We’re joined this episode by James Bruce, who together with school friend Stafford Fox founded StrangeLove Beverage Co in Byron Bay, Australia, in 2012.
StrangeLove is an unlikely story of entrepreneurialism that began with a single product – StrangeLove Organic Ginger Beer Energy Elixir – ‘a ginger beer so hot, it was almost undrinkable’, which also contained functional ingredients like green tea and yerba mate.
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Over an at times tumultuous decade in which James and Stafford were continually running out of money, the StrangeLove offering evolved into a portfolio of adult soft drinks, mixers and mineral waters that proved so popular the business was ultimately acquired in 2022 by Asahi Beverages.
This episode of Drinks Adventures was produced in partnership with StrangeLove, which has this year come on board as a sponsor of the show.
So, I’m excited to share with you the StrangeLove origin story in this conversation with James, who reveals there is a new chapter on the horizon for the company involving its first ever foray into the arena of alcohol beverages.
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Darwin Distilling Co’s uniquely Territorian gin, with founder Rebecca Bullen
Waubs Harbour Maritime Tasmanian Whisky, with Tim & Bec Polmear
James Bruce of StrangeLove Beverage Co: Full transcript
JAMES ATKINSON: Mate. Well, good to be having this chat with you today. I, thought if you could take me back right to the very beginning of when you and Stafford came up with the concept of launching StrangeLove. Tell me about, you know, how you guys met and how you conceived the idea in the first place.
JAMES BRUCE: Oh, look, we met at school in Sydney, so I’ve known Stafford since I was twelve. We were both asked to leave prematurely, if you like, and kind of kept finding each other. So my Dad lived up in Byron at that time. I went up to kind of hang out there as a 20-something-year-old. And, Stafford also, I think we joke we were having a midlife crisis at 23 or something. So we both found ourselves on the Northern Rivers living that kind of life. In terms of how we got to kind of start a drink company, it’s kind of still a little bit unclear to me, but I mean, we’re both working hospo jobs and I’ve worked in hospo since I was kind of 16 and my first job at a barbecue chicken shop cleaning chicken off rotisserie spikes, which is an unforgettable experience. So you know, we’re both around hospo and I think like up in Byron it kind of started to dawn on us. You know like we could very easily just keep working in hospitality for the next 20 years and work on our suntan and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think what I’m saying is the job market up there is so limited there’s a bit of a culture of entrepreneurialism happening. So a lot of people starting businesses and yeah I mean it’s kind of well known now but you had the Byron Bay Industrial Park and it’s just kind of like a hive of businesses and people pursuing ideas. And so that’s kind of how we got into it. I think it’s just all those factors kind of made it a crossroads, you know. Like there was also the Byron Farmers Markets up there at that time. And I think in terms of food and beverage Byron was probably 20 years ahead of the curve in that respect.
JAMES ATKINSON: In terms of like slow food, artisan products, that kind of movement. Is that what you mean?
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, but even now you look at kind of all these drinks coming out like nootropics and adaptogenic drinks and that kind of thing… People in Byron were doing that 20 years ago. You know like adding in maca powder into smoothies and stuff.
JAMES ATKINSON: Functional drinks.
JAMES BRUCE: Functional drinks and kombucha and fermented drinks. But no one was really doing it on a kind of commercial level. So I think the idea initially was to take that kind of Byron philosophy and you know that kind of interest in eclectic flavours and things like that and try and do it in a way that was kind of more accessible to a mainstream consumer.
JAMES ATKINSON: And when did you decide that it was going to be a soft drink company? Like was there ever a moment where it could have been something else?
