YouTube Deep Summary

Arizona Beverages started more than 30 years ago and they're still making new flavors. We get 30, 40, 50 samples with tweaking, touching, smell, finish. To this day, Arizona's co-founder and chairman, Don Voltaggio, still tastes every new flavor himself. It's not generally something that a chairman of a company gets involved in, but I'm not your typical guy. Don started out by selling something a little harder than iced tea. I was a beer distributor. I didn't know anything about iced tea. But all of that changed one cold morning in 1991. I bumped into a Snapple guy and he gets his big order for iced tea in the wintertime. And I said, "I'm going in the tea business." I made the decision right there. The next year, Don and his business partner, John Feralito, co-founded Arizona Beverages, but the competition was stiff. Snapple was the leading readyto drink iced tea brand with 20% of the US market. Liptin Original. That same year, Liptin teamed up with Pepsi to launch its first iced tea, Liptin Original. We didn't have the money or the wherewithal to do the advertising, the other stuff that our major competitors do. What I did notice and saw firsthand was consumers made a decision right at the cooler. Most packaging to me is boring. You know, they use traditional colors. The original designs came from my wife in my house in Queens. It was designed around the Southwest. That was the inspiration. That's also what inspired the name of the company despite the fact that I had never been to the Arizona. I had never been western in Mississippi. Their next strategic decision was making their cans bigger. While their competitors sold 16 ounces of tea for 99, Arizona sold 24 oz for the same price. But Don says the most important thing was making sure it tasted good. The first time you buy it is because you saw it and it looked good. But if it don't taste good, I call it game over. You don't buy it again.