New labels and fun meetings

Big news of the week is we designed new labels and are sending them to our printing company to print 100,000 of them for our first production run! We worked with Forward branding in Webster, NY to make the label stand out more on the shelf.

We've also dropped the color names from the labels and changed orange passion to tangerine.

We're really happy with the way these have turned out!

We had a conference call setup with Seth Goldman, who started Honest Tea, but he blew us off! We've heard he's been fed up with the beverage industry after he sold out to Coke though, so he probably wouldn't have been much fun to talk to.

Met with Wright-Wisner Distribution in Rochester, NY today for over an hour and learned a lot. They were awesome and had great advice for us. We were already aware of this, but one of the points you may find interested is........

Shelf space Slotting fees (examples):

• Tops Grocery market - 7 to 9 thousand dollars per flavor for shelf space
• Convenience stores like Wilson Farms - 135 dollars per store per year (80 stores!)

Yes, you have to PAY STORES to be able to SELL TO THEM! Some of you were probably already aware of this, but it's kind of a strange concept that is almost monopolistic and certainly favors large companies and is anti-competition if you ask us!

The week has been fantastic and we are really getting excited to start selling Vital Energy in a few short weeks!!

I have a lot more to write about the past week and should post again this weekend!

-mike