Spindrift: Bill Creelman

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2020

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bill Creelman graduated from college in 1996 with a business plan — to sell smoked fish from Nantucket. But over time, that idea morphed unpredictably into a brand that sold cocktail seasonings and supplies. After selling that company to liquor giant Diageo, Bill wanted to stay in the beverage industry. As a way of kicking his Diet Coke habit, he started making sparkling water with a fresh squeeze of lemon or grapefruit. That deceptively simple idea grew into Spindrift, a beverage that came with huge production challenges. Today, the company has an annual revenue topping $100 million. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," Gaurav Chawla loved home-made chai but hated how long it took to make. So he quit his engineering job and started the five-year process to create Chime — an automatic chai brewer that uses tea and spices from India. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	I knew where the risk was, or at least I thought I did, but ultimately there's just risk embedded in between the coolers and going up against the big soda guys and trying to do something really different in terms of the ingredients.
0:47.0	All of that just was going to be challenging. So yeah, it was terrifying.
0:53.0	From NPR is how I built this.
0:59.0	Show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:10.0	I'm Guy Raaz, and on the show today, how Bill Creelman started out with a business plan to sell mail order smoked fish, but instead ended up creating spin drift and selling $100 million of sparkling water a year.
1:22.0	So back in 2019, the World Health Organization revised its guidelines for sugar intake.
1:35.0	Sugar, it turns out, is actually worse for us than we thought, and too much can be deadly.
1:41.0	Now I say this, by the way, as I finish this delicious sugar cookie my kids made last night.
1:47.0	Anyway, the new guidelines now suggest adults should not consume more than 25 grams of added sugar a day.
1:55.0	Now, think about this for a moment.
1:57.0	A single 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola has 39 grams of added sugar. That is a day and a half of sugar in a can of coke.
2:06.0	And if you go to the movies and get a 32-ounce cup, you will burn through nearly five days of your sugar allotment before you get to the credits.
2:15.0	So what to do? Well, the obvious answer is drink less sugar, which clearly is advice lots of people are taking.
2:23.0	Because last year, the sparkling water industry hit an all-time high in sales, nearly $2.5 billion according to Nielsen.
2:32.0	And it's why the beverage aisle of your local supermarket is now jam-packed with La Croix, and Tobogicco, and Bubbly, and Poland Springs, and Waterloo, and several other brands.
2:43.0	And it's also why big players like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestle are all pushing into the sector.
	...

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