Liquid Assets: A Beverage Industry Podcast

While many CPG companies are still keeping records on clipboards, new technologies like cloud computing, connected factories, and AI are helping more innovative firms capture and analyze the data they need to navigate disruption, reduce waste, optimize operations, and ultimately improve their margins. Alongside two guests from Amazon Web Services, Justin Honaman and Michael Connor, we explore how...

The 100+ Accelerator is a partnership between AB InBev, The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, and Colgate-Palmolive that allows sustainability-focused startups to pilot their innovations within the supply chains of these four multinational CPG companies. In an unmissable conversation, Molun Zhang of The Coca-Cola Company and Carolina García Arbeláez of AB InBev discuss their companies' biggest sustaina...

As the world braces for recession, Rabobank's world-class economists Jane Foley and Christian Lawrence join the Liquid Assets team to dissect the most recent economic news and share what indicators they'll be watching in the months ahead.   Check out our 2022 economics preview from January: The Most Important Trends of 2022 .   Rabobank clients can sign up for our research via this link: Research....

Could inflation force beverage companies to rethink their packaging choices? And could those changes have a positive impact on climate change? With help from Packaging and Supply Chains Analyst Xinnan Li, we explore what is driving up costs in packaging and some less disruptive changes companies can make to address those problems in the near term. Our next episode will be dedicated to structural c...

McBride Sisters is a Black-owned brand that explicitly – though not exclusively – markets to Black women. As a consequence, the media, retailers and distributors, often assume your brand must only appeal to Black women or worse, that it might actively push away other consumer groups. With help from Co-founder and CEO, Andréa McBride, we learn more about one of the fastest growing wine brands in th...

In a format designed to maximize controversy, the Liquid Assets team analyzes some of the industry's most urgent and contentious opinions and predictions. Expect plenty of rapid-fire debates as they answer questions like "Is hard seltzer dead?" "In two years, will anyone be talking about NFTs?" and "Will the US ever legalize marijuana?"     Rabobank clients can sign up for our research via this li...

Constellation Brands' Vice President of E-commerce, Wayne Duan, returns alongside Sara Master, Constellation Brands' Senior Director of E-commerce Marketing & Digital Shelf, to discuss how alcohol brands can take their e-commerce marketing to the next level. In this episode, we discuss: The importance of digital content and how brands can maximize the impact of the digital shelf The evolution and...

Constellation Brands' Vice President of E-commerce, Wayne Duan, and Adam Springer, Constellation's Director of E-commerce Category Advisory, help the Liquid Assets team breakdown the US online alcohol business. In the first of two episodes featuring the digital team from Constellation Brands, we tackle big picture questions like: How much has the pandemic changed the e-commerce landscape for US al...

Inflation, war, and general chaos are disrupting every aspect of the beer value chain. To help brewers plan through this conflagration of unfortunate events, we invited Bart Watson, Chief Economist for the Brewers Association, and Michael Uhrich, former Chief Economist for the Beer Institute and now principal at Seventh Point Analytic Consulting, on to the show. With their help, we use a draft to...

February may be the shortest month, but this year, it has felt like the longest. To break it all down, the Liquid Assets team discusses the biggest stories from the past few weeks: Monster Beverage Corp's beer dealings, the US Treasury Department's report on fairness and competition in the US alcohol industry, and, finally, the potential impact of a global public policy push to reduce alcohol cons...

Get up-to-date on equity markets, labor, and inflation as Rabobank's world-class economists Jane Foley and Christian Lawrence join the Liquid Assets team to dissect the economic stories you need to pay attention to in 2022.

Journalist Kate Bernot ( Good Beer Hunting, Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ) and Brewbound Managing Editor Jess Infante, help us debate the biggest stories from the past 12 months. Things then turn fiercely competitive, as we go head-to-head in Liquid Asset's first ever 'Quiz of the Year'. Happy New Year, everyone! Thanks for tuning in.

