything, right? So when I was a student, I was a third year at Edinburgh University, Kenyon College, didn't have enough beds.

[00:03:24] So they shifted all the juniors abroad. I got sent to Edinburgh to study economic history and I chose the brewing industry. And I'm from St. Louis. Which is a beer town, obviously, and a great beer town. And so beer was an interest, right? I love beer, but I wasn't aware that it was more beyond beer than American light lager, and I got to Edinburgh and all of a sudden, wow, it's like, there's all these amazing beers that don't look like light lager, don't taste like light lager, and so I was really interested in it and studied that as I had to choose an industry to [00:04:00] study from a history.

[00:04:01] Economic history, uh, perspective did that and then just decided this is what I want to learn all I can about this. I want to learn to be a brewer. That was a goal. And so I set up some internships. I walked through every door that would open up for me. And fortunately I walked through a door at Young's Brewery in London and he said, yeah, you want to work for us for six months for free?

[00:04:23] Yes. So I walked through that door. Uh, an old family friend in St. Louis who made conveyors for packaging lines for the brewing industry. He opened up a door at Scottish and Newcastle breweries in Edinburgh. I walked through that door and did six months and Young's offered me a job. Crazy. And so I took the job and that was 1983 and I learned.

[00:04:47] I spent a couple of years as a trainee brewer, and then they asked me to look at ways of growing the business beyond sales in the pubs. So supermarkets, export sales, etc. I did [00:05:00] that for a while, that. Brought me back to the US and I started to see small breweries that were opening in the 1980s around the United States.

[00:05:08] And at the same time, then a family friend, another family friend, a law partner, my father's Tom Schlafly, came to London on a trip, enjoyed spending time in pubs. And we're not really sure whose idea it was. I think it was his idea. He thinks it was my idea. We opened the first new brewery in St. Louis since Prohibition in December of 1991.

[00:05:31] And I took a break moving back here to Scotland in 92, but ultimately moved back to St. Louis in 1997, and we were able to develop the brewery from there. It was. One customer at a time, it was the early day. It was before the term craft beer existed. We were known as micro breweries. I just thought of ourselves as a small brewery.

[00:05:53] We sold our beer over the bar because in St. Louis, nobody was interested in selling beers from [00:06:00] another brewery. So we were forced essentially to sell beer over the bar. So the tap room, the Schlafly tap room was all the beer we made. All the beer we sold for the first few years was over that bar. Uh,

[00:06:11] Daniel Scharff: just before we go into Schlafly more, I was just curious, what was it like to be an American working in the Scottish brewing, uh, you know, British brewing industry?

[00:06:19] How did they perceive you, um, were you treated nicely or with, with suspicion

[00:06:24] Daniel Kopman: or a side eye? Well, it was interesting. I was working for a very old historical family brewery that owned 200 pubs in London, but it was very much run by the family. As an outsider, I was welcomed by all members of that team. So whether it was folks working on the production line, or whether it was the family members, you know, they sort of couldn't place me.

[00:06:49] They didn't know, like, where did he grow up and Who is this guy? And I just tried to be friendly and curious and ask for help all the time because I [00:07:00] needed lots of help and it was a great experience. I learned so much and I learned a lot of not just what to do, but I probably learned as much what not to do, which for any entrepreneur.

[00:07:13] As you know, it's learning those things. I learned those things in my twenties and was lucky to do so. So by the time I was 30 and we were setting up this brewery in St. Louis, I at least had a rough idea of what not to do. What I'd seen maybe at working at Young's or, or working at Scottish and Newcastle, or, you know, then visiting so many small breweries.

[00:07:34] When I say so many, there was a handful. I think when we opened in St. Louis, we had brewing license number like 200. Obviously, there were real pioneers that paved the way that became friends forever, whether that's a Kurt Widmer or. John Hall at Goose Island or the folks at Great Lakes in Cleveland or others.

[00:07:57] All of those that started late eighties, [00:08:00] early nineties, going to a craft brewers conference, and there might've been 200 at one of the early two, 300 people. Yeah, there's now 12, 000 attendees at a craft brewers conference, as opposed to having sessions where there'd be a speaker with PowerPoint slides.

[00:08:15] We'd sit around a table and talk about. Whatever the topic was. I remember sitting through one and I was sitting next to the founder of Rogue Ales, Jack Joyce. Jack was an amazing human being. And my question, it was a session on marketing, but it boiled down to what point of sales should you buy? Like, should you buy coasters or glassware or whatever?

[00:08:37] And I said. I've got a couple thousand dollars to spend on signage. I asked the group, John Hull from Goose Islands there, Kurtz there, others are there. And I said, you know, what would you spend it on? Would you spend, would you buy 10 neons or a hundred light boxes? And Jack and others, some were like, Oh, do the neons because if you get 10 great [00:09:00] locations, that's best.

[00:09:01] That has a facing out to the street and others were like, no, buy the hundred light boxes cause you'll need something for each account that you get. And Jack Joyce, cigar in his mouth, turned to me and he said, I just keep the money in the bank. And that was Jack. And Jack was like, we're doing enough to make the beer.

[00:09:20] We don't need signs. We don't need this. Yeah. Keep the money in the bank. And he, there was probably a four letter word that went with that. I can imagine,

[00:09:29] Daniel Scharff: I also am kind of like that, but I also have been accused of just not understanding marketing at all, so I can

[00:09:35] Daniel Kopman: see that. So that was the environment, and that was, those early days, there was a handful of us, and we knew every customer.

[00:09:43] Yeah, great.

[00:09:44] Daniel Scharff: I wanted to ask before jumping in too much further, I think it's really important those lessons about what not to do. I feel like on our podcast here, that should be as much of what we're trying to talk about as what people think we should do. So what were some of those lessons or what are some of those lessons now?

[00:09:59] What should [00:10:00] people definitely

[00:10:00] Daniel Kopman: not do? Wow. That's a great question. What should folks not do? The biggest thing, it all depends on the business. And even today, now, when I'm speaking with students in a course on strategy, strategy is as much about what you choose not to do as what you choose to do. So if you think about the most basic of any business, it's what are you going to make and where are you going to sell it?

[00:10:24] So in our case, we decided we would focus on making two or three beer styles and doing it really well. So great pale ale, great wheat beer, Hefeweizen. And a great stout. Let's not try and do more than that. Let's just make three great beers. And all we're going to do is sell them over our bar. We're not going to try and package them for the market.