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah. Ah, I don’t know how you know that but we actually kind of started with this idea first that, we were watching people up there do kind of downward facing dog and yoga all through the week and then get to Friday night and they’d absolutely write themselves off at the Railway hotel. Then Monday it was back to yoga and wellness. And so the initial idea was to create a kind of wellness brand for degenerates, I guess. So we played around with vitamins and nutraceutical chewing gum, hangover powders and all these kinds of really weird products. So how we ended up in beverage was we took one of those energy powders with green tea, yerba mate, a couple of other kind of vitamin compounds and we mixed it up. It was ginger flavour. Before long, we kind of just realised, hey, this actually tastes pretty good. Maybe we should just do this ginger beer kind of idea. It was such a crazy idea when I looked back on it because we were trying to do about 100 things in one drink. I think we called it an organic energy ginger beer elixir or something. So I don’t know how we survived, but I think the drink was like really, really good. And I think as well, the fact we knew nothing about the drinks business and nothing about cost of goods and profit margin and that kind of thing just allowed us to kind of make this amazing drink. We just kept adding more and more ginger until it tasted how we wanted it to taste as opposed to even what I know now about making drinks where it’s like we have a budget for ginger of 15 cents a litre or whatever it is. And this was just like, gloves off, let’s make the best ginger beer in the world. Yeah.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah, that backstory because I just kind of was thinking about the first time you guys maybe reached out to us when I was editing the shout. So I think we’re going back to like 2014 or maybe earlier than that even. I’m not exactly sure when it was, but I think you were even called StrangeLove Vitamin Company.
JAMES BRUCE: At one point we were, yeah, exactly. That confused people for ten years.
JAMES ATKINSON: Tell me how you actually did get it off the ground in terms of how you were manufacturing it and how were you funding yourselves at the start there?
JAMES BRUCE: We literally made the first prototypes on a home juicer. We had this powder that we were kind of adding and we just combined the two and we took that prototype around to a couple of cafes that we knew the owners of, but then we realised we had to find a manufacturer. We ended up finding a contract manufacturer down in Melbourne and we just thought we had the greatest idea in the world and that once we showed people they would feel the same way about it, that wasn’t how it went. In fact, this contract manufacturer, the guy who ran it, Mark, very funny guy, we sent him an email and he wrote back an email basically saying he’d taken more people such as myself to bankruptcy than anyone else in Australia. He said, ‘save your money, buy some land up a Byron’. You know, basically just keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll save you ten years and a lot of money by not doing this idea.
JAMES ATKINSON: And did he say why exactly?
JAMES BRUCE: He was just alluding to how tough beverage was. And particularly at that time, it was really dominated by kind of mainstream brands, soft drink in particular. There was no kind of no and low movement, there was no kind of artisanal or boutique soft drinks. It was kind of the big brands. And so I think he’d genuinely seen a lot of people come along, hand over their life savings and then go, ‘shit, how do I sell this?’ And end up with a warehouse full of finished goods that they couldn’t move. For me, it was actually a good decision point or fork in the road where I did hear what he was saying and I was like, ‘nah, I am going to do this and I’m going to succeed’. And I’ve often thought back to that email in the years afterwards going, sorry to swear, but f**k that guy, you know, I’m gonna make this work. And, in terms of funding, like that initial, oh, man, that was so scary. You know, I think we did over the years, around four fundraising exercises. Pretty unsophisticated. Just friends and family.
JAMES ATKINSON: The ‘three Fs’, friends, family and fools.
JAMES BRUCE: That’s right, exactly. Many of whom had even forgotten that they’d invested by the time we kind of got acquired, which was nice, giving them a kind of knock on the door and saying, ‘that ten grand you put in back in 2012 has multiplied’. I think we’d just kind of raise enough to kind of cover one production run. And, then, you know, we also got a few government grants and yeah – oily rag.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. Just fully bootstrapped.
JAMES BRUCE: Fully bootstrapped. And just, I think at one point, I didn’t take a wage for kind of six months and was just doing other jobs. Not an easy road to take, for sure.
JAMES ATKINSON: Did you end up working with that contract manufacturer who sent you that email? Or did you find someone else?
JAMES BRUCE: No, we worked with him. He didn’t take that much convincing to take our money in the end! We worked with him for a period of time, actually. Yeah, quite a long time. He ended up starting his own contract manufacturing business and we went across to him and then we have changed around over the years.
