Drinks bottled where they are sold? / Drop Water CEO / Scott Edwards

https://www.dropwater.co/

What if your drinks could be made on site? 
Stop shipping water and dispense it at the point of sale. 
Ready to advertise for your brand on a drink? 

Had a great conversations with CEO Scott Edwards from Drop Water! 

Check out our sponsor Orora Packaging Solutions 
https://ororapackagingsolutions.com/

https://specright.com/ 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1329820053/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=corygat

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-connors/

I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap.

This podcast is an independent production and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2022.

Transcript

0:31

Welcome to sustainable packaging with Cory Connors. Today's guest is Scott Edwards, the CEO and founder of drop water. Hey Scott, how are you? I'm doing well. How are. Good man. I'm, I'm impressed with this idea. It's really innovative. It's exciting. I'm looking forward to explaining it to the audience. What, what you guys have going. It's something I've never seen before for sure. And I, but before we get there, let's, let's start with, how did you get here? Yeah, so, I mean, it started a long time ago, nearly a decade ago and I studied industrial. And packaging at Cal poly here in San Los Sapo. And we you know, learned how to essentially, you know, make packaging and the, the purpose of, and learn what the purpose of packaging was. Which is I'm sure, you know, one of 'em is to make the product survive from where it's made to where it's consumed, right? So you need oxygen barrier, you need great tensile strength. It needs to protect, it needs to. Drops and be in trucks in Arizona. So basically it needs to be built to last in any environment for a very long time. And you know, I'm a kite border surfer spent a lot of time in the ocean and 10 years ago, you know, I was well aware of plastic waste entering in our environment and seeing the effects of that. And someone that was studying packaging, I wanted to solve. Or at least contribute to that problem rather than just, you know, making a cap slightly thinner or injection blow molding bottle with less materials, which is not fundamentally solving any problem. I wanted to try to create a solution that would actually have a great impact. And that became my senior project where I studied under Jay sing. Who's the director. The packaging department here at Cal poly. And basically, you know, the idea was to not need to transport the product full and to make it at the consumer. So if you change the system like the distribution and, and eliminate the need for a shelf life, you can really use different materials that are, you know, not even. In the, in the round of possibility for using traditionally. So that's how we started, you know, Cal poly senior project. Love the concept. It's, it's incredibly unique and far as I know nobody's ever done it before. Can you talk us through how you came up with this innovative idea? Yeah. So I was given the assignment for, for you. Basically making a contribution in packaging. And with my background in robotics, I, you know, have been building things my whole life. I really wanted to build robots cause I, I thought it would be fun. And I wanted to have some sort of robotics in my senior project. So decided to make an actual prototype of how might you fill drinks at the point of sale in bottles. And. That's how it started. I mean, I was in a garage. I believe I got a little bit of funding from friends and family to build a prototype, like thousands of dollars. And that kind of started it off. And then years later after I graduated I found out about a team that was doing something similar and they're a great company called Bevi , and they were doing something. A bit different before they became be they were doing it was called refresh water technologies, which is essentially filling and selling drinks at the point of sale. And I thought, man, I can't, this is like, what I wanna do. This is what I wanna dedicate my life to doing. And other people are doing it. So in, you know, kind of got a fire lit beneath me, created a business plan and probably a matter of two days. Told everyone in my whole inbox, what I wanted to do and a few people responded and said like, Hey, this, this sounds kind of interesting. I might wanna help you. So that's how it started. Yeah. That's great. Getting some positive feedback right away. Love that. Yeah. That's not very common. So , that sounds like this was a good idea from the beginning. Can you walk us through how it works? Absolutely. So We have machines and they, they hold stacks of bottles. We can actually fit about 200 bottles for a cubic foot and they stack like cones and I'm gonna, yeah. Grab you and move you. Bring us with you. I love it. This, this is what the bottle looks like. So it's over 50% just paperboard this one's clay coded so we can print on it. Looking for bottles right here. And this is how they look before they're filled and sealed. So the bottom is kind of like a trap door and we'll move over to a machine. You can see how they stack in the machine. This machine is not actually complete, but this is what they look like. This is a stack of 40 bottles. So basically like two cases of water. And it autonomously pulls the top bottle off fills it, seals. It gives it to the consumer in about just over 10 seconds. We're trying to get that time down, but oh yeah. On demand. Yeah, on demand. And we, we have highly concentrated flavor. So, you know, the thing with. Bottled drink really is it's the vast majority of the drink is water. And if you just rehydrate