[00:10:46] We're not going to try and set up relationships with wholesalers. We're not gonna, everything that goes with all of that. There's so much that goes with trying to sell beer into, through a distribution channel of [00:11:00] distributors and retailers. That's a complicated web, as you've learned. When you're selling directly to a consumer, the trick, especially in those days, pre e commerce days, who's going to walk through the door and how are we going.

[00:11:13] To win loyal long term customers that are so valuable, right? The value of a long term customer that comes a couple of times a week and comes for 10 years versus trying to attract new customers all the time. I think those are some of the most basic questions. You know, what are you going to make and where are you going to sell it?

[00:11:33] Once you get beyond that, then okay, we can start to think more about what not to do. But if you're making your own product, I mean, rule number one, you just have to focus on, on making a great product because you've only got so much time in a day and you've only got so many resources. So it's choices, you're making choices.

[00:11:53] And a lot of those choices are what not to do. It's not so much like what not to do so you screw it up. It's more, what should [00:12:00] I prioritize in terms of time and resources? And where not

[00:12:03] Daniel Scharff: to sell and what marketing investments or like it's not to buy because they don't fit with your strategy. Yeah,

[00:12:09] Daniel Kopman: exactly.

[00:12:11] Jack might've been right. Keep the money in the bank because you're going to need the money for something else. Like payroll. Sometimes students, I remember I was guest speaking on an MBA course at Olin Business School at Wash U in St. Louis, and these are entrepreneurs that are thinking about how do I start the next billion dollar business?

[00:12:27] And they said to me, so what's the key to a great startup? And I said, well, you've got to make payroll every two weeks. And they looked at me like I was. What am I learning from you? You know, and I said, well, if you can't make payroll, then your employees who you need, you're not going to do it all. You need the people, you know, they're not going to stay.

[00:12:44] They got to make rent and make their mortgage. And sometimes I see startups and they've got a great business plan, great model, great everything. But for one reason or another, they run out of cash and make payrolls. You're done. Yeah, well, I

[00:12:57] Daniel Scharff: definitely saw that at a former company that I worked with and it just [00:13:00] had tons of money, endless money, and I think just blew through a lot of it on marketing initiatives like hand painted murals in obscure parts of tastemaker areas and then ran out of the money and didn't have, and basically had to let go of people who they couldn't pay anymore.

[00:13:15] So I think that definitely would ring true for them. One thing I wanted to ask about for Schlafly is, so I know you guys had done extremely well, especially in the Midwest, and then. You were selling into retail as well. And you know, not just in the Midwest, but nationally. Can you tell me about what that process was like and how were you doing that in those days, which was probably a different kind of environment than we see today?

[00:13:37] Daniel Kopman: Yeah. So we start by selling all the beer over the bar. We then start kegging beer for distribution to local bars and restaurants and then. And that's 1991 is when we start. And in the late nineties, we started packaging beer and selling it to the supermarkets in St. Louis and all the markets in the U. S.

[00:13:59] with beverage, [00:14:00] alcohol, they're all a little different, right? St. Louis was a grocery driven market. It also was a unique market in that the local grocers were local. So the big grocers, as opposed to being big national chains. were, you know, Schnucks, Deerbergs, and ShopAndSave. ShopAndSave was part of SuperValue, but it was the smallest of the three.

[00:14:21] And the market leader was, by and far, Schnucks. And so we started selling. And our wholesaler, quite honestly, did the heavy lifting initially, meaning got it placed. And got it priced, but we had a price, the price didn't change and I'd go shopping. I had two little kids in tow and I'd go into the grocery store to do the shopping.

[00:14:40] And that inevitably meant that the kids were going to get dragged to the beer aisle. And they love to tell that story. So, and I'd stare at this aisle and it was full of these yellow tags. And I was like, so the white tag had the like one price and then the yellow tag had a discount. I was coming back to St.

[00:14:58] Louis from the UK. And so I [00:15:00] wasn't all that familiar with U. S. grocery and how it all worked. And I hadn't been working in the brewing industry in the UK. So I phoned up the buyer at Schnucks and I said, can I come and see you? Name was Bob Watson, really amazing guy. And I said, okay, I run this little brewery.

[00:15:15] I don't know what I'm doing. Can you teach me? How this works. How do these yellow tags work? And he explained how it worked. And we had great relationship over a decade. He's retired now, but he taught me how it worked. And we worked together to really grow the market. For craft beer in St. Louis or in the region.

[00:15:38] And I started to also understand where beer margins were. So they sold beer, wine, and spirits and made very little money on beer. They sold beer like milk. Maybe Anheuser Busch's hometown, you know, there was a bit of a monopoly. So pricing power. Was, you know, from an economic standpoint, suppliers didn't initially, or the buyer in this case, meaning Schnucks, didn't have [00:16:00] a lot of pricing power because if they put the price up, then the consumer would go buy their 30 pack of Bud Light next door.

[00:16:07] So they made very low margins on beer. So craft beer and imports were not a big. Deal in St. Louis at all. So craft beer, especially a local craft brewer offered schnucks a huge opportunity to make more than nothing because they were making essentially nothing selling beer, kind of like milk. And so we struck up this partnership and we ended up developing a very successful program around pricing where we would be frontline price, no tag, and then a sale tag and key weeks and.

[00:16:39] eMonths, you know, around beer centric holidays and. You know, even once we expanded our sales outside of St. Louis, 75 percent of our volume was the St. Louis metro area. Pretty interesting to hear

[00:16:52] Daniel Scharff: about the kind of collegiality or camaraderie in the beer industry. I visited a brewer in San Diego [00:17:00] once, and we were doing store tours, they're high fiving store managers.

[00:17:03] And I was like, how do you have such incredible distribution locally? And then I realized it's cause actually the store managers like to go hang out at those breweries as well. So they're pals, they hang out. And then I also was talking to people about Bev Alk and like beer trade shows. They're like, yeah, I mean, it gets a little sloppy.

[00:17:19] Like you can do business for a little bit and then everybody's tasting the beer. And so it gets a little dicey. Maybe it was just because it was different times. But, you know, I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't even imagine if I asked a retail buyer now to explain how promotions work to me. But it seems like it was either.

[00:17:34] In that time, it was okay, or people are just cooler in the beer space about helping you, or Dan Kottman is just a very affable guy and people want to help him. Out of which one of those?

[00:17:45] Daniel Kopman: Couldn't tell you which one, but there was an understanding that we both had a lot to gain. There was something really to be gained for the retailer here.

