Jonesing for Soda

Juice Guise

I was thrown into the beverage industry without any aspirations to be in the beverage industry. I didn't wake up one morning and say I want to be in the beverage industry. What happened was, I was in the ski industry. I was fairly young at the time. My father was a psychiatrist and he was, like, "You've got to go to school." And I'm, like, "Dude, I get paid to go to ski right now. I've got a sweet car. You're on drugs if you think I'm giving this up. I've got my own credit card. I'm paid to ski. What are you thinking?" This was in Edmonton, Alberta.

I basically blew him off, and when I realized that I wasn't good enough [at skiing], and that school was probably the right option, I was so stubborn that I couldn't do it. I couldn't go to school because I told him I didn't need it. But I also realized I wasn't good enough to be a professional skier of any great magnitude. I was 22, 23 at the time. I had traveled Europe and done all the things you do after high school. To make a long story short, I started a fruit stand. The ski industry pays you for 12 months, but you only work nine, so you have these paid summer vacations.

The guy I was buying my fruit from said, "You've got to look at this orange juice from Florida." I did the due diligence on the OJ market in Canada. And it's 55% of a $365-millon industry. There's no premium fresh-squeezed frozen OJ, yadda, yadda, yadda. So I sold my car and brought this OJ up from Florida to Canada. And that's how I got into the beverage industry.

I got US $14,400 for my car. It was a Chiraco. It was a sweet Chiraco. But it wasn't too gooey. Just the right amount of goo on it. It was a beautiful car. I sold the car to buy the OJ. It was a product called Just Picked. The guy who sold it to me was from New York and the company was from Florida. And the first batch he sold to me was the extra-thick stuff. So I had 1,440 cases. And this stuff was so thick you could stick a spoon in. So I was going to restaurants to sell it with champagne. The solids would separate. So you'd have a clump of crap. And I'm, like, "Oh my god, I've got all this OJ. What am I going to do?" So I'm walking up and down the street, telling people it'll lower their cholesterol, it's got fiber, you can eat it with a spoon. It was horrible. It tasted really good, but it was absolutely horrible in quality. It actually caught on. The next year the sales were $12,500 for the entire company. I was able to fight through that.

The Jones Soda story is really one of determination and fighting through challenges that most companies would never have to. No one's given us anything. Everything we've done, we've had to fight for, probably harder than we should have. The fighting is getting less and less now.

After the OJ started to take off, I started to import other beverages and built a distribution company, a beverage distribution company, in Vancouver. We sold Snapple, Arizona Ice Tea, Pepsi, Coke, we were selling tons of different beverages. We were the largest independent beverage distributor in western Canada. That was by 1994, 1995. We built the business to about $6.9 million in sales. One of the problems was, I didn't like dealing with the suppliers and I wanted to create my own brand. Because I had seen all these companies come to me and say, hey sell my crap in Canada.

If someone asked me at 18, is this what you dreamt to do? I would say no. The reality is that it's been a weird game to get to where I'm at now. But at the age of 41, I'm very qualified to do what I do. I understand the consumers better than a lot of people do.

Not Necessarily Needed

Around this time, we started to import concentrated root beer. We were bottling a root beer. So I started to understand how to make soda. So we started Urban Juice and Soda and by 1994, we were flying. Sales were going through the roof. Snapple sold to Gatorade for $1.6 billion, 432 new ice teas are coming out. I'm saying, this is crazy. I'm seeing this stuff come flying at me. People are knocking on the door everyday trying to get me to sell their stuff. Then I said, I don't want to sell other people's stuff anymore. That's horrible. It's not fun. It's not yours.

But the world doesn't need any more of this stuff. Because nobody cares when this stuff goes off the market. If Jones Soda fell off the face of the earth today -- or if I got hit by a bus and the company got closed down, nobody would lose any sleep over it. And that's the attitude you have to take today. That's the attitude we took in 1995-96. It's more relevant today because of consolidation in the biz world. It's more relevant today because of the Internet and the number of channels. But it's still relevant and was relevant in 1995. The reality is that consumers don't need our stuff. I don't mean to say that. But when you start thinking that way -- a lot of time, business people, marketers convince themselves that people need their stuff. They're passionate about how you need my new widget. You need it!