Ep 35: How Bonterra Built a New 50,000 Case Brand by Thinking Like CPG

Kate Herbert used to sell cereal and pet food at General Mills and J.M. Smucker. Now she’s in wine, where the budgets are smaller, the competition is insane (110,000 SKUs in the US alone), and the glamour wears off the moment you look behind the curtain. Her first year on the job produced something unusual: Ranch Wine. It looks like an RTD, comes in at 11% ABV, and tastes like pineapple, strawberry or cherry — except it’s all grapes, no flavourings. “Flavourful, not flavoured,” as she keeps repeating, because even her own winemakers didn’t believe it at first.

The project went from idea to shelf in about five months, which is nothing in wine terms. Demos had to be staged with rocks glasses, ice, salt and tajín rims, because influencers kept pouring it into stemware. Off-aisle displays work better than the varietal wall; younger drinkers don’t even walk the aisle. The result: 50,000 cases in six months, 40% of them in places Bonterra had never been before. It’s a reminder that agility, not heritage, is what makes innovation land — and that taste still beats every sustainability claim on the shelf.

00:28 CPG to wine: what transfers and what doesn’t

02:33 Why wine is hard: 110,000 SKUs and thin resourcing

03:51 Pet-food “health halo” and what it taught Kate

06:05 Ranch water explained and the $115m signal

06:32 Thinking like a beverage brand, not a wine brand

10:25 Concept testing, packaging-first surveys, 85% non-wine appeal

11:52 Numerator/Cydex insights on Gen Z drivers

13:38 Flavour-forward yet grape-only; “flavourful, not flavoured”

19:38 Demos, influencers, and breaking the stemmed-glass reflex

28:40 From brief to shelf in ~5 months; why agility mattered

30:31 Scaling and distribution; national, ~50k cases

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Felicity Carter is an award-winning wine and drinks journalist, editor, speaker trainer and content strategist. She led Meininger’s Wine Business International to become the world’s most must-read wine trade magazine, and was founding Executive Editor of The Drop/Pix, which the Wall Street Journal named one of the most trusted sources of wine information. A regular keynote speaker at international events, she was named a 2024 Industry Leader by WineBusiness Monthly.

And Drinks Insider is an award-winning podcast! It has won the 67 Pall Mall Global Wine Communicator Award in Audio.