( Founder of Frontier Alaska Soda)
There’s a new soda that’s emerged in the marketplace- out of Alaska.
Appropriately titled Frontier Alaska Soda it’s the creation of David and Alyssa McCarthy.
They believe soda doesn’t need to be filled with artificial additives or empty ingredients .
And so, Frontier Alaska Soda was born.
We spoke with David McCarthy about his soda, how it came together and what he’s doing to promote it.
Q – David, you recently had a booth at a pizza convention. Was it your intention to try and convince pizzeria owners to carry Frontier Alaska Soda?
A – Yes. There’s a little back story. I’m actually a restaurateur in addition .So, I own restaurants and I actually own pizzerias outside of Katmai National Park which is one of the top tourist destinations in Alaska.
My goal as a co. is to simply share Alaska with the world. So, when I started creating the brand Frontier Alaska Soda it was to create an inclusive brand that everybody could try.
My first place to launch it, to check out the response was to bring it to the Pizza Expo. Why was that important to me? I’ve been attending the Pizza Expo for 17 years. So, I was there and I would say these are my people. You meet friends and vendors. People would always say to me, ‘Oh, my gosh! You’ve got a pizzeria in the middle of nowhere?!’
We don’t call it the middle of nowhere. It’s where I live. (laughs). I call it home.
I talked about the products that I make. One thing that is so interesting is that they’d say you should bring your products down here.
I said it does so well with the pizzeria. Adults, teenagers, kids – they all love it!
Costs are rising. People are trying to find any way to do marketing and fill some media blitz. And I have something that’s really authentic and something with a unique taste. What I think is a unique taste of Alaska.
So, we brought it there to sample the audience, to see the responses and show people that this is a product that sells itself. If you want to be different don’t be different like everyone else. Be different like no one else. If you want to be different like no one else add something that is very unique to your pizzeria store. This is a product that just naturally goes with the food stuff that’s there.
So, we brought it down there and the very first day we went through 4,000 samples and the response was automatic.
The first thing we heard every day was ‘Alaska Soda? Never heard of it!’
Then they look at the flavors and it has done very well for us down there and that’s why we brought it down to the showcase in Las Vegas. A lot of the growth we’re looking for is organic growth. It’s person to person sales. It’s somebody who had it at their local pizza pub and they tell another friend about it. We believe as part of the brand without doing this massive marketing blitz on Social Media, to just try and create influencers. We want the people in your local pub to help us become the influencers and the product speaks for itself. That’s why we brought it there.
Q – So, then did you convince pizzeria owners to carry Frontier Alaska Soda in their restaurants/pizzerias?
A – Yes. Absolutely.
Q – I read that your soda is carried in only 4 states – Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Idaho. But, I also read that your soda is carried in Wal-Mart. Does that mean Wal-Mart carries your soda on the East Coast of the U.S.?
A – No. Wal-Mart has approved the product. So, we are only in the Wal-Marts in the Pacific Northwest. After the Pizza Expo. We had multiple brokers in multiple cos. Now we have national account numbers through Cisco also. So, if you are a food service you can actually go to Cisco and Cisco has the numbers and they can get it for you anywhere they deliver in the nation now.
But, in order to get it to the East Coast there’s a lot more moving parts that have to be put together with logistics in order to get there. But, yes it is approved in the Wal-Mart co. but only in the Pacific Northwest. You can order the product online and have it delivered there ( the East Coast).
Why I went to the Expo is to create these relationships through networking to get the product to go nationally.
Q – Was it your idea to come up with a soda that would compete with all the other sodas out there?
A – It’s a two part thing: Yes and No. Yes, it was my love child to come up with it because I originally grew up in the Mid-west and my wife is from Alaska. I moved here over 20 years ago. I fell in love with it and Alaska became my home. I obviously met my wife here and have two little boys here. One of the things I missed is some of the nostalgia about growing up and one of the unique things I remember is in the Mid-west we had a soda called Green River. There were no products like that in Alaska. Nobody was making products for a younger audience.
I do make alcoholic products in addition but no one was making soda products. To me that meant that nobody was being inclusive of everybody.