JAMES ATKINSON: So when you launched initially, tell me about the products. You had this out there intense ginger beer. I remember there being a smoked cola fairly early on, but just kind of talk me through the initial product range and then how that landed in the market and also, what did distribution look like in the early days?
JAMES BRUCE: Well, actually, we started with that one product, which was the organic, energy elixir, ginger beer. I can’t even say it. And we started kind of taking it around to cafes and restaurants and people were buying it because it was an amazing ginger beer. It really was just incredible because it cost so much to make. It was so unprofitable. But, probably about a year in, we realised people weren’t buying it, because it was an energy drink or it had all these kind of magical properties. They were buying it because it was a good ginger beer. And I think we’d stumbled on to this idea of adult soft drinks that, there was actually this gap in the market for, like, uncompromising big flavour like ginger beer that actually burns. We did a lot of kind of just, hitting the road, doing events, doing kind of art openings and that kind of thing. Through that, we managed to get distribution at Billy Kwong’s in Sydney, which was Kylie Kwong’s restaurant, and got an email from one of her patrons saying, I had your ginger beer last night, amazing Moscow mule, blah, blah, blah. But I was up until three in the morning from the caffeine. I think we went, ‘okay, cool, we’ve got to make a decision here’. And we ended up taking out the caffeine and all the kind of functional ingredients and we added a few other products to the range. So we added smoked cola, blood orange and chilli, bitter grapefruit. All flavours that no one was doing or thinking about back then, really adult flavours. And I think we just inadvertently stumbled into this kind of new space of adult soft drinks. The other thing I think we really did well was I’m a copywriter by trade, so I love branding and packaging. We made up these kind of kits that cost about $30, I reckon. And they had like, a deck of cards, they had bottle openers and just this, like, book about ginger beer. And it was probably, you know, 40 centimetres by 30 centimetres. This kind of tome of a tribute to ginger beer. And we’d take that to every single account. Even if it was a burger bar, they’d get this kind of like, $30 sales pack. And it actually worked, I know people still have that pack today. And I remember our first big break I took it into a distributor in Brisbane called Boutique Drinks or something, and we got distribution and they bought a pallet of drink, which was like $3,000. And I was like, ‘oh, my God, we’ve made it!’ Because, you know, we were literally selling kind of $50 case, $60 here. Our biggest order before that was a five-plus-one, which was, I think, $247. So that kind of started the journey of pursuing wholesale distributors, I guess, and changing the model up here.
JAMES ATKINSON: You know, you mentioned that you’re a copywriter by trade. Where did you actually learn that trade? What experience had you had prior to strange life?
JAMES BRUCE: Basically, I learned it from being unemployed in Byron. I had a few online businesses before StrangeLove, selling really ridiculous stuff like tents, anything. I sold about ten different things and I just read a lot of books on copywriting, but that real kind of sleazy, direct copywriting. Like, ‘you have three minutes to take this deal or your house is going to explode’, you know? And then I ended up doing a advertising school called Award School, which kind of helped me articulate myself better and become a better kind of copywriter. And normally people do Award School and then go into advertising. I kind of did Award School and just used what I learned there for StrangeLove.
JAMES ATKINSON: Okay, so you started, like, talking to some wholesale distributors. Were you seeing yourselves as being serious entrepreneurs at this point? Or was it still just kind of putting one foot in front of the other and just thinking from one batch to the next? Did you have a longer-term view at this stage?
JAMES BRUCE: I think we always had a longer-term view. I think one of the reasons we kind of chose drinks as opposed to vitamins, was we saw that there was a potential to be acquired. Like there was a definite kind of exit strategy there. Not that you couldn’t be in vitamins, but I think distribution channels in drinks is probably more interesting than kind of going into Amcal and trying to sell kind of exciting vitamins. Like, we were in bars and restaurants and the channel was inherently exciting. I don’t know if we ever saw ourselves as serious entrepreneurs. Even now I’m not sure. There was always just an element of survival and just overcoming, the next problem that was in front of us, I think. Yeah.
JAMES ATKINSON: You’ve mentioned that there was like, by 2015, I think, a range of four different sodas with some pretty out there flavours. What was the market response to some of those newer products? And then when did you then kind of move into the mixer arena.