[00:17:53] And that was probably, that's a lot because it was timing. There was no craft beer market, so there was no separate [00:18:00] profit pool. to be worked on craft beer for a lot of retailers represented a whole new opportunity to drive margin in the BevAlp sector that maybe didn't exist in beer before that point.

[00:18:13] And so that may be part of it. But also the larger beer market was very much driven by on a volume basis. So pricing It was all about filling breweries at, at all costs. And so volume was really critical to the major brewers, more so than maybe profit at the time or profit. They saw their profit coming from volume.

[00:18:32] Um, and that has changed now with premiumization and other trends that really dominate the market today. So it's the beer market sort of like an accordion, it's come back as opposed to it being separate. Now the profit pool, it's not necessarily separate profit pools. It's just beer and profits being made, whether it's on.

[00:18:50] Domestic light logger or an import or craft.

[00:18:53] Daniel Scharff: Can you define profit pool for people who

[00:18:55] Daniel Kopman: are unfamiliar? I mean, think about it more as just gross margin. Okay. And [00:19:00] then kind of

[00:19:00] Daniel Scharff: who makes what, right? Like what you make, what your distributor makes and what the retailer makes, you know, the share of that profit pool.

[00:19:06] And, you know, it's pretty interesting to hear you say that because I think. All of us now, we strive to show buyers, you will make more profit with the, on the shelf or stuff that's out there. But I think the example you're giving is just such a clear cut case of it. And I mean, maybe that's only in retrospect, but yes, when you have those kinds of mass market, mass produced beers that are really like price war, retailers probably against each other on trying to bring people in and it, you know, reminds me a lot of like.

[00:19:32] Coke versus Pepsi and like which brand was going to be doing a two for five on 12 packs at CVS that week. I mean, it was kind of flip flop weeks and then now seeing like the premium sodas that are coming into the market. I imagine, you know, a very similar argument that they were making for a lot of these retailers of just, this is a whole new world for you guys.

[00:19:50] We can really bring up the price points. So maybe it's common sense to everybody kind of looking back, but I imagine that was a really big

[00:19:56] Daniel Kopman: advantage for you. We had that early mover advantage in the [00:20:00] craft beer space in our market, but by the time, and we had it for longer than many other small brewers, so we were the only other brewery besides Anna's a Bush in St.

[00:20:12] Louis for years, whereas there were many more. All other markets had more than one craft brewer, especially by probably the late 90s, early 2000s. And we were on our own really until 2010. So we had that early mover advantage. But honestly, once things changed, it changed very quickly. And that presented us with huge challenges.

[00:20:36] Because now. We were going to have to fight for our share of the growth, essentially. My hope was that we'd have some friends to help drive the market, that additional brewers coming in would help drive the growth of craft beer. And it did, but quite honestly, most of that additional growth of the market went to the new entrance.

[00:20:55] So our volume, we were able to hold our volume for quite some time. [00:21:00] So that, you know, our volume held up, but it didn't grow like it was before. And so what

[00:21:05] Daniel Scharff: was that story then? Like, as you started expanding to retailers beyond Schnucks and, you know, outside of the region, were they just as receptive and did you have those kind of early case studies to show to them?

[00:21:15] It

[00:21:15] Daniel Kopman: was quite honestly, this is where now having those local grocers put us at a disadvantage. Because it wasn't Schnucks and say, Hey, take us to another market and they'd be receptive to that. So. I remember friends, Sweetwater, who, Big Brewery in Atlanta, and Publix was the big customer for Sweetwater. And they were expanding to Florida and Publix just took them to Florida and it went really well.

[00:21:43] When we were going, we had the challenge now that we were doing really well in St. Louis and there were places we wanted to go, but we had to establish new buyer relationships. Whereas if you were in a market that already had, say, a national grocer [00:22:00] as the driver of that market, that grocer could take you to a new market.

[00:22:03] So that was an advantage. for other brewers that were in other markets. And that was a bit of a challenge, quite honestly. We were successful in pockets, both in the Midwest and on the East Coast, but it was not easy, not easy. And we had to start the way we had done it sort of in St. Louis. We had to start on premise in those days and sort of build up some name recognition and then try and establish relationships with buyers in those areas.

[00:22:34] And the wholesalers became critical to the, you know, we, those wholesaler relationships in those other markets where they had the relationship already. With the retail buyers, those were critical. Yeah.

[00:22:44] Grace Kennedy: Something I've heard from so many alcohol brands as like the largest struggle is figuring out distribution, like locally versus expanding into other markets.

[00:22:56] So in terms of just like the current landscape and maybe like a [00:23:00] recommendation you would have for brands, what would be sort of your, if you were doing it all again today? What would be sort of your line of attack when it comes to starting locally, where you can definitely get in, versus figuring out then how to expand to another state, another

[00:23:15] Daniel Kopman: market?

[00:23:16] I think in the beer space, stay local, quite honestly. The transaction cost of establishing your brand in another region, the further away, the harder it gets, and the more expensive it gets. And so, unless you have something That you feel is, offers a really unique selling proposition. I would just make that strategic decision at least for some time to just say, we're only going to sell here.

[00:23:43] And if you look at a brewer like New Glarus, they said years ago, we're only going to sell in Wisconsin. And they've never wavered from that. And Spotted Cow as a brand is one of the things that makes Wisconsin a unique place. Craft beer and beer [00:24:00] is maybe a little different than other beverages. So much of craft beer is tied to those local communities in the same way that that benefits the brewer.

[00:24:10] It also benefits those communities. I think craft beer at the start of changing trends in the whole food and beverage space, I think of, you know, movements like the slow food movement and other things that have happened in food. Craft beer was right at the start of that and now not just craft beer, but all sorts of other food and beverage companies make local places special.

[00:24:33] And I think there is, from a strategy standpoint, while it may get in the way of creating a billion dollar business, there is something really special about local businesses and what those offer their communities and how important those local food and beverage businesses are to communities. In terms of making them unique and making them destinations, you know, tourist destinations.

[00:24:59] And there's not a [00:25:00] whole lot of reason to travel to St. Louis besides beer and baseball, but now there's some great food as well. There are local food companies that are helping to make a place like St. Louis unique, and those who are responsible for marketing St. Louis as, for example, as a tourist destination or any city, they leverage those assets, and those assets are really important.