My wife growing up used to make soda products with her grandmother. They used to make it on the stove where you had the little tablets and the sugar. I just fell in love with this. She would talk about the flavors and talk about picking berries and boiling it and sugar.
I said to her, ‘I miss the nostalgia of these products. There’s nothing like that. You grew up with these flavors’.
That’s where it all came from. That was the start.
And so my hospitality background and culinary background combined with her knowledge of flavors and what she grew up with really is what started the uniqueness of creating Frontier Alaska Soda.
The goal was to share Alaska with the world and we wanted to do it through this beverage manufacturing because of it’s taste and uniqueness that just creates authenticity.
To me I always believed that Alaska is one of the strongest brands in the world. People everywhere dream about it.
You got to think the wilderness, and the independence is the adventure of the purity of Alaska itself.
The idea just to create another soda wasn’t it. It was to bottle this feeling of Alaska and share it with people everywhere and that’s basically why we came up with it. That’s why we call it Frontier Alaska Soda.
Frontier was created to represent more of a lifestyle and a place people are emotionally connected to. So, we saw an opportunity to create something that was authentic in a marketplace that is really just dominated by huge corporations here.
Q – All over actually.
A – Yeah. Essentially the important part about when we created it is we’re not trying to beat Big soda cos. at their own game. That would be impossible. We’re not trying to become another mass produced soda brand.
Consumers today are looking for authenticity. They’re looking for regional identity and they’re looking for brands that have a real story. That’s where I believe Frontier Alaska Soda wins because you cannot undo my story. You cannot undo my wife’s story. You can not undo the fact that Alaska is going to be the last frontier forever. It is.
When you think about this think tank when we come up with these unique flavors, it’s really this emotional relationship that we have with this environment. We even have a fun flavor that we don’t even describe to people. It’s the Aurora Borealis flavor that’s a limited flavor.
People will say, ‘Well, what does it taste like?’
We tell them you tell us.
Then somebody says, ‘Oh, that’s like the Big soda cos. coming up with these flavors’.
No. The idea behind that soda was like when you look up at the Aurora you tell me how you feel. You tell me what it is.
So, when we tell people that story they go, ‘Wait a second, you’re really trying to connect to the environment.’
Locals in Alaska get it. And there’s a reason why there’s an allure.
To me, the back story is we used to make a cola product and Big soda came in and not mentioning the name, the distributor distributed that Big soda in addition to ours. They said, ‘We’re not going to distribute your product unless you stop making that.’
We thought, man, we are a little local co. right? Is that Big soda co. really worried about this little co?
I called my brother who’s an attorney and he said, ‘You know David you’re not going to have enough money to fight it. They could put you out of business tomorrow.’
I said,’ We’re just going to get rid of that ‘cause that’s not even a flavor of Alaska. We’ll focus on the real stuff, the flavors if Alaska.’
It spurred this drive that’s truly just the innovative frontiersman mentality.
Through advertising you have to find ways to succeed. So, to me Frontier Alaska Soda is really an authentic story. It’s not something that’s made up in a think tank in California and tested out. This is something we drink. If you go around Alaska; everywhere in stores barbershops, jewelry stores it’s all over the place because people believe in it. So, that’s really where this story came from.
Q – Are you competitive with the Big soda cos. in your pricing?
A – No. It would be like looking at the liquor business and asking somebody who makes champagne in France are you pricing the same as somebody who makes a copy of that in California? It’s not possible to compete on pricing with the Big cos. It’s just not possible.
Just some logistical shipping on so0me ingredients with the sugar, we’re going to pay more for just using real sugar in Alaska.
Ultimately the product doesn’t come in 12 packs. It is only sold either in single cans or 4 packs. The 4 packs depending on your market can be priced anywhere from $4.99 to $7.99. So, are we priced competitive with the Big brands? No. Not in any way, shape, or form and it was never part of the business structure to be able to compete on a pricing. When you’re fighting price and you’re not looking at quality, longevity to me is just not sustainable. So, we always looked at the quality of the ingredients, the sustainability, Non Gmo and natural colorings.
We order natural sugar. We have to start with that first because we drink it. To me soda is a luxury. It’s a luxury good. It’s not an in-expensive thing.
