Within just five months of launching what they say is the world’s first all-natural ready-to-drink spiked coconut water, makers of the Sunboy sparkling coconut cocktail beverage are already shipping to more than half the United States, and they credit some of their success not to rich backers or celebrity sponsors but to a modern distribution model that builds a brand online before marketing it on the ground.
By successfully showing off New York City-based Sunboy on the internet through same-day home delivery — before spending time and money convincing traditional distributors to carry it, retailers to sell it and customers to buy it — owners Luke McKenna and Yair Tygiel pitched it straight to consumers who helped generate immediate buzz.
“Engage your consumers right away on the internet and see what they’re saying about it. Then go to stores and say, ‘Hey look at all this demand we have,’” says Jason Sherman, founder of the TapRm online distribution platform that’s taking Sunboy national. “That’s why Luke and Yair have grown as fast as they have. It normally takes years.”
Sherman calls this a pull, rather than a push, model, which means interested buyers are asking for the product, AKA “pulling” it, instead of being on the receiving end of a “push” to get the package on shelves and in bars. He believes this approach works particularly well with new categories run by savvy marketers — just like he credits Sunboy for.
“This is not something where someone’s going to see it and say, ‘I know what this tastes like.’ New categories have to convince consumers they ever want to pick up this type of product, and the best way is to walk them through it online,” says Sherman. “Once you do really well on the pull side then you can really start pushing.”
Launched in May 2021, Sunboy, which currently comes in four-pack 12 oz. cans of 5% ABV pineapple, passion fruit, mango and tangerine for $14 each, has just started selling direct-to-consumer in 33 states through TapRm and is poised to enter New Jersey and Connecticut’s brick-and-mortar market.
“We’re about to sell out of our launch batch and create much more in December to satisfy demand in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut,” says co-founder Luke McKenna, who anticipates expanding further after a second friends-and-family round of fundraising and potentially some initial investment from venture capitalists. “With distribution to 33 states, we’ll gauge interest around the country. I would love to see all this pent up demand somewhere like southwest Georgia.”
Sunboy already entered the physical shelf space at a few Manhattan and Brooklyn Whole Foods
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“So many seltzers are the same fizzy water with alcohol,” McKenna says, as a point of comparison against his gluten-free, no sugar-added coconut cocktails. “The power of high quality juices means we don’t need to sweeten. It’s a little higher calorically than White Claw (spiked seltzer) but lower than a cocktail.”
McKenna and Tygiel enlisted the assistance of international food scientist Andrey Ayrapetov to design recipes and source what they say are top-quality ingredients, including barreled coconut water from the Philippines, which can be frozen, unlike fresh coconuts that risk rotting at backed-up post-pandemic ports.
This means Sunboy can exist, says McKenna, who’s learned from searching the world for quality coconuts that he prefers the “beautiful nuttiness” of southeast Asian coconuts over those sourced in the Caribbean, and finds Filipino coconuts “just a little less sweet than from Thailand.”
Global shipping issues aside, McKenna says international supply has grown to meet contemporary demand for the tropical fruit, which means Sunboy can presumably enjoy longevity without risking running out. Though he and his partner developed the concept last year when the pandemic shut down their previous enterprise, the pair has been slinging coconuts together for almost a decade after meeting at a dinner party and discovering their mutual passion.
McKenna, a former financial journalist, first got into the coconut game by setting up an illegal coconut stand as a way to make friends when he moved to Toronto, and Tygiel had been hosting coconut “hangs” in Brooklyn parks. The two began hosting parties in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge where they’d sell cold cracked coconuts from a delivery bike they decorated with tiki torches.
“It was very much a subversive thing,” laughs McKenna, who admits to paying off the police from their stash.
“The coconut is a pretty powerful bribe. I think they saw the silliness of it themselves,” he says.
The partners went on to create CoCo & Co, which had them searing highly recognizable corporate brand names onto the fruit’s shell and selling or giving away these sponsored coco water or cocktail creations at events like the annual Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. Coincidentally, they were a highlight of my visit there around four years ago (sponsored by Molson Coors
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But as a life-long coconut lover (full disclosure: I named my first cat Coconut, and my full name, Tamara, means palm tree in Hebrew) who happily spruced up some marginal tequila with a sample can of passion fruit Sunboy this past summer, I’m looking forward to what appears to be a sunny future, at least in the short term. Sherman says approximately 70% of products that launch on TapRm either make major changes or go out of business.
“Our platform allows breweries and brand founders to test to see if their brand has any customer retention and/or traction. A lot them will put products up just to test: concepts, taste, slogans, names, liquid, etc.,” he emails.
“Also, we’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of hard seltzer brands emerge on our platform overall in the last 6 months. Given the sudden growth stagnation that they couldn’t foresee in the seltzer category, most of them are rolling the brands down or changing their direction because of performance and lack of interest from customers, distributors, and chain retail,” he says.