Is a drinks business for you

A category with enormous demand, thin economics and two hard regulatory edges.

What the product is good at

Consumable, so it repeats, and repeats fast.

Cheap raw materials for most drinks.

A real market with genuine interest in small producers, particularly for anything live or local.

And fast feedback: people drink it and tell you immediately.

What it is bad at

Heavy and liquid, so freight dominates and online barely works.

Short shelf life, unless you process, which removes what made it distinctive.

Cold chain, which limits where you can sell and costs money continuously.

And the packaging costs more than the contents, as it does throughout this estate.

The two thresholds decide the shape

If there is juice in it, the five-log question decides whether you can sell wholesale.

If it ferments, the half-percent question decides whether you are a soft drink maker or a brewer.

Neither is a detail to resolve later. Between them they decide the process, the package, the cold chain, the channel and the license.

A maker who has not settled both is a maker whose first wholesale order or first warm summer will settle them.

Who does well

People selling locally, where delivery is short and the cold chain is holdable.

People with a genuinely distinctive base, a local fruit, a real tea, a specific process, because the category rewards difference and punishes being a cheaper version of something.

People who accept processing where it is the right answer, rather than treating pasteurization as a failure.

And people comfortable with measurement, because this property is run on numbers more than any other here.

References