r/BeverageIndustry

So I have been considering launching a RTD drink for quite a while. I own a small online retail store as well as sell on Amazon and know my products and industry well. I know what main ingredients I want to use in the drink. I have also tasted many different varieties, and informally tested flavors at home and have a good idea of the two flavors I want to launch initially.

I was looking at some of the flavor houses, beverage developers and feel a bit overwhelmed. With what I’m looking at I think I would prefer to find a beverage consultant and really dial in two flavors at a smaller scale and then decide whether to move forward. I think realistically I am willing to spend about 6-8k for flavor development of the 2 flavors. After that I would maybe be comfortable with a 30k investment for the first run of inventory.

Advantages for the product:
-I wouldn’t call it niche but I think it would be a product I could focus on placement into health food stores. I would assume this is helpful to help narrow my marketing while the brand builds.

-I already have solid relations with some of the raw ingredients.

-I already have an established Amazon brand and a PPC manager who is pretty solid

My questions are:

-Does anyone have any recommendations on great beverage consultants who can work with my price range?

-If I dial in some good flavors and produce around 30k in inventory, would it be smart to focus on Amazon sales as I start to scale?

-Is this a reasonable plan for development and scaling small and slowly. Dial in the product, get some sales on Amazon and then move into advertising into health food stores.

Looking for help/guidance!

I work for a beverage manufacturer (carbonated beverage canning/bottling) and we do a good amount of co-pack.... a lot of brands are incorporating juice concentrate in their formulas. Clarified juice conc. is no issue, we also special order low pulp orange juice for a few products. Our low pulp OJ has a pulp spec of 'less than 2' and even that will clog up our can fillers from time to time.

FYI UOM for pulp is v/v at single strength brix

We try to avoid using juices with pulp specs much higher than 2-4 to avoid clogging up our fillers, but we have brands/customers come to us with formulas with juice concentrates that have pulp specs up to like 14 v/v.

We also have a customer wanting to mimic spindrift which has a notable amount of pulp in it, so I assume that is probably ran with larger filters on the canning line to allow larger particles of pulp to pass through and make it in the can. The customer wants the appearance to match spindrift, so having some sort of pulp in it is a necessity.

We have a juice manufacturer that can special make certain low pulp juice for us, which usually skyrockets the minimum order quantity to more volume than the customer can sell.

This has been a recurring problem and I'm positive it will continue to be one in the future... we don't really want to make drastic changes to our batching/canning process, but only being able to use clarified juice or having to special order massive quantities of special made low pulp juice is a major limiting factor.

Feel like I can be throwing the purchasing/sourcing team in the weeds when we have a request to develop a beverage... and we're asking them to source a juice that pretty much doesn't exist. Like a pineapple juice concentrate with a pulp spec of less than 2, etc.

My initial thought was during batching manually passing the juice conc. through a fine mesh screen.... however thinking more about it that might be a dopey thought, if "clarifying" a juice concentrate was as easy as passing it through a fine screen then why would juice manufacturers be using a centrifuge to clarify lol.

If anyone has dealt with a similar issue and has any advice or solutions I would greatly appreciate it. Maybe the juice industry will adapt at some point to offering a consistent supply of low pulp options--- sounds unlikely though

Hi all, we are a functional beverage company.

We need:

- tunnel pasteurizer

- 10,000 can start

- RO water

- experience with protein

- we are based in Miami, so south east is preferred but not required.

Thanks a lot!

Hey everyone,

I’m starting a new beverage brand in India focused on healthier and more natural drinks, and right now I’m struggling with the formulation side of things.

I need help understanding:

Shelf life stability

Flavor balancing

Sedimentation issues

Maintaining taste over time

Small-scale production guidance

Keeping the product affordable for the mass market

The drink is lemon/ginger based with a refreshing functional positioning, and I want it to feel modern, tasty, and accessible at an affordable price point.

Since I’m self-funding this project, I’m trying to learn as much as possible before moving to commercial production.

If anyone here has experience in beverage formulation, food science, FMCG startups, or manufacturing, I’d really appreciate your advice, resources, or even mistakes to avoid.

Would also love recommendations for:

Beverage consultants

Shelf-life testing labs

Learning resources/books

Ingredient suppliers

Thanks a lot 🙌

I have been looking into agencies and mockup studios for beverage packaging, cans and bottles and the quality varies a lot more than I expected.

Some visuals look polished at first glance but the label wrap, proportions or reflections feel off once you look closely. I am trying to find studios or workflows that actually make the packaging feel realistic and shelf-ready instead of just rendered.

