Colorado-based beverage maker Hoplark is separating into two subsidiaries: Hoplark, which will oversee the core brand as it currently exists, and Hoplark Labs, a tech-driven division that will launch new beverage brands and products under the leadership of the company’s founder, Dean Eberhardt.
The restructuring, announced to employees on Wednesday and effective January 1, 2023, represents a significant new chapter for Hoplark, which debuted its flagship line of non-alcoholic hopped teas in 2018. Created by Eberhardt as a flavor-forward alternative to craft beer, the brand has become one of the fastest-growing names in natural CPG, and has since expanded nationwide into categories including sparkling water and non-alcoholic ‘beer.’
Hoplark Labs is intended to use the company’s learnings from the past four years as fuel to continue pursuing beverage innovations that go beyond the core brand proposition, Eberthardt told BevNET last week. In turn, the move will put the Hoplark brand in experienced hands of former DRY Soda and General Mills executive Betsy Frost, who was promoted from Chief Commercial Officer to Hoplark CEO this week, as it pushes for scale.
“It’s a super exciting thing for me because it’s really my core passion and the thing I love more than anything,” Eberhart said. “It’s not a normal thing to do four and a half years into a crazy beverage startup, but I think it’s the right thing — clearly the right thing for me and I think clearly the right thing for the company.”
Over the years, Hoplark has built its identity around creative flavors, unique label designs and limited edition varieties like its “explorer” series, and Eberhardt remains committed to those as foundational elements. But he also acknowledged that his “desire to push the envelope on stuff might be a bit distracting.” At the same time, promoting Frost, who joined the company in May, to the top job brings operational expertise at a time when Hoplark is doing “way more than we’ve ever done,” including onboarding 3,000 new doors in an eight-month period.
Eberhardt will remain in his executive chairman role at Hoplark and continue to “support the team at the executive level and at the innovation level,” as well as tinkering with process engineering as needed.
“That cultural separation allows for, most importantly, the Hoplark brand to really finds its identity and lose a bit of some distracting elements of trying all the stuff that we try and different things that have been going on and really focus directly on this incredible market opportunity,” he said.
In Eberhardt’s new role, creating “distractions” is unlikely to be an issue. Though the two subsidiaries will share the same parent company and ownership, he explained that Hoplark Labs plans to create its own brands and products in other beverage categories that will “probably” be separate from the Hoplark brand, in addition to designing and creating beverages for clients. The Hoplark brand will continue to run its own R&D department, but there will be some “overlap” between the two organizations, and Eberhardt didn’t rule out Hoplark Labs developing a product that “gets reinserted back” into its eponymous brand.
“We’re picking our spots for where we think we have a really strong brand voice and perspective, but going to also create it for others,” he said.
As for what may come out of Hoplark Labs, Eberhardt said to expect drinks featuring “real ingredients brewed with craft techniques,” and created with patented tech IP and applications. The past four years have yielded significant learnings on how to work with fresh ingredients — the company does not use flavorings, extracts or concentrates — that have encouraged Eberhardt to push further into bold flavor experiments, some of which require going further downstream in the supply chain. He cited the challenge of finding fresh juniper berries — hard to find in a market set up for dried berries used in gin.
“The other thing that we’re able to do with the technology is extract different layers of flavor than other people are extracting right now,” he said. “So we can extract fresher, brighter flavor notes and characteristics because of how we process it, and because of how we source it to actually turn an ingredient that might be thought of a certain way into a completely different experience.”
Hoplark Labs officially gets off the ground next month, but Eberhardt has already laid the groundwork for new partnerships that will be announced within the next few months, he said, likely followed by “thoughtful” product rollouts in specific regions by summer.
On a personal level, the pivot has been unexpectedly revealing for Hoplark’s founder, particularly after spending the last 16 years operating his family’s manufacturing business.
“Although I may be really quite good at (operating and building businesses) the unexpected result of launching Hoplark might be that it’s possible that I’m great at developing innovative taste experiences that connect to market opportunities. I did not totally see that coming.”