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, the market response was mixed. It was, I loved it. Stafford didn’t. Stafford was very much, we need to make orange and passionfruit soda that everyone loves. I was very much like, wanted people to kind of either hate the product or love it, you know.
JAMES ATKINSON: You wanted it to be memorable.
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, I think I read this book, called Purple Cow by Seth Godin, and he was basically making the point that products should be remarkable in the sense that, like, people should talk about them, remark on them, you know. And so we used to get emails just like saying, ‘your Smoked Cola tastes like bushfire. It’s absolutely disgusting’. And I used to quite enjoy those emails. Stafford didn’t. I took it as a sign we’re on the right track, that we’re kind of doing something that no one else would dare to do, you know, and even now, having worked in bigger corporate, I still don’t really believe in focus groups and sensory testing and all that stuff. I think it leads to this kind of dumbed down version of product that’s not exciting to anyone. What ended up happening was the more distribution we got, the more it started to kind of feed back into our innovation. So, we got national distribution with a wine company based out of Melbourne. And many of their customers wanted tonic water. And at that stage, I think there was about five gin distilleries, or six in Australia, maybe a bit more. But I remember in the early days meeting Stu and Cam from Four Pillars, they were just kind of kicking off. And our distributor at that time was definitely like, ‘you guys should do tonics’.
JAMES ATKINSON: And were there any other Australian-made, smaller batch products taking a more craft approach to tonic than the big soft drink companies? Was there anything else really, around that point? Maybe Capi would have been around at that point I guess.
JAMES BRUCE: Pretty much only Capi and Fever-Tree was obviously being imported with nowhere near the kind of brand awareness they have today. And that’s one other thing about soft drinks. It’s a pretty big barrier to entry in that you’ve got to make 2000 or 3000 cases of every product to make it viable production-wise. It was really the three of us, I would say. There’s that kind of analogy, ‘in a gold rush, sell shovels’. And that is a little bit what it felt like to be a tonic water company. You had this gin boom happening and we were one of three tonic waters. And so I think we rode that wave for the next few years, probably until about 2020.
JAMES ATKINSON: So was tonic, was that transformative for the business? Was that the product that you got traction with that kind of took you into a new sphere?
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, definitely. For sure. We started getting accounts like Attica and Minamishima, these kind of three hat restaurants that I don’t think we ever would have got just with soft drink. I think soft drink, even though we were doing really adult versions of it, it was just always seen as kind of juvenile in some respect. You know, that’s changed now, I think. I think it’s got a lot more credibility now. But doing tonic water and mixers allowed us to have this more sophisticated conversation about how it was kind of interacting with alcohol and elevating alcohol and elevating drinks in general.
JAMES ATKINSON: It must have been over that time. I’m imagining that as you kind of get more distribution, you’ve got to make more products, and the business gets more money hungry, basically. So is that when you’re doing more funding rounds and are you still doing that with unsophisticated investors, shall we call them? No disrespect intended.
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. I may have been one of them. Yeah, we were. I think we were probably getting a bit more sophisticated at how we were doing it and who we were going out to.
JAMES ATKINSON: But you weren’t talking to venture capitalists or, anyone along those lines.
JAMES BRUCE: Right at the end, we were starting to have those conversations with private equity and that kind of thing. And then obviously, we ended up going through a trade sale with Asahi instead. But that kind of process actually started as a process to raise more money and ended up with us selling the business.
JAMES ATKINSON: Were there moments along the journey, though, where the cash position of the business was concerning to the extent you were worried about being able to stay on?
JAMES BRUCE: I would say the opposite. I would say there was only very few moments where it wasn’t a worry or I cannot remember a time where it was like, ‘okay, we’re flush with cash here, and we can just take it easy for a while’. It just felt like, yeah, as you said, kind of just hungry, hungry beast. And the more success we were having on the outside, the more it would just kind of eat up capital, the more inventory we’d have to fund, the more staff we’d have to put on. It just never felt like we got to a point where it was like, ‘okay, now we’re really cooking with gas and we’ve got enough money’. It was super stressful.