[00:25:21] And

[00:25:21] Daniel Scharff: so, um, so Dan, speaking of those learnings then, when you moved over to Heavy Seas, did you focus more on local, or what other learnings did you take from your first go around for the

[00:25:32] Daniel Kopman: next chapter? When I started at Heavy Seas, I understood a couple of things. A lot had changed. Now we've got seven, 8, 000 breweries in the United States.

[00:25:41] So early mover advantage is gone. And Heavy Seas had that early mover advantage. Loose Cannon IPA was one of the first IPAs in that region, in the Mid Atlantic region. So they had that early mover advantage, but now they had thousands of friends in terms of other breweries [00:26:00] producing similar beer styles.

[00:26:02] So the job as CEO was a different job. It still was a transformation. You want to be that kind of transformational leader in which you set a mission that's clear that everybody understands, and that motivates everybody to get up every day and want to go to work. So in St. Louis it was, we're gonna change the beer culture.

[00:26:22] We're gonna leave a zip code better than we found it. Here's a struggling sort of rust belt city. We're gonna make this place better. That was the mission. Change the beer culture, meaning people are going to start to drink things that aren't light lager beer, more than just Bud Light. So the mission was really clear in St.

[00:26:38] Louis and everybody bought into it. I didn't have to work that hard to get that message through. It's just that we were really clear about that message. And then the choices we made, for example, to focus on local beer sales was really important to many of our employees. The difference that they were making in the community was really important.

[00:26:55] So when I get to heavy seas, this is a different job because. St. [00:27:00] Louis and the DC metro area, DC, Baltimore, Philly. This is a different place. Local's important, but local is, how do you define it? Is it the Delmarva region? Is it Philly? Is it Baltimore? What is it? And I realized that I had to be not just a transformational leader, but I also had to be a good coach to individuals on the team.

[00:27:25] I had to encourage. The team to work together, and we also needed processes and systems that would maybe give us a bit of an edge over others. And so there was as much, I wouldn't say, I didn't want to become a bureaucratic leader in the classroom environment and how hit Kogod, there are PowerPoint presentations, you know, there are slides.

[00:27:51] Yeah, but I often have felt that American businesses are being overwhelmed by PowerPoint. It's like death by PowerPoint, because if [00:28:00] all we're doing in our business is making PowerPoint slides to present to each other inside the four walls of our business, we're not spending enough time talking to customers.

[00:28:08] Big businesses have people that do and talk to each other all day long and make strategic decisions and do all that. And then they have other people that sell and. People that talk to consumers. When you're in a small business, you have to make a choice. Are we going to spend a lot of time talking to each other or are we going to go talk to customers?

[00:28:26] And if you spend too much time talking, if you think that the process that you run needs to be just that process that you'd run in a bigger business. You might struggle cause you're not spending enough time with your customers. That's pretty interesting to think about

[00:28:40] Daniel Scharff: it that way. Cause I mean, I've worked across major multinationals and small startups.

[00:28:44] And if I think about ever going back to a major multinational, I'm like, ah, but the fricking meetings, like, I don't want to sit in all those meetings. I think you're right about that. I'd way rather be emailing customer and hustling for a sale and talking to a consumer.

[00:28:59] Daniel Kopman: So to answer [00:29:00] your earlier question, what's something not to do in a startup?

[00:29:03] Spend a lot of time talking to yourselves and spending a lot of time making the PowerPoints look good. You know, you don't need to impress each other in a small business. You need to spend time talking to customers. You need to spend time also talking to your suppliers. I think that's a really overlooked part of it, right?

[00:29:20] The integrity of a product, the story of a product. A lot of that comes from learning the whole value chain, especially. In food and beverage, right? You've got a wonderful value chain full of farmers and others involved in that value chain. Spend the time to get to know those folks. Spend the time to get, understand their business.

[00:29:40] It's not in the beer world, a bag of malt, malted barley shows up at your door and you're buying bags of malted barley. There's a whole story behind that bag of malt and there's a maltster involved. There's a farmer involved. There's a seed merchant involved. Spent some time on the farm. I mean, I'm married into a farming family.

[00:29:59] I'm [00:30:00] really lucky to have learned so much from my father in law and brother in law. And you've been on that farm and you were at that wedding. So I can't say enough about how important it is for those of us in food and beverage to understand what's going on at the farm. I totally

[00:30:17] Daniel Scharff: agree with you in my past companies, I would try to get on a phone call with suppliers of most of the ingredients and understand like, really, where is it coming from?

[00:30:26] What are the benefits of this ingredient that you're supplying to us? I learned so much, including a lot of stories that I think were really important for explaining the product to consumers and to buyers. So I'm totally with you on that. I wanted to pivot a little bit because, you know, I think one of the really interesting things about your background is that, you know, now you really see this alcohol space on a global level.

[00:30:49] Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, what's your work that you're doing now on that level and some of the context for

[00:30:55] Daniel Kopman: it? Yeah, I mean, I'm a beer guy, right? I love beer. I love everything about the [00:31:00] industry, the history of it, from farm all the way through to glass. I spend a lot of time with farmers.

[00:31:07] It's just great. I thoroughly enjoy that. And I understand how important it is. It's a getting beer into a glass that tastes great. And we're in a very different world today than we were even 20, 30 years ago. And there have been moments over the past two, 300 years in which beer and specifically hard liquor kind of get into it a little bit, right?

[00:31:31] We're all in the beverage alcohol space and there's some great distilled spirits, but a drink is not a drink. And. So, beer is very healthy on a global basis, but beer has lost a lot of share, for example, in North America, to distilled spirits, and I'm not happy about that. I think beer is a really important historical beverage.

[00:31:53] It's a great thing to drink. I mean, it, there's, I could go on forever and I won't, but I think you know where my passion [00:32:00] sits, right? Wine makers are the same way, right? Wine makers feel very passionate about it.

[00:32:05] Daniel Scharff: What are those share changes that you've seen? It's

[00:32:08] Daniel Kopman: 20%.

[00:32:09] Daniel Scharff: Or can you talk, can you talk a little bit more about like, where was it when you were like historically or when you started and where are you seeing it now and where is it projected to go?

[00:32:16] Daniel Kopman: Right. If you look at what I would call share of ethanol, right? So if you take volume and you adjust it for the average ABV, you get to the, you know, what's the amount of alcohol being consumed as hard liquor? What is being consumed as wine? What is being consumed as beer? The distilled spirits companies have gained 20 points of share from brewers.

