The US Market Obsession and Why You Must Build Demand Before You Can Capture It
From The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast: the US is the most profitable beverage market in the world and the most expensive to misread. Eric Franco on what “available in the US” actually requires, and what beer learned about rotation before spirits did.
Your LinkedIn feed has the announcement.
Finally available in the United States.
Maybe you have posted one yourself. Maybe you are planning to. The board asked about it. The investors wanted to see it. The shareholders needed the tick in the box. The US is the most profitable beverage market in the world and the pressure to be there is real.
What the announcement does not say is what being there actually requires. Not to be listed. To be bought. Repeatedly. In enough accounts to matter. With enough capital behind it to survive the learning curve before the market decides whether your brand belongs.
Eric Franco has spent thirty years inside that market. He opened his first bar in 1994. He has run brands at every scale, from local craft to global. He knows what the US looks like from the outside and what it demands once you arrive.
The gap between those two things is wider than most directors account for.
Eric says it plainly: “For smaller brands that wanna go wide, too wide, it could bury you quickly.”
Chris Maffeo puts the same point differently: “US itself is a huge market. It’s like, I’m gonna launch in Europe. You can’t launch in Europe. There’s no such thing.”
There are fifty markets, each with its own three-tier complexity, its own chain dynamics, its own consumer profile. The brand that tries to be in all of them before it has proven the model in one tends to run out of capital before it runs out of ambition.
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