JAMES ATKINSON: And what happened to the original lineup of those four adult sodas, shall we call them? Has that sort of been replaced today by the effectively the lo cal soda range? Tell me about how the range kind of evolved.
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, I think, for us, I mean, people have often commented and said ‘you went into the better for you space’. That’s not kind of how it came about. How it came about was, we were having these annual strategy catch ups up at Byron Bay and we went around the room and realised that not one person in the room drunk one of our, soft drinks for about six months. We’re like, ‘well, if no one on our team is drinking the drinks, we’ve got a problem’. It was the first year that range didn’t grow. It had kind of had shrunk by one per cent in terms of revenue. And it was kind of masked largely by the growth of the tonics. And so we were like, ‘well, we’re not drinking them because they’re too sweet’. And people’s palates have changed in just five years. It was remarkable. You know, I think the standard kind of sugar level back then was about ten to twelve grammes of sugar per 100 millilitres, something like that. And so we made a decision to just kind of pull about 70% to 80% of the sugar out. we obviously added some new flavours, got rid of some flavours, so added kind of mandarin and yuzu and holy grapefruit and those kind of flavours. And, yeah, took out some of the sugar and ended up with the lo cal sodas.
StrangeLove Yuzu and StrangeLove Salted Grapefruit: Top sellers
JAMES ATKINSON: I suppose the unique flavours has been a part of your DNA since the beginning. And you were telling me recently that salted grapefruit, the mixer, is your top selling product. How did you land on that? And why do you think that’s kind of had such great traction?
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, it’s that one and our Yuzu Soda are, probably the two top sellers, I think. I mean, obviously there was no-one doing agave mixers and very much everyone in mixers was still thinking about tonic water. I think we started to think beyond tonic going back to that point about like, by that stage we had this really kind of amazing array of distribution points in really eclectic bars and restaurants. And that starts to feed back into, your products and how you approach kind of innovation. And so all of a sudden, like, it sounds very mainstream and boring now but, things like yuzu and, you know, we were having that out in kind of Melbourne restaurants and at bars and stuff and then we’re like, well, let’s do a yuzu, product and same with white grapefruit and holy basil you know, having these kind of culinary experiences. And that started to be reflected in our kind of innovation and product development.
Acquisition by Asahi Beverages
JAMES ATKINSON: I guess maybe the next thing to talk about is the Asahi acquisition. So that wasn’t something that were you actively going around and knocking on doors trying to find a buyer at that point or you were just trying to raise money and out of that came some approaches. Or how did that kind of evolve after raising money?
JAMES BRUCE: I think three or four times we realised we needed to raise some serious money and we probably made the mistake three times of not raising enough. It felt like we’d made it to base camp and we’re about to kind of try and ascend to the peak almost. And so we got approached by a couple of mid-sized, I guess you’d call them beverage distributors who, wanted to invest. And then we got approached by a private equity group and it was through that that I reached out to someone at Deloitte and said maybe we need to run a kind of a fundraising kind of exercise. And she said, let me put my feelers out. And so she went out to market and that’s how the Asahi thing came about. She’s like, you know, Asahi’s just undertaken a strategic review and they just want to have a little chat first. And so it was a bit of a surprise to us.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. And did you do an equity crowdfunding thing at some point as well?
JAMES BRUCE: We were thinking about it too. Yeah, just about to. Thankfully we didn’t. I mean, 17 shareholders for me is like too many.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah.
JAMES BRUCE: I can’t imagine having 1300 shareholders.
JAMES ATKINSON: Tell me about how the conversations with Asahi went down. You know, you guys ran a pretty different race, shall we say than the likes of a big corporate like Asahi. How did you get sort of confidence that you would be able to slot in there?