[00:32:39] Wine has stayed pretty consistent at about 15%. Beer was 60. Wine was 15. When I started, and hard liquor was 25, beer is now 40, wine is still 15, and hard liquor is now 45. So I think you've probably heard, you know, the distilled spirits folks will say, you know, distilled [00:33:00] spirits now are bigger than beer.

[00:33:01] And that's what they mean. There's a lot of policy changes that have happened that contributed to that. Hard liquor is now available in many more places than it used to be, right? And hard liquor is now advertised in places where it wasn't before. So, the distilled spirits companies have worked very hard to change regulations across the U.

[00:33:22] S. to make hard liquor products more accessible. You now can get a cocktail at a baseball game. When I first went to my first Cardinal game, I could not have gotten a vodka, whatever, or a tequila, or whatever. I could get a bud, or a bud light, or a bush. So there's been a lot of change. From a consumer perspective, consumers should be able to choose what they want to drink, but consumers need to also understand, not all beverages are equal.

[00:33:50] A night on tequila is not like a night on beer. And so, in the same way that it's been very important for Americans to learn about [00:34:00] calories, and they make choices based on calories, I don't think Americans necessarily have as much understanding about the strength of one beverage versus another and the sort of impact that has.

[00:34:13] So that's a piece of it, but really it's more, we need to make sure that we protect and defend what is a great historical beverage with great economic benefits to communities that we should be celebrating. Does that help answer your question? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Quite honestly, it's very different in other parts of the world.

[00:34:33] So that share change that I've talked about in North America has not happened in Europe. The share of. Consumption that beer and distilled spirits and wine has, has not changed in the past 20, 30 years. Now the total amount of ethanol that consumers are consuming, the total amount of ethanol within the, those shares has gone down.

[00:34:54] So, Europeans are drinking less of everything on a proportional basis where [00:35:00] the shares haven't shifted. In the U. S., consumers are drinking about the same amount of total alcohol beverages. But the share of what they're choosing to purchase has changed.

[00:35:10] Daniel Scharff: Is that share pretty similar in Europe, or is it skewed more towards beer?

[00:35:16] Daniel Kopman: Europe has some real regional differences. So wine is quite a high share in Spain, Italy, and France, whereas beer has a very high share in Germany, Eastern Europe, the Netherlands, Belgium. And the Nordic countries. So there's regional variation. So when you look at data for the EU, you know, that's what you see.

[00:35:37] Beer's also super healthy in Latin America. Beer's doing very well throughout Latin America, Mexico, all the way to Argentina. And beer's doing very well in Africa. And the thing we also have to understand is that the U. S. and Europe are not growing that much population wise. China's no longer growing population wise, the population [00:36:00] growth that we're going to see over the next 20, 30 years is really going to come out of South and Southeast Asia and Africa, you know, five of the largest cities in the world in 10 years will be in Africa, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Lagos.

[00:36:15] So from a brewing industry standpoint, I sort of try to see the whole picture and. Try to breweries throughout the world now to promote what they're doing and improve education and. Do what wine has done. One of the initiatives we're working on is to make sure that consumers really understand where beer comes from and get to know those farmers.

[00:36:37] We all think of wine as an agricultural product. Our goal is that consumers would think of as beer the same way. I wanted to

[00:36:44] Daniel Scharff: ask, why do you think that the share of ethanol for spirits has gone up so much in the U. S. and not in those other regions? Is it because of the strong culture for beer in Germany and, you know, wine in France and Spain?

[00:36:58] Or what is it that means that in [00:37:00] Europe those other categories are just still

[00:37:01] Daniel Kopman: holding strong? I don't have the like silver bullet answer. I think it's like everything else. It's a combination of factors that you put all the pieces together. The distillers had their eye on North America for many years, the global distilling companies, and they've done a really good job of, um, marketing, both the on premise and off premise.

[00:37:22] I know, for example, when I was working, we'd go to bars to do a tasting in St. Louis and. The distillers would show up with a better program in promoting the cocktail culture and things like that. So there was a lot going on that has contributed to the share shift that maybe wasn't, either they didn't have Europe as a target or they decided the traditions in Europe, whether it was for wine in some countries or beer in other countries was going to be too difficult to overcome.

[00:37:51] Where the pub culture, whatever the culture was in Europe, was so embedded that they weren't going to be able to break that down. [00:38:00] Whereas in the US, we're always in the US open to new things and what's happening, what's new. And we saw that through the 90s and 2000s of a shift whereby consumers.

[00:38:12] Rightfully sort of found the marketing programs, the cocktail programs that the distillers worked, invested in to be attractive and, and it worked. And

[00:38:20] Daniel Scharff: I, yeah, I guess because of maybe liquor with the margins and, you know, some of the like celebrities that have promoted a lot of, that brand new have taken off, yeah, probably a combination of things that have also been through the accessibility as well, getting into, um, new points of sale, like baseball stadiums, where

[00:38:36] Daniel Kopman: how you can get a cocktail.

[00:38:38] Yeah, hard liquor has some real advantages. If you think of beverage alcohol as one market, I don't necessarily view it that way. But if you consider it that way, they have some real advantages, right? The product has basically a never ending shelf life, unlike beer, which has a Pretty strict shelf life, some cases, you know, somewhere between four weeks and maybe up to a year of good [00:39:00] shelf life.

[00:39:00] But generally speaking, that would be the outside limit for beer. It's really more a month or two is a good shelf life for beer, maybe six months. Whereas you find a bottle of gin or vodka that was produced 10 years ago. It's still going to taste the same. Plus there's been some evaporation. It's the same bottle.

[00:39:18] So, and it's relatively inexpensive to transport. Because you're transporting one bottle, doesn't have to be refrigerated, unlike beer, especially has to be often refrigerated. They've got real advantages, from a cost structure, selling, etc. So, they've taken full advantage of that. And what we have to do is, beer is to remind people of the history and of the provenance, find occasions in which we can compete and win in the market.

[00:39:46] So a

[00:39:46] Daniel Scharff: lot of our brands now in our space are focusing on low or non alc, whether it's spirits or beer. So what do you see as the trends these days in the US market as well as in international

[00:39:59] Daniel Kopman: markets? [00:40:00] For me, a really exciting part of the beer business, because this is where beer now has a competitive advantage over wine and hard liquor.

[00:40:08] The methods that are used, whether that is a mechanical method to remove alcohol from a beer we make, or now new methods that are biological, where we can use yeast strains that actually don't produce ethanol in fermentation. and produce really great flavorful beers, those methods aren't available to wine or to hard liquor.

