Organic Processing Vo1.5 #5

never having chemicals on it, is going to be the choice for a health-conscious consumer.

Recently another pesticide, carbofu-ran, used mainly on imported coffee, bananas and rice, was banned for health reasons and who knows what other chemicals will be next? The more that kind of stuff comes to light, the more the value of this brand, and the organic pillar of Honest Tea, will be important.

Overall, our job in the next three years will be to show Coke the value of Honest Tea by being successful with our current brand structure. As they say, the best defense is a good offense. The single best thing we can do to help protect our brand is to do exactly what we’ve been doing but do it in a bigger, more powerful way.

big fan of Honest Tea. What is the story with that and has it help spread aware-
ness?

Goldman: Yes, he is a big fan of Honest Tea and when he would go to a city where we didn’t have distribution his campaign had to go through all kinds of gyrations; calling our office to track down the nearest location and traveling hours out of the way to get the product. With our expanded distribution, it will be easier for them as well as millions of other people to find our product.

As for awareness, I’m sure it doesn’t hurt. At samplings, people will come up and say, “Oh, I want to try the tea that Barack Obama likes,” which is the Black Forest Berry. But, we’re not a political tea—we have a great deal of consumers who are Republicans. There was a great article in the Weekly Standard where one of their columnists wrote, “Finally, Barack Obama and I agree on something.”

OP: So, what is the plan for expanded distribution?
OP: It’s been reported that presiden-
tial candidate Barack Obama is a

Goldman: Well, first of all, we will continue our natural food distribution so that all of our existing business efforts will stay intact or grow. SPINS data shows that our brand has a market penetration of 90 percent or higher in the natural foods area—which is great.

We’ve made success there, but we haven’t really gone beyond the natural foods channel. So if there’s not a co-op around, where would you buy your drinks? At a convenience store? A drug store? Supermarket? We have made some progress in these types of stores in California, DC and Denver, but I didn’t