The CPG Pivot Playbook: How to Change Direction Without Losing Everything
How Suja survived Coca-Cola's rejection by making one brutal product pivot. Jeff Church shares the framework for knowing when and how to change direction.
July 3rd, 2018. My house is full of family getting ready for the Fourth of July. Kids running around, Linda in the kitchen, the whole thing.
My phone rings. It's Scott Uzell from Coca-Cola.
He didn't call to check in.
Coke was not moving forward with acquiring the rest of Suja. Six weeks earlier, their integration team had been at our plant. HR meetings, org charts, the whole thing. We thought it was happening.
And then... it wasn't.
I walked downstairs after the call and wept in front of my boys.
The next morning I woke up to fireworks. July 4th in Mayville, New York. Blue skies, 82 degrees, not a cloud in sight. And I felt sick to my stomach.
We were running a $100 million revenue company with less than $100,000 in the bank. We had $40 million in secured debt coming due in October. And we were burning more than $10 million a year.
Something had to change. Fast.
Here's what most founders get wrong about a pivot: they think it's a failure.
It's not. It's data.
The question is whether you have the discipline to act on it before the business forces your hand.
At Suja, we had to make decisions that felt like they might break us. Cut marketing by more than $4 million. Eliminate low-margin products. Reduce operating expenses across the board. But the single most important call we made in that period wasn't about cutting.
It was about what to bet on.
We had kombucha. And on paper, kombucha looked fine. We had actually solved a technically difficult problem that was plaguing the category -- the alcohol consistency challenge that every other kombucha producer was struggling with. Our product was genuinely good.
But the gross margin was 12%. Outsourced production. And when we looked at our consumers... they didn't think of Suja as a kombucha brand. They thought of us as the cold-pressed juice company. The wellness company. The "Green Supreme" brand -- three ingredients in a bottle for people who wanted to feel better without punishment.
We were forcing a product into a brand position it didn't belong in.
At the same time, we had something else. Wellness shots. We were the third player in that emerging category, behind VIVE and KOR. But watching those two companies had taught us exactly what the consumer wanted -- how intense the sensory experience needed to be, what the price point could sustain, what the category was still missing.
Wellness shots made in-house. Gross margin close to 60%.
We made the call. Kombucha out. Shots in.
Within a year, we had 30-plus percent market share in the wellness shots category. At Costco alone, we were selling roughly $2,000 per week per club. And that single product mix shift moved our company-wide gross margin from about 32% to 40%.
Eight points of margin. On a $100 million business.
That's millions of dollars in breathing room, in options, in staying power.
That decision is what saved Suja.
Gross margin determines destiny. I mean that literally. And one of the clearest ways to understand it is to see what happens when you let a low-margin product occupy shelf space -- both at retail and in your own production capacity -- that a high-margin product could be filling instead.
So how do you know when it's time to pivot? And more importantly, how do you know what to pivot to?
Three questions I come back to every time.
Does your customer believe you?
This is the identity test. When you put a new product under your brand, does your existing consumer nod their head or tilt it sideways?
Our cold-pressed juice customers trusted Suja for health and wellness. When we put a kombucha under the Suja label, the response was... neutral. They'd try it. But it didn't feel like us to them.
When we handed someone a 2-ounce wellness shot -- a concentrated blast of everything they already loved about what Suja stood for -- the reaction was completely different.
"Of course Suja makes a shot. Why didn't you do this sooner?"
That's the signal you're looking for. "Of course" is the sound of a brand extension that fits.
If your customer is confused, that's not a pivot. That's a distraction.
Does it improve your margins?
Revenue without margin is ego. A pivot that moves you into lower-margin territory isn't a strategy. It's just movement. And a lot of founders mistake activity for progress.
The kombucha-to-shots move at Suja wasn't just a product decision. It was a structural change to the economics of the entire company. Every percentage point of margin we gained bought us options. Time. Leverage with buyers. Room to absorb a bad quarter.
When you're evaluating a pivot, don't just ask "can we win in this category?" Ask "if we win in this category, what does our P&L actually look like?"
The answer tells you everything.
Can you test before you commit?
The brands that execute pivots well almost always do some version of test-and-learn before going all in. They don't bet the whole company on a new direction. They find a way to get real data first.
At Suja, we had a built-in laboratory at Costco. Their 13-week rotation model is genuinely one of the best test environments in retail if you use it right. Every rotation gives you actual velocity data -- not focus group data, not survey data -- in front of real consumers in a real environment, in 10 weeks.
We ran multiple innovation offers through that model. Some got an X. Some got a star. And each one taught us something. The Costco buyers respected us more for it, because we were always the first ones to tell them when something wasn't performing. We brought them the solution before they had to bring us the problem.
That's how you build the kind of trust with a retailer that outlasts any single SKU.
Don't plan the pivot, then commit. Test the pivot, then plan.
One more thing I want to say here.
After Coke's rejection, we cut marketing by more than $4 million. And revenue grew 10% the following year.
Let that sit.
Strong brands with loyal consumers don't always need massive spending to maintain momentum. What they need is clarity. A focused product portfolio that gives the consumer a reason to keep coming back. One or two things the brand is genuinely world-class at -- not fifteen things they're doing because someone had a good idea in a meeting.
We launched 275 SKUs in Suja's first seven years. We aggressively discontinued all but 55 of them. The brands that win aren't the ones who did the most. They're the ones who figured out what they were actually great at, doubled down on it, and had the discipline to walk away from everything else.
"Expansion strengthens a brand when it builds on what you already do well. Random expansion weakens it." I wrote that in my book. I lived it first.
The pivot isn't the scary part.
The scary part is holding on to the thing that isn't working because you don't want to admit you got it wrong. Because you've already spent the money. Because your team worked hard on it. Because you told your investors it was going to be big.
I know that feeling. I've been there. And what I've learned is that the moment you let go of the wrong product and lean into the right one, something shifts -- not just in your P&L, but in the energy of the whole company.
People can feel when a brand finds its groove. Retailers can feel it. Investors can feel it. Your team can feel it.
That's when the real growth starts.
Dream boldly. Plan soberly. And be honest enough with yourself to know which category you're actually in.
If you're trying to figure out whether your brand is in the right groove -- or you need a framework to make the hard calls on product, margin, and channel strategy -- come spend time inside the CPG Founders MBA. And if you want to work through your specific situation with structured accountability, the 90-Day Breakthrough program is where founders go to get unstuck fast.
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