I know a lot of people drink it every day and I’m all for it, but at the end of the day it’s really a luxury good. Price competiveness with Big brands is not something that we’ve ever listed in our business model.
Q – Isn’t it going to be a hurdle for you to get people to pay more for Frontier Alaska Soda when store brand soda for example is far cheaper?
A -I agree that’s a hurdle if that’s your market. The way I see the product we make is as long as I own the product, the product is going to be artisan. It’s going to have high quality ingredients. It’s always going to be focused on it’s quality first and the ingredients to make sure it’s a clean label to the people that are looking for that healthier lifestyle but also a treat.
And so you have to think about it. Do artisans cheapen their art just to put it in more fields? There are certain artists that do that. There are artists that say this is the original and here’s the print.
If we are growing and we started manufacturing somewhere else then that would be a print. The print is less expensive.
They’re going to find ways to lower the cost on that but, the consumer that buys the print is saying, ‘I only want to spend that much but I want a piece of it. That’s a different approach.
To me authenticity is Number One especially if it’s representing a family brand that’s coming there sharing Alaska.
You can’t put a bronze animal in front of somebody in Alaska and say, ‘Look, this is what a bear looks like’.
You can put a taxidermy bear or bring them to a wild center and see a bear walking. That’s authenticity. That’s authentic.
And so Frontier Alaska Soda is not an in-expensive brand. Coming to Alaska is not an in-expensive journey. Living here is not without challenges.
So, when the product is speaking for Alaska it’s not going to be the cheapest product on the shelf.
It’s not going to be price competitive with the bigger people but it’s going to be an artisan product that focuses on quality, unique flavors and sharing that with the world. Those people that search out those artisan products and those healthier alternatives then I believe there’s a marketplace that’s growing and I think Frontier Alaska Soda is in that marketplace.
I think that this product is moving in that market place.
Yes, I understand people will vote with their dollars. And yes I grew up in a family of coupon cutters. I grew up in a family of put it back on the shelf. It’s too expensive. I get that but every other holiday or birthday, guess what? We would have a name brand soda on the table versus the local cheap discount one. Those are the memories I remember. I don’t remember the off brand stuff that we saved money on. It’s not what I buy today. So, to me it’s very, very important when you’re coming out with a brand, you want to choose your lane.
You can make money a lot of different ways but the reality is when you try to come up with something that stands for authenticity and stands for something the goal is never to cheapen it.
I know that’s a larger pool to choose from but I know that I can’t compete against those other people. But, the reality is those other people don’t have the story, the background, the knowledge and the flavor profiles.
There not out there sending their friends to hand pick cloud berries to figure out the unique flavor ingredients to create that. Those stories are real. So, to me as we look through this fake world of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence and copying and creating avatars, I believe the world is going to be looking for more products like ours.
Q – And the reality is while some small successful cos. will sell their co. to a bigger co. the product is never really the same.
A – The reality is the brand now represents a story but, it’s not the same. If somebody came in and bought the brand, I can’t tell you their story is going to be my story. They might take the brand and grow it which is typically what they do and they’re going to have to change costs.
Now, in my opinion I think I can lower the cost based on the economy as a scale.
If I can pre-order cans and pre-order sugar I will be able to drop the price from where it’s at today. That’s just part of doing business correctly and I pass those savings on to the customer in a bigger pool. But, I’m never going to compete against global brands that essentially have control on a sugar cartel. It’s not going to happen. A lot of the inspiration I have is based on a lot of European brands of soda that have come out that I followed for years.
I went to school in Germany for brewing technology and part of that was watching these unique craft sodas in Europe and how the adore and love these brands.
I hope that Frontier Alaska Soda continues to grow and continues as an artisan product as long as I’m running the co.
If someone else decides to come in and grow the co. and make it more global, obviously that’s part of the mission from the beginning; to share Alaska with the world. But, at that point I can’t tell you the product wouldn’t change.
Q – Do you advertise Frontier Alaska Soda? Do you advertise on radio and tv? Do you do in-store promotions?
A – I do. We do print ads and that is only in the states we currently distribute in. We also do radio ads. We’ve also taken out some Billboard ads. A lot of the advertising we do is more gorilla marketing. We go into restaurants and businesses and bars and talk about how to blend it. You find unique influencers that could be great mixologists that can blend the product in other drinks. We do a lot of fundraisers where we go and set up.