the drink at the point of sale, you can reduce the amount of weight and volume shipped by an order magnitude. So With our packaging, they're all empty and nested together. We can fit 10 times more bottles than a given volume. And then also we take out all the water weight. So it's less than a 10th of the weight and we have highly concentrated bags that are in the machine. So we have. Like lemonade, you know, cucumber spot water guava we've made green tea and functional drinks with like Ogan, like calming stuff, energetic stuff. And you can even choose how many milligrams of caffeine you want. So you can make a, a very wide, wide, yeah, a very wide variety of drinks. And we're gonna expand it significantly to try to get like the. Majority of the consumer beverage market can be sold through our machines. But we're just shipping the ingredient in that, in that most concentrated form possible. And the rehydrating. So take advantage of, of just not shipping as much stuff. That's amazing. So the, what you showed me was a chipboard container. Does it, is it just paper or does it have some kind of a poly liner? When I looked at your website, it looked like there was a bag inside. Oh, there it is. Okay. Yeah. So this is the water holding assembly and it's cap a shoulder and a film bag. And we've, you know, we we've used a lot of different materials but. And then also a chipboard. So it is 18 point paperboard. And it just has, you know, man manufacturer's edge on one side make it on a standard automated folder. And so we can make a lot of these per hour and do custom branding for events or design yeah. Locations and stuff. What a neat idea. Totally innovative is the plastic recyclable. So we can choose what, what polymer we wanna use depending on location. So if they want compostable, we use compostable materials. If they want recyclable, we go recyclable. But you know, we, we really wanna use as little material as possible, and I think we've done a great job doing that. If you. As you probably know, edge strength is very good in, in chipboard or other cor gets and stuff. And so we're, we're actually looking at opening another line of our products that are shelf stable. After doing some testing for life on the shelf, it's a very small subset of what, of what we want to do. Like our business main business is going to be bottling at the point of. But another source of revenue could be filling these and then shipping them is we've discovered our package can actually withstand about 80 pounds of crushing force. Wow. Just with that 10, 12 grams of paperboard and 10 to 14 grams of, you know, polymer. So it's amazing, better, better performance than you know, 40 to 50 grand polyethylene bottle with a lot less material and, you know, predominantly using paper, which is recycled a lot more here in the United States. Yeah, very easy to recycle paper or curbside in most areas of the USA for sure. And lots of the world. So that's a great option there. Very innovative concept. Wow. This is really cool. What if somebody wanted to buy a case of those? Could you have somebody working at a store that's like an employee or or how would that work? Yeah, so we are looking at like an industrial strength version. To, you know, basically if you could think of a big retailer that sells a lot of bottle drinks, instead of having, you know, giant cases of, you know, thousands of bottles of water coming in every day we would, we put like a mini bottling plant there and ship them in a highly condensed form. So, you know, hundreds of bottles per cubic foot and produce as needed on. That is not launched yet. Here, right now, we're focusing on, you know, a higher margin market, which is two consumers and places like airports and stuff. So we can charge $2, two 50, $3 per product. Yeah. That port portion of the market will come in later when we have higher volume. And when we can compete against, you know, the Kirklands of the world, or, you know, the discount priced, bottled water of the world, Yeah, I love the idea. I think it's, I think it's got a lot of potential and well done. Good for you and your team. Where are you at in the stage of development? Do you have some of these in stores? Yeah, we're, we're in a number of airports across the United States from Newark to Cincinnati to. Silicon valley. We have a couple machines in the San Jose airport. And we're kind of at the tail end of a prototyping stage and market validation. And right now we're ramping up with a machine that is far superior than machines in the field. Much smaller a lot less moving parts, easier to assemble and just taking all the learnings that we've had over the past, right. Five, five years and put it into a, a product we wanna scale. I love the idea of the custom print. Could have you had stores want to make it co-branded like Fred Meyer or, or, you know yeah. Something like that. Is that pretty common? Yeah. Yeah. We actually, I can give you two examples. You know, one of 'em are good friends at new milk was, was on shark tank and they make nut milks at the point of. In places like whole foods. Wow. We made them a 32 ounce bottle so much bigger. And they fill, fill these bottles at the point of sale and only needs, you know, one plus week shelf life after it's been filled. And, and you note, you put a little label on it, so it, when it expires and we've made bottles for them. Co-branded co-branded and it was new milk branded, you know, kind of powered by drop water. And then we've also done custom branding for Twitter at an event where they hired us to bring a machine and keep out bottles for free. So they, they pre bought all the bottles. We've also made custom branding for an airport. And we look forward to doing a lot