The old playbook of geographic expansion, consolidation, and premiumization were widely successful, but those strategies seem to have run their course. If big brewers want to grow, they'll have look outside of the beer category. In this episode, we bring you success stories from around the globe of brewers diversifying their portfolio and outline a strategy that could help all beverage companies t...

Earlier this year, Marian Leitner-Waldman, CEO of canned wine brand Archer Roose, found an unusual business partner: the actor, producer, and director Elizabeth Banks. Celebrity-backed brands are not a new phenomenon, but the trend is gaining considerable momentum in beverages. In this episode, Marian and Elizabeth (now Co-Owner and Chief Creative Officer at the company) help us understand celebri...

Steve Chasen, VP of Trade Marketing at Campari America, helped execute one of the most successful on-premise brand-building campaigns in history: that of the Aperol spritz. Linden Pride, Co-Founder & President of Dante NYC, is the proprietor of Caffe Dante, which was named the "World's Best Bar" in 2019 and played a major role in popularizing the eminently Instagrammable fluorescent-orange cocktai...

Pinterest is a powerful platform for occasion-based marketing. Kym Lewis, their Partnership Manager for beverages, and Tina Pukonen, their Global Head of Vertical Strategy & Marketing, share their best practices for building an occasion-based marketing strategy, on Pinterest and beyond.

We started our conversation expecting to talk about the news, but so much of the news has been dominated by major beverage companies shaking up their portfolio. Whether it was Molson Coors shutting down 11 brands, Coca-Cola cutting its portfolio in half, PepsiCo selling its juice brands for USD 3bn or Boston Beer partnering with PepsiCo and Beam Suntory, we try to figure out how each of these deci...

Chris Swonger, CEO of Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and  Responsibility.org , and David Ozgo, their Chief Economist, talk about regulations, tariffs, and the overall well-being of the US spirits industry.

They warned us about the return of inflation during their last appearance on Liquid Assets . Now, six months later, we welcome back the Rabobank economic duo, Jane Foley and Christian Lawrence to discuss this pesky inflation situation and dive deep into how the beverage industry is dealing with upstream price spikes and shortages.

We have just completed three years of producing Liquid Assets, and it is high time for some joyful navel-gazing. In this episode, we look back at three years of the show and discuss what we got right and what we got wrong, and we send some love to the industry leaders who inform and inspire us and fill us with jealous rage.

This week, we are joined by Wine Industry Person of the Year, Heidi Scheid, and leading industry analyst Dale Stratton to discuss how quickly the wine industry will recover from Covid-19 and the opportunity for the wine industry to tap into health and wellness trends.

When a beverage company wants to create a new product – anything from a new line extension to a non-alcoholic drink – they turn to companies like Kerry Group. John Kelly and Paul Villis take a break from their work at Kerry Group to discuss product, ingredient, and flavor innovation trends.

In this episode, we're joined by Rabobank analysts Francois Sonneville and Maria Afonso as well as Brent Atthill, CEO of RMI Analytics and former global procurement director at SAB Miller and AB InBev, to take a look upstream at the malting barley supply chain, how it is evolving, and how it is linked to the overall health of the beer industry around the globe. To learn more: Rabobank's Malting In...

Our guest Wayne Blum is currently Director of US E-Commerce Strategy and Partnerships at Diageo, but before that he led digital for Nestlé Waters and their direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, ReadyRefresh. Wayne joins us to discuss why the world's biggest brands are interested in going DTC, the challenges they face in the channel, and what's behind the success of the world's largest and most profit...

For Matt Dukes and Rachel Vodofsky, it wasn't enough to build one successful digitally native brand. They built two! Leveraging learnings and consumer insights from their wine-tasting subscription service, Vinebox, they were able to successfully build a stand-alone sister brand, Usual. On this episode, Rachel and Matt explain what it takes to build a sustainable direct-to-consumer business, create...