JAMES BRUCE: I don’t know if we ever did get confident. I think what we’ve done well is kind of captured or built this new category that was kind of, let’s call it super premium if you like. Also super adult and sophisticated. And they actually have language to describe it internally, like ‘adult sophistication’ is the language they use. So in many ways, we’d kind of intuitively gone into these strategic areas that they had flagged and it kind of lined up with how they were thinking about drinks as well. You know, we went through a series of probably ten Zoom calls with different people from different parts of their business before we got an indicative letter of offer. Yeah, that’s kind of how the process started.
JAMES ATKINSON: When you actually joined Asahi, what did that mean for your manufacturing? Presumably that all got brought into the Asahi fold. And was that a difficult process, replicating your products in their plants?
JAMES BRUCE: It actually hasn’t happened, believe it or not.
JAMES ATKINSON: Oh, really?
JAMES BRUCE: No, they’re very much, you know, initially it was arm’s length kind of. We kept our offices, we kept working out of Collingwood. We still do. We kind of kept driving our own innovation. So I think they’d had a lot of experience with craft beer and doing acquisitions in that space. So they did have a model for probably what works and what doesn’t work. Our products and our volume are nowhere near big enough to run on Schweppes’ production line, still. And they’re kind of just inherently too complicated. There’s a lot of juice in our products, a lot of different ingredients. So we still actually use the same contract manufacturers but we just have access to, I guess, lots of data, lots of sales resources, lots of legal advice, obviously lots of capital. Which is the biggest relief. That was the biggest change for me, realising we could just pay bills when they were due. Yeah.
JAMES ATKINSON: And also having marketing budgets and stuff as well.
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, marketing budgets before, like for the ten years before, I remember when someone said, ‘what’s your budget?’ It was always just like, ‘well, what’s the cheapest thing that we can give you?’ So the idea of actually setting a budget for a year and working to it was absolutely foreign to us.
JAMES ATKINSON: We did touch on this earlier, but your copywriting always brought a lot of personality to the brands and the products. And I generally always, when I pick up a new StrangeLove product I’ll always read the blurb on the side and laugh to myself because there was always such a great sense of humour and quirkiness about them. You’re still the main writer for the brand?
JAMES BRUCE: Definitely. It’s me and Caitlin. She’s been with us for four or five years, so pre-acquisition, me and her still write all the content. The only difference is we have to run it by legal now, which is often quite amusing. Some of the stuff we have to kind of get cleared is funny. But you know to their credit we haven’t had too many things pulled. I think if you read our mineral water copy it says all our bubbles are entirely free range. It mentioned something about the water is sourced in a place ‘where the cows are happier than you’. Yeah. So the first time that went past legal they were like how do we know that the cows are happy? You know so we’ve had a few conversations like that which are kind of funny I think, more than anything.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. They must be like these f*cking guys again!
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah exactly.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. But has it been a happy marriage in terms of the way that you’ve plugged into the business and the what that’s done for the growth of the brand because I mean I see StrangeLove absolutely everywhere now.
JAMES BRUCE: It is, yeah.
JAMES ATKINSON: How much have you grown since joining Asahi?
JAMES BRUCE: Oh, it’s hard to say. I’d say we’ve probably doubled, but I think it still will probably double again I would imagine, in the coming year. I don’t know. Happy marriage isn’t probably the right terminology but we’ve certainly kind of realised a lot of gains. But I think it’s also been really challenging because it’s just a different. It’s a completely different way they think about product. They like to really plan things out three or five years ahead of kind of time. They do kind of lots of testing, lots of consumer screening and that kind of thing and it’s just not how we operate. We kind of shoot from the hip. We make flavours because they taste good. So there has definitely been some kind of teething. It probably took a year I reckon, or a year and a half to kind of just get in their flow.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. But have you gone down the path necessarily of doing consumer testing with new flavours and stuff like that, that’s part of being part of the big machine.
JAMES BRUCE: We’ve put some forward for more packaging. So no I still don’t believe in kind of testing flavours. I kind of trust my palate and a couple of guys that we’ve got working for us and girls. So I’d rather just sit around with them and taste drinks than worry about what you know Jenny from Narre Warren thinks.
JAMES ATKINSON: What’s your belief about how those market research exercises actually play out in practice?
