DEALBOARD
Honest Tea Raises Cash
The Cash: With a $12
million equity infusion
from a team of distributors,
Stonyfield Farm, Inc. (run by Honest Tea board member Gary Hirshberg)
and Inventages Venture Capital Investment Inc., Honest Tea is
expected to begin trying to show off its base position as market leader in
the organic tea category.
The Objective: The company has had strong sales and growth, especially
with the high-end tea boom of the past two years, and has solid distribution
both up and down the street and in natural foods and club channels
in some major metropolitan areas, but hasn’t been able to escape the coasts
in terms of distribution density.
The Analysis: With a broadening portfolio of brands – they’re making
juice drinks and kids’ drinks now – Honest faces the problem that it might
be straying from its core strength, delicious teas. The cash could be a good
way to get shelf space for those teas and build a national sales network, or
it could further dilute a great brand.
Coca-Cola Co. buys FUZE Beverage
The Cash: $200 million for a highly innovative company that has shown
loads of potential – witness owner Lance Collins being the featured “little
guy” speaker at this year’s “Future Smarts” conference – but has yet to
break through as a distinctive product.
The Objective: Coke gets to broaden its non-carb portfolio, which has
shown less strength than a syringe-free Canseco Brother in recent years,
and hold off ongoing bottler dissent. FUZE, which has a broad, and at
times confusing, product set that has yet to hit a home run, gets a rabbi
to lead it into wider, more consistent distribution without the day-to-day
concerns of an upstart beverage marketer.
The Analysis: It’s hard to imagine a pair of companies that needed each
other more, but there are questions: can Coke bring the consistency and
distribution muscle to FUZE that’s kept it from breaking through in more
major markets? If it does, will anyone buy it? And can Coke’s folks handle
a product this New-Age-y, particularly given their problems with that category
in the past? Depending on which way the health boom goes, this
could be a huge score for relatively short cash – or else another bolt-on
that doesn’t go anywhere.
WATER CRUSADES
The growth of the bottled
water category is fast becoming
a hot topic in, of
all places, Church.
Last year, a group of politically
active churches in
the U.S. and Canada launched
an attack on the bottled water industry, claiming
that, from a social justice point-of-view, clean drinking
water was more God-given resource than saleable commodity; some have
begun to encourage boycotts. The liberal National Coalition of American
Nuns has asked its members to try to avoid purchasing bottled water,
while other groups have asked their congregations to do the same.
The idea is one that has been discussed in other civic forums in the past
– on the pages of the New York Times, for example, in a column by Tom
Standage, author of A History of the World in Six Glasses. But recently, there
has been slow increase in the adoption of water equality as a concept by
religious groups who are interested in the environmental effects of economic
disparity.
In October, Troubled Waters, a documentary produced in concert by the
National Council of Churches and the United Church of Christ examined
water privatization on ABC. With water predicted to become even more of
a commodity in the future, and a significant portion of the global population
still suffering from a lack of potable drinking water, the issue is one
that is gaining prominence alongside other environmental issues, according
to a story from Religion News Service.
That’s not to say that the social justice groups are being joined by the
rest of the Christian community. In a recent public statement, the head
of the Acton Group, which attempts to build understanding between religious
and economic leaders, called the idea “water socialism.”
“The religious groups in question point out that vast amounts of the
world’s population lacks clean water for bathing and drinking,” wrote the
Rev. Robert Sirico. “That’s true. It also so happens that many of these
countries have undeveloped economies riddled by trade barriers and socialist
structures.”
Meanwhile, major beverage companies have been active in trying to
combat third-world water shortages via their own charitable endeavors.
Last year, Starbucks partnered with Equa, a California water company interested
in donating money toward irrigation in Africa. Additionally, the
Coca-Cola Co. has drawn extensive praise for its work in that area.
Another take on the role of bottled water in religion has been adopted
by Bottled Holy. This Stockton, Calif.-based company isn’t concerned
about whether buying water is or isn’t holy – it’s concerned with selling
Holy Water. Much like Kabbalah water (which was infused with the power
of ancient Hebrew mysticism), this product has been blessed by priests.
While Bottled Holy has yet to elicit uproar from any church folk, word is
that the Vampire community is pretty peeved.