[00:40:30] So if wine or hard liquor want to compete in that space and produce products that have no alcohol, it's pretty tough. They have to like rethink the whole thing. And so that has given beer a real early mover advantage. So, in Europe, which is the largest share of non alcoholic beer market, or beer volume, beer is like, non alcoholic beer is like 95 percent of the market for non alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits.

[00:40:57] Does that make sense? So of all the non [00:41:00] alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits sold in Europe, 95 percent of it's non alcoholic beer. And the total volume is about 52 million hectoliters with that perspective globally. With that perspective, that's about two and a half percent of global beer production. In the U.

[00:41:16] S., it's only 1%. So of that 50 million hectoliters being sold globally, half of it's Europe. A chunk of it is the Middle East and North Africa, where that market has existed for a while. And North America has actually got the lowest volume of any global region. So we're really at the beginning. We're really at the early adopter stage of this market, and it has a long way to run.

[00:41:43] And it's going to be years, I think, in the running. I mean, it's growing at its sort of mid single digits, double, low double digits globally. We'll see higher rates of growth in markets like the U. S., where there's only two million hectoliters of non alcoholic beer being [00:42:00] sold. So it presents a huge opportunity for brewers, and I see nothing but huge upside.

[00:42:07] For both existing brewers, both multinational and small brewers, and for startups who are just producing non alcoholic beer. And what do you think it is

[00:42:15] Daniel Scharff: that is so different culturally about why Europeans drink so much more non alcoholic? I know when I lived in Spain in my twenties, I would go to a bar and People and girls that I knew, they would order it on AlkBeer.

[00:42:28] It was called, in Spain, it was called a C, without, just casually. And that really blew me away because I had not seen that in the US without a stigma attached to it. You know, people would joke about O'Douls a lot and call it near beer, stuff like that. So that, yeah, there really was a negative perception of it that you didn't really

[00:42:45] Daniel Kopman: see it in Europe.

[00:42:47] There's a couple of things. One, that's where the market started. So all of the things that would encourage the market, like anti drink drive laws, other sort of trends, health related trends, started there, and it [00:43:00] started much earlier than it did in the United States. So, just from a consumer adoption perspective, We're behind, or the U.

[00:43:08] S. is behind. That doesn't scare me. That doesn't concern me because we will ultimately catch up. And it's just a question of the consumer wrapping their head around it. I think the most important thing is to think about non alcoholic beer differently to other innovations in the beverage alcohol space.

[00:43:26] So there have been these innovations, are all the RTD products that have come into the market. For consumers, it's got 4 or 5 percent alcohol, that's the same as a beer, I'll try it. And there's occasions, they're in the same occasions behaving the same way, if that makes sense. They're just trying something a bit, a little different.

[00:43:44] Whereas the acceptance of non alcoholic beer for a non alcoholic product, full stop, Within a beverage alcohol occasion, so you're talking about going to a bar in Spain and you saw lots of young people drinking [00:44:00] non alcoholic beer, and that probably was a bit of a dissonance for you, right? You were like, what's going on here?

[00:44:06] Why are they drinking beer without alcohol? What I'm saying is it took time in Spain, but they've had 15 year head start. So imagine the US market 10 years from now and a younger. cohort of consumers now entering that beverage alcohol occasion space, I think you're going to see a lot of them choosing non alcoholic products.

[00:44:29] And so, remember we talked earlier about how the total amount of, of alcohol being consumed in Europe has declined over the past 20 years, and it hasn't necessarily done so yet in the US, but I think that's coming. Yeah, it feels

[00:44:42] Daniel Scharff: that way, at least just, you know, with my friend group, like, you know, I can't imagine when I was in my twenties, if one of our.

[00:44:49] FratBros had ordered a not Alkavier, and I'm like, what a wuss. And now if I'm with a friend and they order, you know, a Heineken Zero or something like that, I'm like, wow, I should probably be [00:45:00] doing that.

[00:45:00] Daniel Kopman: The consumer now doing that might be 21 or 22. And so imagine what's going to happen. As new consumers follow on from the current 21, 22 year olds, now you're looking at everyone from the age of 21 to 30 who now finds ordering a non alcoholic beer.

[00:45:20] So think about the growth rate at that point. And now you could see pretty significant growth rates five to 10 years from now.

[00:45:29] Daniel Scharff: Makes sense. I, Grace, I was wondering, what do you choose to drink if you're out with friends or at a bar?

[00:45:35] Grace Kennedy: Yeah, I was going to say, anecdotally, I feel like they're just, even in my own friend group as well, there's been so much change and now, like at my.

[00:45:43] family christmas party there was a whole stack of non alcoholic beers but i will say i think when you were talking about where can beer win i was thinking about non alcoholic beer because i was like if i'm gonna drink something that's non alcoholic that's not just like a seltzer i'm gonna have a non alcoholic [00:46:00] beer because i've just found that they taste like beer and it's cool to hear about the process a little bit more about the actual process of brewing them because they totally It's really cool to have those options.

[00:46:13] One thing I am curious about that I've talked to some other non alcoholic brands about is like pricing structures, because I know there's sometimes a consumer disconnect between, okay, I'm buying something non alcoholic. It should be less expensive, but the process is kind of just as expensive to create a good non alcoholic product.

[00:46:32] product. So I was wondering if you guys have had any conversations around sort of like bridging that consumer gap of like our understanding of what a non alcoholic product should cost and what it actually needs to be in order to make a profit.

[00:46:48] Daniel Scharff: Right.

[00:46:49] Daniel Kopman: So the cost structure. Is not the same in terms of, and in some instances it can cost more to make non alcoholic beer than it does to make a beer, right?

[00:46:58] Because in the case of [00:47:00] say, an existing lager brand like Heineken, they're making a product very similar to Heineken and then removing the alcohol. So there's another step, but everything else is the same packaging, distributing. Everything, all those, the costs that go into that ultimate price are the same.

[00:47:16] Now, there is tax that is saved. That amount of tax that's been paid, the excise tax, not sales tax. You know, in some places that can be a small amount. In some cases it can be more. You're also Again, as we talked about, this is a market where we're seeing early adopters, and it's, and it's a really early stage.

[00:47:37] And if you think of other products, not necessarily beer products, but you think of other food products or other new innovations. You know, the pricing sort of evolves over time, and as you get more volume and more competitive volume into a market, you're going to see more diversification in pricing, you'll see more [00:48:00] competitive, if you want, more competition in the space, especially given that it's a food and beverage space, it's going to behave a little bit like that.

