In this talk, Kara Goldin recounts the founding and rapid growth of her unsweetened flavored‑water company. She describes early traction in the San Francisco Bay Area, a pivotal phone call with a Coca‑Cola executive who dismissed the product, and the realization that she was creating a brand‑new category—unsweetened flavored waters. Goldin explains how she navigated retail real‑estate challenges, avoided costly slotting fees, and built a distribution network without relying on Coke or Pepsi logistics, eventually reaching roughly 50% of U.S. stores and approaching $100 million in annual revenue as a profitable, independent beverage company. Throughout, she critiques the incumbent soda industry’s focus on sweeteners, highlights the rising epidemic of type‑2 diabetes and pre‑diabetes, and frames her mission as a health‑driven alternative to sugary and artificially‑sweetened drinks.
Chapters
Okay. So about 6 months into— we were getting traction primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I thought, I love what I'm doing, but at the end of the day, I have no idea what I'm doing. And so a friend I was talking to from AOL said, you guys have built this great product around the Bay Area. You should really reach out to this guy that I know from Coca-Cola. and tell him about what you guys are doing in the Bay Area. And I thought, yeah, I've launched something. I'm really excited about it. I love the process of actually launching it. But it's a lot of work, and I need to hire people or go raise money or whatever in order to really grow this in the right way. And so I called this gentleman at Coke and said, listen, super excited to talk to you. And this is what we're doing in the Bay Area. We've got it in Whole Foods. We've got it in some cool— places around the Bay Area. And soon after getting on the phone with him, he quickly said, listen, I hear what you're doing. I've actually seen your product, really interesting. San Francisco is like an interesting little microcosm of the rest of the world. You and your other women that you hang out with are shopping at Whole Foods. Whole Foods is never really going to make it. It's kind of this like thing that's going on and you guys are all a little earthy crunchy out there in San Francisco. And there were lots of things that he said along the way that I thought like, who is this guy? But then he said finally, he said, sweetie, Americans love sweet and your product isn't going to work. And I thought, did he just call me sweetie across the phone? And who is this guy? Like I've never met him before. And then I started making excuses for him saying he's from Atlanta and maybe they say that in Atlanta. I don't know. But pretty soon I come back to the phone and basically think, wow, I've got this guy on the phone with one of the largest beverage companies in the world and he's sitting there telling me that my product won't work. And I know that my product will work because I've had it in different stores throughout the Bay Area and people are buying it. And so he is going down one river and I am going down the other river and he has got a lot more money than I do and he could turn around really quick, turn the ship around really fast and come back down my river. So I just sat there and listened and which is a major point that I tell entrepreneurs all the time. I said, listen, like Steve Jobs used to talk to Bill Gates, as much as he could because he felt like he could learn from somebody even though they're a competitor. And I thought, here is like a major piece of learning that I can actually get this guy on the phone and he can talk to me about how my product sucked or whatever, but at the end of the day, it was— I basically knew that he wasn't committed to creating a product that was actually healthy for you. He was interested in making sure that people were going to continue to be addicted to sweet. And I saw it so clearly while I'm on the phone with him and I thought, I actually need to do this product because it will never get done if I don't do it. So we continued to grow it in the Bay Area and my husband is a New Yorker and said, if we really want to see this work, we should launch it in New York and And we'll fail fast if we go spend some money in New York and see whether or not New York is actually a viable market. And so we did that and soon saw that we were getting the same type of traction in New York and which was super, super exciting and really led us to believe that this would be a significant product eventually. What I had no idea though when I launched the product was While I viewed my product as different and it didn't have any sweeteners in it, I had no idea that we were actually launching an entirely new category, which was unsweetened flavored waters. Stores had no idea exactly where to place us in the store. So the way that the real estate is set up in these stores is that lots of big food and beverage companies actually own real estate. So you may go in and think like, Gatorade is what everybody wants to drink, but it's a whole game to get you as a consumer to believe that that is the product that everybody should be drinking and they've paid millions of dollars across the country to be in these large chains in order to sort of have that traction. So, learned a lot about it in the first couple of years and basically thought, okay, I'm not going to play that game. I'm going to actually get it into lots of stores without paying slotting fees across the country. And so we did that. And today we're in about 50% of stores across the country and have— but having said that, we may have this much space in many stores. And what we've had to do every year is prove that we can grow and grow and grow and grow, which we've done. So we continue to fight up against the Cokes and the Pepsis of the world. We've had many conversations. I continue to have conversations with many people and it's always a fun conversation with all of the soda companies because what I realized is that it really is what I thought initially that these— they're not interested in creating products that actually make me healthier. They're making— they're interested in making products that actually get me addicted to a product that is sweet. And whether that's sugar or diet sweeteners, it's really kind of a sick thing. And I thought that this is— and it doesn't stop with soda, it's chips, it's ice cream, it's lots of different categories across the world. And so we've continued to grow the company. And primarily had focused on the coasts initially and then grew it into the rest of the country and figured out how to piece together distribution without using— you see all those Coke and Pepsi trucks across— without having a partnership with them, you don't get those Coke and Pepsi trucks and it's a very expensive business to be able to compete in. I would say that we're one of the only independent companies, we'll do just shy of $100 million this year. We're a profitable company. We are the largest independent beverage company that is not using Coke and Pepsi, doesn't have an investment from Coke and Pepsi across the US. And we've been patient in doing it. So, I wasn't in a hurry to actually load up lots of stores, go and pay for it. I wanted the consumer to get to a point where we are today. There's lots of things happening, going on around us, everything from soda taxes to lots of other stuff that we're not involved in at all, but it just helps to really highlight exactly what the issue is. Today, type 2 diabetes is— 40% of the country has type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. It was 2% in 2005. So it is the fastest growing disease in not just the US, but also the world. In Beijing, 50% of the population under the age of 18 has type 2 diabetes in a country only until recently they could have— they could only have one child. So it's an epidemic that is growing and yet we don't seem to be paying attention to it. Our stores still continue to take money for real estate from these large CPG companies, which is somewhat concerning and also surprising to me the more that I've learned about this industry.
