From Pitch to Pour to Purchase | We Help Beverage Brands Land in Bars, Restaurants & Retail | Distributor + Customer Strategy + Field Activation | Just Pick Up the Phone
June 6, 2026
A Drink Up Live roundtable on runway math, ghost distribution, pricing backwards, and the discipline nobody wants to hear about.
Everybody wants the beverage success story.
Launch. Distribution. Scale. Exit.
Clean. Fast. Screenshot-able.
Nobody wants the real version, where you work the same ten accounts every week for two years and watch the bank balance go red anyway.
This week's episode was supposed to be a guest interview. She had to cancel at the last minute, so Adam and I went live anyway. Then Chris Siconolfi came in hot, seatbelt still on, and turned it into a three-advisor roundtable.
What came out was the most honest hour we have recorded about patience, pricing, and why this business punishes people who are in a hurry.
🎙️ This Week on Drink Up
It was a Saturday Drink Up Live, and the plan fell apart on schedule.
Our scheduled guest had to cancel, so it was me and Adam Smith of Alias Advising, the supply chain and operations brain who has lived on the production floor for years.
Then Chris Siconolfi dialed in mid-conversation. Chris spent seven years at Moet Hennessy, a couple of decades in bev-alc, and now runs Pour Proof, advising premium and luxury brands on pricing and route to market.
Three advisors. Three generations. One blunt conversation.
“I love it when people come in hot, man. You're always welcome here, brother.”
🧠 The Question Nobody Wants the Honest Answer To
The title of the episode was a real question we keep getting: why is patience so hard?
Here is the number that answers it.
24 to 36 months.
That is the runway you need before this business pays you back, and most people show up with a fraction of it.
“Brands in the beverage business, if you don't have twenty-four to thirty-six months of runway to build your business, don't get in this business. I'm just gonna say it live right now.”
We are the Carbliss fanboys on this show for a reason. Adam reminded everyone that before the success, Amanda kept her day job and paid the bills while Adam worked feet on the street.
For five years.
Sam's take: everybody loves to point at the brands that made it and call it overnight. It was never overnight. The overnight stories are just the ones where you did not see the first five years. If you cannot stomach a long grind, the category does not care how good your liquid is.
🧪 The $10,000 Formula That Was Not Finished
We opened on formulations and IP, because Adam is staring at a live example.
A founder abroad paid a formulator for the IP on a distilled spirit, with a non-alc SKU and a cider behind it. Roughly ten grand per product vertical.
$10,000 per SKU.
Then Adam read the actual formula and found no target ABV, no pH, no Brix, no preservation system.
“It cost her 10 grand to get not a fully developed formula. Which is less than ideal.”
Adam said: this is not about good guys or bad guys. Some formulators do the work for free and expect an IP payment later, and that can be a perfectly logical deal. The danger is signing it without understanding it and getting surprised on the back end. Clarity is the whole game.
And on waiting until you are ready:
“Two months is twenty seconds in this industry.”
“I'll have that conversation right now for free because I don't want to see you light your money on fire.”
Sam's take: bring a real operator in before you sign anything, not after. If you pay to develop a formula, make sure you can move it. The founders I respect most are the ones who ask a hundred questions before the money leaves the account, not the ones who find the fine print ninety days later.
👀 Ghost Distribution Is Worth Exactly Zero
Here is the term I keep beating the drum on. When a founder tells me they are in a hundred accounts, I ask one question back.
“How many of those accounts are reordered? A lot of them don't know that answer. And I call that ghost distribution.”
“If you're getting distribution and you're not activating it or doing anything with it, it's ghost distribution. It means absolutely zero.”
Adam said the same thing from the ops chair: founders chase more doors, more doors, more doors, and call it a plan. It is not a plan.
I lived the other side of this as a distributor. A brand would sit at my desk and say they wanted to be in 80% of Tito's accounts. My answer never changed:
“Do you have the money to be in 80% of Tito's business? Do you know what Tito spends in each one of those accounts to activate them?”
“I can get you distribution. I can't create pull.”
Real example from this week: a client got into ten Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board stores and did nothing in them. Those ten doors are the golden eggs. Get in there, run tastings every week, create the reorders, and the state expands you from 10 to 20. Rinse and repeat.