[00:48:07] So think of. New food products that come to the market, they might be pretty expensive to begin with, but as the volume really grows, then you start to see more different pricing levels within the same bucket of, of products. So I would expect to see that, but in terms of the production costs, the costs are either the same or they're slightly more.

[00:48:29] In terms of production cost, the trade off is excise tax.

[00:48:33] Grace Kennedy: Definitely. But I was just thinking of, you know, I'm based in, um, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania has like the worst liquor laws ever, just most puritanical. There is also that slight advantage, I guess, with a non alcoholic beer. And I'd be curious to see even in PA, how this starts popping up of like.

[00:48:49] They could sell the non alc beer in stores that you normally can't have beer and you know you don't have to deal with all the different rigmarole of or like places without liquor [00:49:00] licenses because it's so expensive for restaurants to get a liquor license and so I think it's exciting and there are so many high quality non alc beers that I've tried and I tried a new one just the other day.

[00:49:11] I think, what was the brand? It was Nonny. N O N N Y. Yeah. It's

[00:49:15] Daniel Kopman: great. Yeah. There's a tremendous amount of investment going into this space. And we've sort of reached a tipping point to being able to produce really great products. And it comes back to, someone asked me earlier, you know, what What is the key for suppliers in this space?

[00:49:31] What do I have to focus on? And my answer was focus on the product. Just make the product. Just keep working hard at making these beers better, however one describes that. The consumer, I think, is going to take care of some of the lifting in terms of do we need a lot of push marketing, et cetera, or is it going to be a pull thing?

[00:49:53] I think it's going to be a pull. If we're patient, right? Obviously, we got to get it to the shelf. We got to make it accessible. But [00:50:00] to your point, Grace, we can also use e commerce. We can use some avenues. As brewers that may not be available to us with the alcoholic versions. And so that just opens more opportunities.

[00:50:12] But if we focus on getting that product right and making, keeping that advantage we have over wine and spirits, just because so much investment's already been made into how to make non alcoholic beers, and now we have just a great supply chain. That is really supporting the production of this and not only for the largest brewers, but now we're going to start to see, I think, opportunities for smaller brewers as well.

[00:50:40] There's work they have to do because it's now we're producing non alcoholic beverages and that comes with other quality related concerns that have to be addressed that maybe brewers. I just didn't have to worry about it because we had alcohol to help protect the product from some sort of quality related [00:51:00] contamination.

[00:51:01] Daniel Scharff: So let's talk predictions for a second about where the market we think is going and I'll go first with mine. But, you know, I think like for me. Obviously, just beverage in general is on fire. It just is growing. You know, beverage is an accessory, all of these things. And, but I definitely see people toning down just drinking in general a lot.

[00:51:19] I personally, you know, at least for, for like non alcoholic cocktails, for me, I think they've struggled to make them taste good. Even canned. Spirits, White Claw doesn't taste good. You know, it tastes, it's like quote unquote alcohol in there. Like they don't even tell you what it is. And it just tastes for me a lot of like natural flavors, but you know, not, not in a good way.

[00:51:38] And like, if I go to a bar and maybe I'll have one regular drink and then I'll switch to like a. You know, non ALK beer or something like that, you know, I'm much less likely to order a mocktail off their menu, which is to me, I just like see the price point of it. And it's just like some stuff and it probably doesn't for me even taste that good.

[00:51:57] So I believe in the growth of [00:52:00] the beverage category. I believe in the slowdown of ALK in general. I feel like a lot of that volume is going to go to non alc beer, but then actually just to kind of functional beverage in general, a lot of it also, just as people look for different kinds of things that they're interested in having at a social gathering, obviously we've seen even like, you know, water and like liquid death and those kinds of things take up some share you might've seen.

[00:52:23] So where do you guys think that the consumers are going to go in the future? Where do you throwing a new, if you had 10 million bucks to launch a new brand, where would you be launching them? What kind of products would you focus on?

[00:52:34] Daniel Kopman: Wow, let's start with where I think beer is going. I think we're going to, on a global basis.

[00:52:40] I think beer is really well positioned as the sort of default low alcohol beverage to begin with. So, especially in, we're still seeing lots of population growth, I think beer is going to continue to do really well. So that's, whether that's in Latin America, parts of Asia, Africa, especially, beer's got a really [00:53:00] bright future.

[00:53:00] Has a really. Unique footprint that hard liquor doesn't have it, meaning it has breweries in all these countries. We're starting to use raw materials. We're not shipping raw materials from one part of the world to another as much as we used to. So in Africa, we're making beer. If, if malted barley is not available, it is in some African countries, but not all.

[00:53:22] So we're using sorghum in West Africa. We're using Fonio in parts of Sub Saharan Africa. So we're really developing the supply chain to use other grains and millet in beer production. So I think beer in general looks pretty good. And beer has, you know, some markets that are really underdeveloped, notably India, where if we can develop those markets for beer and non alcoholic beer, I look at them sort of together.

[00:53:50] Then I think that looks great. You know, Europe is. Doing fine, and non alcoholic beer has replaced some of the lost volume. [00:54:00] So even though alcoholic beer hasn't lost share to spirits, it's lost volume because people are drinking less ethanol overall. And non alcoholic beer has replaced a lot of that value, so 20 million hectoliters.

[00:54:12] has replaced a lot, for brewers, has replaced a lot of that value or, and volume, which has been really important. So the big question is North America and it's your backyard. And I think you're right. I think we're about to see a reduction in ethanol consumption for the first time in a long time. And we're going to see an increase in also in beverages that fill that gap.

[00:54:32] So whether it's People consuming less cocktails, people consuming less wine, people consuming less, maybe less alcoholic beer. What is it going to be? What's going to fill that space? And to Grace, to your point earlier, beer has this early mover advantage. And the question is, we have a competitive advantage, how do we keep it?

[00:54:49] And I think it's, it comes with Really doing a lot of that heavy lifting of, you know, sampling and the things that have always worked aren't going to stop [00:55:00] working, right? I don't think we can sort of just rely on social media, for example, to get this job done. I think we're going to still need to use the sort of.

[00:55:08] Tactics that got us, that have always been proven tactics, where those samplings happen may change, right? It may not all be in Mars, that some of that sampling may be at retail, like in stores, some of that sampling may be in places that don't sell alcoholic beverages. So there's a huge amount of opportunity there.