We’re doing an air show that’s going to have 250,000 people at it. We make little different ice-cream floats with all the soda flavors that people just love.
We do a tremendous community investment and sponsorship. We sponsor outdoor health activities and walking and hiking and bike trails and trail development all over Alaska as part of the brand development.
We follow the 111 philosophy where we donate 1% back specifically to kids sports in Alaska and educational things.
The reason it’s important to me is that we have a lot of mental health and addiction issues in Alaska.
I’m looking at Frontier Alaska Soda as being part of the solution of a generational challenge to help remove that and reduce that from our community by giving back to the community. Let’s get the kids in sports and activities. So, that’s why we do that.
We donate our time. We do that currently and obviously all the Social Media aspects that are available to us.
Q – Is Frontier Alaska Soda underneath the umbrella of 49th State Brewing Co? Would that be correct?
A – That’s correct. I also make alcoholic beverages under the 49th State Brewery. So, if you think about our model you see a lot of breweries that make a soda but we also always want to make a soda brand. So, the parent co. that manufactures all that I own and that’s called the Alaska Pacific Beverage Co. Technically Alaska Pacific Beverage Co. is the parent co. 49th State is the beer/alcohol side of the manufacturing and Frontier Alaska Soda is the non-alcoholic side of the soda.
Q – You’re a classically trained chef with a formal brewing background and a degree in hotel and restaurant management. You could easily find employment in the finest hotels and restaurants not only in the U.S. but probably the world.
Why would you want to take on all the headaches of running your own co?
A -(laughs). I feel like I’m talking to my mother.
Q – I do believe a lot of readers would like to know why you would take on the burden of being involved in such a competitive business.
A – That’s a great question. Some people go to work to make money and some people go to work to create a legacy. And to me I fell in love with Alaska and Alaska has been so good to me in my life, to my wife, to my kids, the environment and my business.
The challenge of the frontier is so addicting and so enthralling. I worked for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I worked for the big corporations in the Mid-west. I’ve worked overseas in Paris. I did not feel the connection and the drive for my life’s mission like I did when I came to Alaska.
When you look at it there are certain people that are driven for money. I understand the for profit for business but there’s certain people that are driven to create something that lasts beyond their generation.
I believe in Alaska, the people that have come before me, the native people that are here that preserved this beautiful state. Being part of the story is way bigger than I could ever imagine. Just working for a global brand is to create one. It has just driven me. It’s gotten into my soul. My feeling is I’m not just selling soda I’m sharing Alaska with the world. I fell in love with it. I feel so connected with it and I want to make sure people globally feel the same way.
I feel I’m more driven for that because I’ve experienced all these other things.
I’ve been a cog in a wheel in a lot of businesses. I’ve had glass ceilings on top of me and the reality is it takes a different spirit to come to Alaska and carve out a living. It takes a different group of people to do it and maybe I’m just one of those people that just said I need something more. And that more has been so rewarding that I want to now tell people how incredible this place is.
People always say if it fails you can always go back. Well, for entrepreneurs failure is not an option. To me I want to share this great frontier with the world. I’ve chosen to do it through beverage manufacturing because that’s through hospitality and to me it drives me as a person and gives me tremendous satisfaction to tell the stories to you and to stand in Las Vegas and share these stories with everybody else.
This sense of adventure that I am on , to my own life story is something that I’m putting in a package and every time we meet, every time somebody shares it, when you see peoples’ eyes light up it’s what I was doing in hospitality before.
This vision is more grounded than any job I’ve ever worked for any global co. before. My focusing on the culture and lifestyle branding of the product drives me more than just going to a very fancy hotel and working for a co. that’s a global brand. I’m not knocking them. I love them and I’ve worked for them. But, I’ve learned to know where my lane is and what motivates me.
So, when I get up every day, no matter if my day is 8 hours or 14 hours or 7 days a week you get internal energy when you know it’s the right thing for you to do. And that’s where I’m at. I’m in my lane and I really just love it and enjoy it.
©Gary James
Official Website: https://frontieralaskasoda.com