Industry context: RTDs are the engine of adult beverage growth right now, which is exactly why the shelf is so crowded and why activation, not door count, separates the brands that survive. Velocity data from Circana and depletion trends from SipSource both tell the same story: distributors back movement, not optimism.
🎯 Pick Three Stores and Hammer Them
Adam's line of the day, aimed at early founders who think national is the goal:
“Pick three stores and just hammer them. Make them your best friends, focus on nobody else.”
Why three?
Because proven velocity is the most valuable thing you own, and founders constantly underestimate it.
I think about Mike Levinson every time this comes up. While everyone chases HEB, Albertsons, and Walmart, Mike says go play rivers and streams. Food service. The lanes nobody is crowding. You can build a real living in your own backyard before you ever try to boil the ocean.
Sam's take: three obsessed accounts beat three hundred ghost accounts every single time. Depth is a strategy. Width without depth is just a more expensive way to fail.
💸 The Math That Makes Founders Quit
I ran a real model this week for a mezcal client, month by month, for thirty-six months.
Distributor margin. Retailer margin. The fractional rep on the ground. Sampling. Marketing. All of it baked in.
The gap between FOB and cost of goods, the money the brand actually keeps, was about forty-four dollars a case.
$44 a case.
And every month of the first twelve had a minus in front of it.
The tipping point was specific: 134 accounts, averaging one case a month each, just to hit break-even.
134 accounts. One case a month. That is where the bleeding stops, not where the profit starts.
This is why pricing fights get emotional. When a can costs $2.50 to make and the market demands a $14.99 four-pack, founders do not want to hear it.
“I didn't make the market up. That's where the market's at.”
Adam said it lands the same way in functionals. A vendor friend called asking how many pennies of mushroom extract belong in a can to hit a $3.50 non-alc shelf price at healthy margins. Work it backwards through retailer and distributor and your all-in liquid cost cannot clear about twenty-five cents, which leaves your functional at five to eight cents a can.
“He goes, that math really sucks. And I said, yeah man, welcome to being a brand owner.”
📊 Gallo 101: Price Backwards, Then Fund the Feet
This is where Chris dialed in, and he made my point for me.
“Can you hear me putting on my seatbelt?”
Chris said you do not start at cost of goods. You start at the shelf and work backwards. Take your target shelf price, strip out roughly 30% retail margin, then the distributor margin around 27.5%, then freight and tax. What is left is your net FOB. Divide that by two and that is your cost of goods.
But here is his actual edit to the textbook:
“Instead of doubling your cogs to meet your FOB, do it at 1.1 or 1.2 to cover feet on the street, activations, social media.”
Then he dropped the number that should end a lot of arguments. A canned THC client wanted to launch at $5.99. The competitive sales analysis said otherwise.
Velocity at $6.99 was 18% higher than at $5.99.
Higher price. Faster sell-through. More margin to fund the brand. All three at once.
“That's how Gallo does their shelf analysis, because I was taught by a 25-year veteran of Gallo who does pricing.”
Chris said the best part of the call was that three advisors from three generations could attack the same problem three different ways and still land in roughly the same place. He calls himself a tortoise and the hare guy. Slow, steady, and straight.
🔥 Line Expansion Is a Trap Right Now
Chris does not hedge, so here is the hot take of the episode:
“For the next three years, anyone thinking of doing a line expansion should punch themselves right in the stomach. Go deep and wide with what you have.”
Adam has been saying the same thing from the cost side. Founders think they need sixteen reasons to buy: real tequila, and agave sweetener, and named fruit juices, and the most expensive everything.
Pick the one reason that actually sells. Real bourbon, real tequila, a real functional. Pay for that. Market that. Make everything else as cost-effective as possible.
Industry context: the proof is in the giants. Chris watched the US Hennessy team push for an RTP line for seven years while France said no. A new global CEO approved it, they made 100,000 cases, distributors took it all in one purchase order, and it sold out in six weeks. Meanwhile Treasury is reportedly cutting 60 of its 90 brands and Diageo is on another round of restructuring. Focus is not a small-brand idea. The biggest houses in the world are relearning it.
Sam's take: innovation is the easiest way to feel productive while avoiding the hard work of proving the brand you already have. If you have not earned desirability on SKU one, a second SKU is not a strategy. It is a distraction with a tolling fee.