of, a lot more custom branding and advertising at places like arenas. Maybe you can. Game by game advertising. So, wow. The lake Lakers are playing. You can have you know, Lakers, logos and whatever sponsor of the event or whatever messaging you want to get into consumer's hands in the arena. Incredible because we, we have very low QS compared to other packaging. Companies is there's, you know, just printing straight onto paperboard or not then laminating it. And we Don. Need high volume to make the business work. So what's the MOQ and for the audience, that's the minimum order quantity. Yeah, one, one box. So, you know, one box is 480 bottles. And so it's yeah. 12 stacks of 40 and geez, you just put you know, these stacks go into the machine. You just, if you. Put a stack of cups, like onto, onto a table, you can service our machines. And so, wow. Three stacks are, are in the machine. They kind of act like little PS dispensers. Once you get, or take out all the bottles from one stack, it goes onto the next one. And then you get like a low inventory notification that's texted or emailed to whoever's servicing the machine and they go refill it. And we can. You know, there are a lot of fun things that we're gonna experiment with. You know, if a machine is getting down to the last few bottles, we could increase the price to you know, try to get someone's servicing machines to service like a, a bunch of machines at the same time. So they only have to make one trip and kind of try to like get them all down to low inventory at the same time and adjust the price on the fly autonomously to make that happen. Oh, I see. So you're encouraging sales or, or yeah, you could or discouraging yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Well that, that's amazing. And, and with digital print, you could, you could run just a few dozen of these things and, and make it viable, like you said, for special event or a UFC match or, you know, something like that. This is amazing. The potential here is huge. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Love the idea. I, I could see these at, at businesses at industrial parks at Disneyland, you know, all over the place. Oh yeah. Just, just, you know, like, like people collect popcorn containers at Disneyland, they could collect, drop water boxes or, or you call 'em bottles even though they're they're chipboard. Yeah, we, we actually should call 'em cartons. And it's really like drinking out of a bag that has a paper tube around it. Right. So all of our marketing materials, we call 'em cartons and we should probably call, just call 'em cartons. But yeah, we would love to be in Disney. If you have any. Disney connections. It'd be perfect. We can make drinks at, in on Disney's theme parks would be amazing. Oh, I just went a few weeks ago with my family and tried the, the blue milk for the first time in the, the star wars land. It's amazing. You know, and, and to have that in a, in a keepsake container. I tell you what that's gonna sell fast so I can see this thing really, really going quickly. So is, is that the future? Are you, are you hoping for things like that , to happen? Absolutely. I think, you know, highlighting, you know, star wars, I think if you were to go in the star wars universe and like see a civilization, that's really sorted things out that's truly sustainable. I think they probably have something more like drop water. We're not bottling water in a central location, wrapping in plastic, and it takes a year to get to the consumer. I think they'd probably be using the water that's already there and doing something way more sustainable and efficient. So yeah, I think this, this would be in the star wars universe. I agree. I absolutely could see princess Leia drinking, one of these things that, that, that makes sense to me. Right. Yeah. Brilliant. Totally brilliant. Do you put instructions on the carton to tell the consumer what to do with the packaging? Yeah, we do. So and I'm not sure the last run it did, and we just changed them. So we want them to mechanically separate. The polymer from the paper and recycle the paper. And you have, you have a few different options, you know, if, if you do have a municipality that accepts as SDM B 6,400 compostable products you could compost it. And you know, if you do happen to have a bottle that is polyethylene recycle the whole thing, but definitely, always mechanically separate. So. Pull it apart. It's really easy to do. Take it's like 4.6 pounds of pull force to pop it open and then separate your two materials. So I love that, you know, that only, only a founder would know that that's brilliant. You're you obviously a scientist and have figured this out. Well done. Thank you. yeah, this thing's, I I'm excited to watch what, what happens with you guys? Will you come back on in six months or a year and, and keep us updated? 100%. Yeah. It's it's gonna take a while. So maybe every six months for the next 10 years or something. Okay. That's, we'll have a recurring drop water episode. I love it. Yeah. Sounds good. Well, how do people get in touch with you if they wanna buy one of your machines or, or 20 of them? Yeah, go to drop water.co and go to contact us. Fill out the form. I get an email. Every time. And so does Zach and our whole team about incoming inquiries. So just make an inquiry, we'll reach back out and we'll sort it out. I love it. Well done. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you being on Scott. Thanks. Thank you, Corey. Likewise. Yep. And like to thank Landsberg Orora for sponsoring the podcast for your listening, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next episode and give us a review. We really appreciate that. Thank you so much.