[00:55:28] I did a sampling. of non alcoholic beer at a health related event at American University. And it was, people were like, this is great, and I can either stay in an occasion that, where other people are drinking alcohol and I'm choosing not to, and I'm not going to be stigmatized by doing it because this brand works, or I can choose non alcoholic beer.

[00:55:50] In the same way, I would choose kombucha. So I think it'll be used as a substitute for an alcoholic beverage, but there's potential there for non alcoholic beer to be a [00:56:00] substitute for other functional beverages. Because essentially, non alcoholic beer is, it's malted barley, hops, water, and yeast. These are all healthy things.

[00:56:11] But the yeast in this case is either we've removed the alcohol that was produced by the yeast, Or we have a yeast strain and a mix of sugars that doesn't produce ethanol in that fermentation. So, and the companies that have done the research to develop these maltose negative yeast strains are really, they're still pushing the boundaries.

[00:56:30] So, brewers are going to have all these tools available to them to use to produce really great products. But these maltose negative yeast strains aren't going to work for wine, unfortunately. Because I don't know of a yeast strain that won't ferment fructose and sucrose. Got it. Okay, makes

[00:56:48] Daniel Scharff: sense. Grace, what about you?

[00:56:49] Yeah,

[00:56:50] Grace Kennedy: I mean, I feel like I can speak more as a consumer than a, like, industry expert. I do think definitely there's a shift towards just more mindful [00:57:00] consumption of alcohol. I think almost every single person in my life written right now or in the past year has spoken to wanting to cut back or stopped drinking entirely.

[00:57:10] And it's exciting to have so many options where you don't feel like you have to necessarily be like, I'm stopping drinking and now I must only drink water. But I'd also really like to what you were speaking to Dan about sort of bringing some of the intentionality to beer. And I think just generally alcohol in general, like, oh, I know where this is.

[00:57:31] The malt in this beer was grown and I'm interested in this like strain and they added this cool thing to it and just like having a real intention behind what we're drinking and beyond just like it's alcohol it's like knowing where it's from who made it going to my local farmer's market and talking to the brewer who said there's a brewing company in PA who this guy like foraged sumac and did a round of beer with With that, and I was like, this is [00:58:00] so cool.

[00:58:00] And I'm excited by both the options for non ELK, but also the people who are sort of making this, like you said, hyper local, really based in the community. But that gives you really like a reason to be excited to drink it and not just like, let me crack open a, you know, a bud just cause it's here. So I'm excited by some of those shifts as well.

[00:58:21] And, um, and also just the lower ABV stuff I think is great because, you know, it just lets you enjoy. What is cool about alcoholic beverages without having to feel like, I'm glad the IPA craze is kind of going on its

[00:58:35] Daniel Kopman: way. Yeah, there's clearly a place for all of it, if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly.

[00:58:42] What you're ultimately getting at is the consumer wants, they want the power to control the impact that anything is having on them, whether it's in the occasion or long term. And so it's going to be about transparency. And I will say this about the Bev Alk space. I think [00:59:00] beer has done more at a trade association level.

[00:59:03] I remember on the BI board, beer was the first Bev Alk product to put nutrition facts on the package. Because Bev Alk in the United States is subject to FDA regulations, but not from a labeling perspective. Now, non alcoholic beer is. That needs a full nutrition facts label, et cetera, but BevAlc isn't. But beer has unilaterally, without government direction, done that.

[00:59:28] So nutrition facts now exist on beer. I can't say the same for wine or hard liquor. I do think it'd be an interesting question to ask our You know, my friends in the distilling world, are you happy about disclosing all the ingredients on your bottle of Fireball or whatever it is? Because there's going to be some consumers are going to go, Whoa, I didn't know that was in there.

[00:59:52] So, but it's coming, whether the companies choose to disclose it themselves or the government ends up mandating it. I think [01:00:00] that sort of transparency is coming and cause consumers want it. And, but if we can be transparent and celebrate from a beer perspective, where our ingredients come from and what's contained in our products, then I think beer will be fine.

[01:00:14] All right,

[01:00:15] Daniel Scharff: you guys, I'm going to wrap us up, um, on that note. So Dan, thank you so much for joining us and sharing all of these lessons from entrepreneurship, being one of the OGs, I would call it, and craft beer and, you know, really paving the way and accomplishing some really incredible things across Schlafly and Heavy Seas.

[01:00:33] And now with your, I would say international and global work, educating people and, you know, really supporting the beer industry in general, Dan, is there a good way for people to kind of. Follow along with, you know, your research and teachings. Is it connecting with you on LinkedIn or is there a good way people can stay up to date?

[01:00:50] Daniel Kopman: Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best. Then I believe on just Dan Koppman on LinkedIn and then connect with Kogod, the Kogod School of Business at American University, some really great work being [01:01:00] done by some great academics and some really great experiential learning projects for students that we're doing.

[01:01:06] So that's, that's exciting. And then the World Brewing Alliance, the WBA, you can connect with them as well. I don't personally do a lot of, I'm not that active on social media. Tend to be pretty buried these days in the classroom, working one on one with brewers and the supply chain, but there's a. Ton of great work being done by the WBA and all the member trade associations.

[01:01:27] And then at Kogod. So if anyone's interested in going to business school, you can get in touch when you have it. We have both in person and virtual programs. And then a big piece of what we're doing is a master's in sustainability management. That's an area where Kogod sort of is a leading institution, sort of pushing boundaries on both research and learning.

[01:01:47] Alright,

[01:01:48] Daniel Scharff: fantastic, well thank you again for all of the insights, this is, yeah, truly fascinating, thank you Grace for joining us as well. Thank you for having me. Yes, we can go and game plan now what beverage company we're gonna [01:02:00] launch in this space to take advantage of all the, uh, the trends. Alright, thank you everybody.

[01:02:06] All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast today, it would really help us out if you can leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I am Daniel Scharf. I'm the host and founder of Startup CPG. Please feel free to reach out or add me on LinkedIn. If you're a potential sponsor that would like to appear on the podcast, please email partnerships at startupcpg.

[01:02:28] com. And reminder to all of you out there, we would love to have you join the community. You can sign up at our website startupcpg. com to learn about our webinars, events, and Slack channel. If you enjoyed today's music, you can check out my band. It's the Super Fantastics on Spotify Music. On behalf of the entire Startup CPG team, thank you so much for listening and your support.

[01:02:49] See you next time.

[01:02:59] ​[01:03:00]