⚙️ What Distributors Actually Care About
Adam asked me straight: do distributors really care how many SKUs you have?
No. They care about one thing. Support. Movement. Velocity. Can you sell what they put in the truck.
Chris framed the new reality through the best operators. Johnson Brothers will do ten things in ninety days and all ten get done. Reyes built the modern model on the beer side and is now telling suppliers something honest:
“We will work at 22 to 24 points versus 25 to 30. You take that money and invest in people in the market.”
The kicker that should be on a poster in every founder's office:
“What's the last brand a distributor built? Tito changed his name and Tito built Tito's.”
He also walked us through a RIP program in New Jersey, which I had honestly never heard named that way. RIP means reduction in price.
“It's a legal way to do volume discounting in New Jersey that should protect the brand shelf price. It's a margin enhancer for the retailer.”
The smart version keeps the shelf price up and lets the distributor write the retailer a check for the deeper discount thirty days later. Same family as California QDs, where Costco buys a container at ten bucks, Safeway buys half at twelve, and an independent buys five cases at fifteen.
And on the premium end, Chris was blunt about the discounting death spiral:
“Discount your heart away, Pernod. Discount your heart away, Diageo. Tortoise and the hare.”
👀 Be Brutally Honest on Call One
I asked Chris how he qualifies a client. His answer was a masterclass in the unglamorous part of this job.
“You gotta tell them all the bad things. All the bad things just means you have to be amazingly transparent.”
His best story: a manager for a popular musician wanted to launch a tequila and sell it for a hundred million in five years. Chris did the math on the spot, showed him the case volume that fantasy required, and told him to aim at a real twenty-five to fifty million valuation instead.
“If anyone tells you anything different, they're lying to you, and you should go with them, and then you'll come back to me in six months.”
They came back in eight months. Chris said no thank you, I don't have any more room.
Industry context: the comps back the discipline. Casamigos was around 70,000 nine-liter cases when it sold for a billion. Aviation has been a public lesson in paying up for celebrity and growth that did not fully materialize. Buzzballs, started by a former school teacher, sold for roughly a billion to Sazerac. The math, not the hype, decides which of those was a good deal.
Sam's take: the kindest thing you can do for a founder is tell them the brutal truth in the first or second meeting, not ninety days in when their money is already committed. Transparency early is not pessimism. It is the most respect you can show someone's life savings.
🎯 The One Idea You Should Steal
Adam closed on the thing that tied the whole hour together. Pressure-test your plan from more than one direction.
“Too many brands don't pressure check the math from multiple angles. They see two plus two equals four and they go, okay, cool, that's my plan.”
Flip it. Does four divided by two still get you back to two? Does the plan still hold if you come at it from the cost side, the shelf side, the distributor side, and the cash side?
If it holds from every angle, you are not bulletproof, but you are defensible. And defensible is what lets you be patient when the first twelve months are red.
🧭 What This Means For You
If you are building a beverage brand right now, steal these:
Count reorders, not doors. A hundred accounts with no reorders is ghost distribution.
Pick three accounts and make them obsessed with you before you go wide.
Price backwards from the shelf, then leave 10 to 20% on top of your doubled cost of goods to actually fund activation.
👉 Run the model month by month before you launch, and know your break-even account count by name.
👉 Own your formula, read the fine print, and bring an operator in before you sign.
💬 Final Thought
I love a surprise pop-in, and I love an honest one even more.
Patience is hard because the scoreboard lies to you early. Red months are not failure. They are the price of admission.
“You gotta be brutally honest either the first or the second meeting about what the realities are of the marketplace and what they're gonna face.”
Jay Williams could teach a master class on building a brand, and yes he is doing it fast. But he did not do it overnight. He put blood, sweat, and a lot of unknowns into it first.
So did everyone you admire. The plan is patience. Everything else is just execution.
🔗 Sources & Further Reading
🧃 Your Move
If you are building a beverage brand right now:
Stop counting doors. Start counting reorders.
Pick three accounts and make them impossible to ignore.
Price backwards from the shelf, then fund the feet on the street.
👉 And give yourself twenty-four to thirty-six months before you call it.
Patience is not the absence of a plan. It is the plan.
Truthfully,
Sam
