Business Monday, September 20, 2004
By Melissa Pasanen
MORETOWN—For two years, Jim Robison and Lara Lonon brewed and sold natural citrus and herb-infused soda on tap from their catering truck at farmers’ markets, concerts, and craft fairs throughout the Mad River Valley and points north.
The couple’s Munchbox truck also offered home-cooked food, but their drinks were always the star.
“We’d go to these festivals with all this food and people would rave about our soda,” Robison said. “We figured if we’re doing great at both the Lamoille County Fair and the Champlain Valley Folk Fest, we must have something.”
In October, the husband-and-wife team started bottling two flavors of Pop Soda in their South Duxbury kitchen. The soda comes in brown glass bottles with striking hand-lettered labels designed by Robison, who studied archaeology and art in North Carolina, where he and Lonon met.
Local stores and restaurants were immediately supportive and sold all the soda the pair could deliver.
“I think we’re really lucky to be doing business in a state like Vermont, where businesses and consumers are so receptive to Vermont-made products,” Robison said. “We have friends in the South who say, ‘How do you even get on store shelves?’ ”
Late last spring, encouraged by the response, the couple took the next step and signed a lease for their first dedicated soda-brewing plant.
To finance the expansion, Robison and Lonon sold their catering truck to a buyer in New York City, where it now serves as a mobile canteen for the cast and crew of the television show “Law & Order.”
With proceeds from that sale and small loans from family, Robison and Lonon estimate they have spent about $50,000 this summer converting space in the Moretown Commercial Park into a soda “microbrewery,” which they expect to be fully operational by today.
The Pop Soda plant has a sparkling kitchen where herbs and flowers are steeped for the lemon-lavender, mint-lime, and citrus-hibiscus sodas; a huge walk-in cooler to store cases of fruit destined to become fresh-squeezed juice; and a room outfitted with four 195-gallon brew tanks, which will allow them to bottle 20 times more soda than they made in their kitchen-based operation. There is also a small tasting room and retail shop equipped with taps where visitors can sample glasses of the bubbly, fruity “pop with pulp.”
The undistinguished commercial building at the intersection of U.S. 2 and Vermont 100 brings one other interesting bonus: It was the site of Ben & Jerry’s corporate offices early in the company’s history. Lonon and Robison say they don’t expect to emulate the ice cream company’s global business achievements, although they will gratefully inherit any “good vibes,” Robison said.
The couple’s goals are fairly modest.
“We were just looking for an idea that would allow us to live in Vermont and take a yearly vacation,” Lonon said. The couple did draft a business plan, but they have remained flexible and reacted to opportunities on the way.
“No matter what you plan, things change,” Robison said.
“We started making soda because we had home-brew equipment,” says Lonon, explaining that the process of making their natural soda is much like that of microbrewing. The difference? “Beer has hops, we have herbs,” she said, and there’s no fermentation.
They initially held parties for friends to test flavors and determined that their best niche was combinations unavailable elsewhere. “There are a lot o f good cherries out there,” Lonon says, “but no citrus-hibiscus.”
While working to get the new plant up and running, Robison and Lonon have continued to use their home kitchen to make an average of 35 cases of soda each week, which they sell to about three dozen accounts from the Mad River Valley to St. Johnsbury.
Even though WaNu, a 3-year-old natural soda company originally based in South Burlington but now in Colchester, has managed to land shelf-space in the regional and natural foods sections of local supermarket chains, Pop Soda plans to remain focused on smaller venues for the moment.
“We’re trying to find the customers who are best for us,” Lonon said. “We’re headed to a co-op before we’re headed to a big chain. Those are the ones who are really receptive to us.”
The couple handle most of the deliveries themselves with a little help from their friends and neighbors at Red Hen Baking, whose trucks carry soda to some shared customers.
“We’ve already had calls from distributors, but there’s no need, at least not yet,” Lonon said.
“For us right now, it’s nice for us to show our faces to our customers,” her husband added.
Among their retail buyers is Clem Nilan, merchandising manager for Burlington’s City Market. Nilan is barraged almost daily with sales pitches.
“It never stops,” he said. “We have a screening process
where we’re looking for a fit and at the integrity of the product. Vermont
stands for something and you need to sync with those attributes. You’re not
going to be something-cola. Pop Soda’s flavor combinations are very unique and
very appealing because of that.”
Fresh Market on Burlington’s Pine Street also carries Pop Soda and owner Simon Pozirekides reports that sales have grown steadily since he began stocking it about two months ago. “It’s moving really well for its place in the market,” he said.
The market for natural sodas is “tiny,” said Gary Hemphill, senior vice-president of Beverage Marketing Corp., a New York-based research and consulting organization. In 2003, Hemphill reports, the premium carbonated soft drink market in the United States hit just over $300 million in wholesale sales compared to mainstream soda’s $47 billion.
There is, however, opportunity.
“A lot of the products are positioned as healthier alternatives to regular carbonated soft drinks, and certainly there is a movement of consumers looking for these kinds of alternatives,” Hemphill said.
The Pop Soda team is not bothered by the relative size of the natural soda business. A mere sliver of the $300 million dollar pie would satisfy them.
“First we’ll cover Vermont, then we go to New England and build an Internet presence. If we can hang on at that point, we’ll be happy people,” Lonon said. “I think we’ll be micro forever.”