Hiring a leader into a food plant is not the same as hiring a leader anywhere else. I have been in this industry since 2006, ten of those years working inside it. I run every search myself.

Beverage looks like food manufacturing from the outside. Run a line at 1,200 cans a minute and you find out it is not. I run every search in this sector myself.

Almost everything that makes a drinks business hard in the US happens outside the plant. Three tiers, fifty states, and a distributor who carries four hundred other brands.

In distribution nobody notices you until something is late. Then everybody notices, and the penalty arrives before the apology does.

Almost every business I see in this space has the same problem. What made the product special is the thing that does not scale.

Selling ingredients is a technical conversation that lasts two years and ends with someone putting your material into a product they cannot easily change afterwards.

Supplying restaurants is not supplying retail with different packaging. The customer is an operator with a labour problem, and that changes what they buy.