Novian Starship 🌠

AriZona co-founder Don Vultaggio explains how a Gatorade 24 oz can sold at Snapple's 16 oz price built AriZona Iced Tea: The whole thing started with a delivery truck in the wrong season. "I was in a grocery store and a Snapple truck pulled up. It was February and he was selling iced tea in February. And I said, 'Iced tea is not supposed to sell in the winter time.' And I went home that night. I told my wife I'm going in the tea business." He already had trucks and salespeople selling alcohol, so tea "was just a plug-in." All he needed was a better product in a can that would stand out. But his first instinct was to do exactly what everyone else was doing. "The short story is I thought I was going to put it in a glass bottle at first because that's what everybody else was doing." Snapple, Lipton and Gatorade were all in that same bottle. He drove to a factory in South Jersey that was making Snapple, run by a man he knew: "He said to me, 'So, you got a label?' I said, 'No, got a name.' 'No, got a package. No, but I have an idea.' He said, 'You know something, Don? That's better than most guys.'" Then the drive home killed it. He stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a couple of Snapples to stare at on the way back to Brooklyn. "And I said, 'If I don't have a package that is going to be different than Snapple, the retailer is going to sell it at the same price as Snapple.' And why would a consumer choose me over them? They know Snapple. They're comfortable with Snapple." "By the time I got back to Brooklyn, I talked myself out of the tea business." Asked why he'd been so fixated on glass, he doesn't soften it: "Because I saw the other competition in glass bottle. And I thought in order to get into it, you should be in a light package. I was naive. Simpleminded." And he applied a standard to himself that most founders never do: "If I can't figure out how I'm going to get a consumer to buy me over Snapple, I don't deserve to be in the business." What restarted it was one line from his wife, who he'd known since high school. "One day leaving the house and my wife said, 'By the way, whatever happened with that idea?' And I said, 'You know something? I couldn't make it work.' And she said, 'I didn't think you were going to pull that one off.'" "Yeah. I knew her since high school, you know, and I said, 'What the heck is that?' You know, it's 7:00 in the morning and I get to the office and I said, 'I got to do something.'" The answer was sitting on a shelf in another 7-Eleven, in the sports drink aisle. A Gatorade in a 24 oz can. "I said, 'If I could sell that big can for the same price as Snapple 16 ounce, I'll be a 50% price advantage at the same price and I'll get consumers cuz it's going to stand out.'" That's the entire invention: same shelf, same price, 50% more product, in a package nobody in the tea aisle was using. He borrowed a format from an adjacent category and pointed it at a competitor he could never beat on brand loyalty, which changed what consumers were comparing in the first place. @DonVultaggio refuses to let anyone dress it up: "Years later, people say, 'Wow, that was ingenious.' No, it wasn't. It was an accident essentially."

@andrewzimmern ate a lot of bugs to build his dream show. 🐜🐛🪳 The award-winning chef explains his million-dollar chess move with "Bizarre Foods" to create his TV empire in the latest episode of Built Different with @Ian_Schwartzman. ♟️ Watch the full interview on YouTube, Friday, August 28, 9 am ET.