JAMES BRUCE: Well I think that they’re not asking what completely delights you in this kind of proposition. They’re more designed to catch areas of dislike, you know. I’m not articulating that very well, but they’re more designed for risk mitigation and to eliminate the risk that people won’t like them. There’s nothing in them that measures excitement and measures the idea of going to places where nobody’s ever been before and just like completely blowing the socks off someone and exciting them, you know.
JAMES ATKINSON: And I could see that at some point you have added a new range which is sort of like flavoured water as well. Was that sort of a new space? Like, I’m not really aware of anyone doing it quite like that.
JAMES BRUCE: I mean it was massive in America, obviously, with Lacroix and I think the industry term for it is ‘water up’, where you take water and add value to it through flavour. Again, it’s just a different occasion as well. So it’s really guilt-free drinking. Actually, if you measured the drinks that I drink the most out of all the StrangeLove range, it’d be the flavoured water. I reckon I have about ten pineapple waters a day.
JAMES ATKINSON: Zero sugar.
JAMES BRUCE: Zero sugar. Really nice extracts and oils and flavour. Yeah. So it just makes water a little bit more interesting.
JAMES ATKINSON: Anything else we haven’t talked about in the range as it is today? It’s quite a vast range of products, isn’t it?
JAMES BRUCE: It really is.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah.
StrangeLove launching alcohol premix range
JAMES BRUCE: I guess the only other thing is probably on the horizon for us is moving to alcohol, I would say.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah. And we can talk about that today. That’s close enough.
JAMES BRUCE: Yeah, I think that’s what we’re kind of, playing with next. And I think, you know, if you look at our brand DNA and our history, we’ve been making other people’s alcohol better for ten years and we just thought, ‘it’s our turn now’. We may as well make our own alcohol better, because we know how to do it.
JAMES ATKINSON: What sort of challenges are there from a legal standpoint there when, you know, we have the Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code and all that kind of stuff? It will be a StrangeLove brand, clearly StrangeLove branded. But will it be treated in a different way? Just to sort of make sure people are clear that it’s, it’s the alcohol product and not the soda product?
JAMES BRUCE: We’re still working through it. It’s a bang on question though. We’re getting kind of this pre-approval, working with ABAC to find whatever the best solution is. When you look at our marketing and our drinks. Well, (A) anyone under 18 probably can’t afford our drinks in the supermarket anyway. So the price itself is a kind of barrier to buying our soft drinks. But you know, we’ve been talking about kind of gin and tonic and palomas and margaritas for ten years. So we’ve got a history of having that relationship with alcohol. Also, our positioning has always been very adult but I think we’re treading really carefully because there’s obviously been some cases recently where people have gotten it wrong. I think that move from non-alc into alc is one that needs to be made very carefully.
JAMES ATKINSON: Can you tease at all what sort of products are going to be in that range? Would it be leveraging other brands that are now in the Asahi portfolio? Like for example, you’ve got Never Never Gin is now part of the family as well.
JAMES BRUCE: Look, nothing is off the cards. I can’t talk too much about it. But I think it’s more, if you look at our current product range it would be taking some of the greatest hits from that. You know, we’ve recently released a spiced pineapple mixer for rum and agave that will be making an appearance. The other one is, we recently released a passionfruit soda. So we’re playing around just with a passionfruit vodka kind of pornstar martini, not really martini, but RTD. Yeah. So I think we’ve got the underlying NPD there and the underlying kind of equity in our current flavours and it’s just about drawing them out and finding what alcohol to mix them with.
JAMES ATKINSON: Yeah, yeah. Certainly sounds like spirits is going to be a bigger part of what Asahi is doing in the future, based on I suppose, what’s happening in the beer market at the moment.
JAMES BRUCE: I can’t comment. I’m not the boss.
JAMES ATKINSON: No, that’s cool. Well James, yeah, thanks heaps for joining me for a chat and also for coming on board recently as a sponsor of the show. Yeah, really looking forward to seeing how things evolve with StrangeLove over the next little while.
JAMES BRUCE: Thanks James. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