What others are using for beverage packaging visuals right now. Agencies, freelancers or in house workflows?

Pay is almost doubled.. love my job and way more comfortable with beer but bills have to be paid.

Any advice or experience doing this or similar?

We are being approached by one of our current clients for a copacking project of carbonated water with natural flavors in a can (basically a Lacroix copycat).

We currently bottle non-carbonated beverages (iced tea, sports drink, juice beverages, etc.) doing HTST Pasteurization and filling in PET bottles so this would be a new line and new process for us. The margins are interesting so this is something we are really interested in setting up. We will start with a small 80-100 cans per minute machine.

So we've done our research but have not found direct answer to two questions, I would really appreciate feedback from industry peers with some experience in canning carbonated beverages.

1. For this type of product do we need a tunnel pasteurizer? The product will only have carbonated water and natural flavor. The product water will be RO water with some minerals added back for taste and the natural flavor only. NO ACIDS, SWEETENERS, FRUIT JUICE, ETC. and we will follow CIP and sanitation procedures correctly.

2. A can warmer is absolutely necessary? The person doing the equipment sourcing for us is obviously pushing us to buy one, but I have seen many breweries not using one, just going direct from filler-seamer to packing table.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

Currently preparing for a pilot launch for a new non-carbonated beverage brand and trying to figure out the smartest way to approach sampling and early testing.

Right now the biggest challenge is figuring out how to introduce the drink to people without burning too much money early on. Since it is a completely new product, I feel like getting people to actually taste it is the most important thing initially.

I am trying to understand:

• Is free sampling usually the best approach for new beverage brands?

• Do people respond better to tasting cups or discounted full bottles?

• Are offers like 1+1 useful during pilot testing, or do they distort actual demand?

• How do you know if people genuinely like the product vs just accepting something free?

• What are some cost-effective ways to run beverage sampling campaigns?

Would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience launching food or beverage products.

Hi all! I’m in the early stages of developing a functional sparkling beverage (clean ingredients, soda alternative, exploring using premium ingredients).

I’ve started getting proposals from beverage labs like Drink Labs, Jungle Beverages, Bebida Labs, etc., but the upfront cost is pretty high (around $8k–$10k+ per SKU). I've also heard back from independent consultants, which would be about half the cost. I'd prefer to work in person to finalize the flavors (I'm based in LA).

I’ve been doing some early at-home testing to understand flavor direction, but I’m not really looking to fully DIY this, I’d prefer to work with professionals to get to a high-quality, scalable product.

Right now I’m trying to figure out the best approach:

• Is it worth going straight to a full-service lab at this stage?
• Or better to work with an independent consultant first to refine formulations, then go to a lab later for scaling/pilot production?

My concern is spending a lot upfront before I’ve fully nailed the taste, but I also don’t want to over-index on DIY and slow things down.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s gone through this, what path did you take and what would you do differently?

Thanks in advance!

Hi, does anyone know of a good AI tool that can help me develop new labels? I am looking to create better branding. Or evaluate the one I have and suggest improvements. GPT and Claude is so generic and "posetive". I need something tailored for it. Any tips?

I am MSC Wintec student. I have want some suggestion from you for My College project about making Alcohol, which can be a beer or wine or harder. Give me some unique idea which can I make, and you also get information about that further, and you like to drink it. I have to make beer or wine or alcohol. From unique recipes, give me some suggestion.

I'm running a small cafe, but during peak hours, I observe that around 1 in every 20 drinks is remade. These remakes comes from either inaccurate orders, or sometimes customers just feel that there's something off with drinks. So I wonder what is the acceptable rate where u guys work?

We are launching our creator program at the end of the month. This will be a 3-month pilot program as we are testing it out, seeing what works, what doesn't, and will relaunch again during the holiday season. We are an alcohol brand, and we are not on Shopify, but even if we were, we wouldn't be able to use it as an e-commerce platform due to compliance.

Our e-commerce partner, Bottle Nexus, is very familiar with affiliate marketing, and we can produce the codes for our creators. Some of the questions/thoughts that I have are,

• We're managing this internally. Should we work with a platform such as ReferralCandy? Or can I onboard the creators onto WhatsApp or utilize an SMS platform? My concern is how to communicate with them on a weekly basis.
• How costly can this get?
• How often should we pay out, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly?

We're looking to onboard 5-10 creators. We've received 14 applications so far, but they're very diverse as far as demographics and content style are concerned. I'd say about 8 of the creators I know from my network, and they are excited to support and join the program.

I'm really looking for guidance and best practices.