Wall Street Transcript Interview with Daniel Birnbaum, CEO and Daniel Erdreich, CFO
Based on his years of successful marketing experience at Nike [NYSE:NKE] and Pillsbury [NYSE:GIS] and his successful tenure at SodaStream, CEO Daniel Birnbaum describes the immediate future for the company he leads:
“…as the industry comes to realize the need for change, particularly around the environmental hazard of plastic bottles, these partnerships will surely become much more committed and eager to join. Because we address so many important megatrends at a time when the huge beverage industry is going through transformation, it’s a really interesting place for us to be at this point in time.”
Investors in SODA get first hand information on the companies being DISRUPTED and PARTNERED by SodaStream:
“The PET bottle was invented by a Dupont engineer in 1973, and since then, 40 years or so, it’s not changed. You pop stuff out of either a can or a bottle and it’s delivered to you, and then there’s all this waste. Every single day beverage is contributing 1.5 billion bottles and cans of waste every day. It’s really a hazardous industry, and it’s an old industry. It doesn’t belong to the future.
So it’s really cool for us, and exciting. Sometimes I have to contain myself. But it is exciting for us to be at this juncture where we provide a future solution that doesn’t have all that waste, and the other benefits I mentioned earlier as far as empowering consumers and saving money and hydration. “
“Consumers are drinking less and less of the sweet stuff, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s sweetened with sugar or high fructose or if it’s sweetened with artificial sweeteners. The artificial sweeteners are declining even faster, about 7% a year over the last five years, and the regular sweetened stuff is declining about 2% to 3% a year, which is pretty significant in volume.
And the way the companies, the Cokes [NYSE: KO] and Pepsis [NYSE: PEP], are dealing with that is they’re raising prices and shrinking package size…right now we are a water company, water and flavored water, but right now about 90% of the total consumption of SodaStream worldwide is simple, plain sparkling water. That makes us by far the largest sparkling water brand in the world.
We’re three times larger in volume than Perrier and San Pellegrino [VTX:NESN], who are about the same size. They’re both about 500 million liters a year, and we are about 1.6 billion liters of plain sparkling water in the last 12 months”
“We’re also looking at more retailers. Less than a year ago, we started testing at Whole Foods in the United States, but we’re gaining distribution in other retailers all over the world to make the product even more acceptable and easily accessible. We’ve started to do more home delivery in various markets, including the United States.”
For a free report and the rest of the in depth interview with the CEO and CFO of SodaStream, visit twst.com
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NOTE TO INVESTORS AND FINANCIAL NEWS EDITORS: Daniel Birnbaum, CEO and Daniel Erdreich, CFO are available for interviews. Contact SodaStream at IR@sodastream.com.
– See more at the Wall Street Transcript.
