Most Beverages Don’t Fail At The Formula. They Fail Between Formula And Production.

Across wine, kombucha, coffee, and functional beverages, I watched the same sequence repeat. A flavor house delivers a formula. A co-packer confirms they can run it. A cost model checks out on paper. Then production starts, and the assumptions break.

Rapid CPG is the firm I built to catch that before too much capital gets committed to the wrong assumption.

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We’ve Worked With

sOUND FAMILIAR?

By The Time Founders Reach Me, They’re Already Saying Something Like This.

“We hired five different people for five different problems, and somehow the gaps between them got bigger.”

“Every vendor was giving us the right answer for their piece. None of it added up to a system that worked.”

“I didn’t realize how much of my decision-making was reactive until someone showed me what the connections actually looked like.”

Different products. Different teams. Different categories. Same fault line.

How This Started

I didn’t set out to build a beverage consulting firm. I started as a culinary professional, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and entered the industry through wine production — learning fermentation, process control, and what it takes for flavor to hold up at scale.

From there, I moved through kombucha, functional beverages, coffee, and broader CPG product development, working across organizations like Revive Drinks, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Keurig, and Dr Pepper.

Across that work, the pattern became hard to ignore. Founders would come in with strong products, real ambition, and credible partners. A formulation from a flavor house, a co-packer who said they could handle the run, or a cost model that looked right on a spreadsheet.

Then production would start, and the assumptions would break.

The formula behaved differently at volume. The cost structure changed once real ingredients, real minimums, and real yields were on the table. The co-packer’s equipment wasn’t quite right for the format. And because every vendor was only responsible for their piece, no one was responsible for whether the whole system would hold.

What Changed My Approach

Early on, I watched a founder invest well into six figures bringing a beverage line toward production based on guidance that sounded credible at every step. The flavor house developed the formula at little or no upfront cost. The co-packer confirmed they could run it. The packaging vendor hit the specs. Everyone did their part.

But no one had pressure-tested whether the formula could support a real business once production costs, ingredient minimums, yield assumptions, packaging commitments, and co-packer fees were all on the table. By the time the economics became clear, too much had already been built around the wrong cost structure.

Adjusting the formula wasn’t impossible — but it meant new samples, new approvals, potential version-control issues, added fees, and more time inside a manual production system. The problem wasn’t that one vendor failed. It was that each vendor optimized their piece, while no one owned whether the whole system would work commercially.

That experience shaped how I work. A product can taste good, be technically producible, and still be structurally wrong for the business.

Why We Built Something Different

After seeing this pattern repeat across categories, founders, and production setups, we stopped treating each engagement as just a formulation project. The real risk wasn’t sitting inside any one function. It was in how the pieces connected — where assumptions went untested and no one owned the outcome as a whole.

Across the brands we work with, the question that matters isn’t only, “Does the formula taste right?” It’s whether the formula holds up at production volume, on this co-packer’s equipment, with packaging and ingredient decisions that support the business economically.

That question only gets answered when someone owns the connections between formulation, production, packaging, and cost before capital is committed. That shift, from isolated project work to integrated commercialization oversight, is what became Rapid CPG.

“I’ve watched founders burn through millions of dollars on decisions that sounded credible in isolation. The problem wasn’t the advice. It was that no one was responsible for how the pieces fit together.”

Matt Carden, Rapid CPG

How We Work

We operate as the integration layer across the beverage commercialization system — connecting formulation, production, packaging, cost structure, and co-packer selection before capital gets committed.

We’re not tied to any ingredient supplier, flavor house, or co-packer. That independence matters. It means we can evaluate what actually works for the brand, the product, and the economics, not what is most convenient for a vendor relationship.

We also bring a culinary lens to product development. Flavor, texture, ingredient behavior, and sensory quality are not afterthoughts; they are part of the commercial architecture from the beginning. A product has to taste right, run correctly, and earn its economics.

And we stay involved through the moments where assumptions usually break: supplier selection, co-packer fit, production readiness, cost pressure, and scale transitions. That is the difference between project work and integrated commercialization oversight.

Why No Other Consultant In Beverage Has This

The Craft Scale Engine

Our operating framework wasn’t designed in a boardroom. It was built from watching what breaks when beverage brands scale without a system connecting product, production, cost, and co-packer decisions.

The framework covers the eight decisions that determine whether a beverage can move from promising concept to profitable commercial scale. Each one exists because we’ve seen what happens when it’s ignored. This is not ideology. It is pattern recognition across hundreds of brands.

Position-Linked Formulation

Where the brand sits in the category, what the product needs to signal, and what competitors have already trained consumers to expect are usually treated as separate decisions. We connect them before development begins so the formula is built around a defensible commercial position, not just a flavor profile.

Scale To Profit

COGS, margin targets, ingredient choices, and volume assumptions are often modeled separately, which is why the numbers can look right in isolation and still break at scale. We build one cost model where formulation decisions, production volume, and margin targets pressure-test each other before the product moves forward.

Craft. Refine. Validate.

A formula that works on the bench doesn’t automatically hold in production. We validate how flavor, formulation, processing behavior, and cost structure interact under real conditions, not just controlled development conditions.

Adaptive Co-Packer Strategy

Co-packer fit isn’t just about capacity. It depends on formula processing requirements, cost structure, and volume trajectory. We evaluate how those factors interact at each stage so the manufacturing relationship fits the product today and does not trap the brand tomorrow.

Production-Ready Supply Chain

Vendor agreements, ingredient sourcing, and first-run logistics are typically managed on separate timelines by separate parties. We coordinate them into a single production launch sequence so ingredients, pricing, lead times, and run timing are aligned before production begins.

Connected Sourcing Decisions

As volume grows, cost breaks become available across ingredients, packaging, and production, but only when sourcing decisions, formulation flexibility, and co-packer economics are evaluated together. We connect those decisions so the brand captures cost leverage without sacrificing flexibility.

Demand-Aligned Capacity

Production planning only holds when it is tied to realistic demand. We keep inventory commitments, cash exposure, and co-packer capacity in sync so the brand can build enough to support growth without locking up capital in the wrong run.

Product Optimization Loop

Reformulation, cost improvement, and production compatibility are not separate workstreams. A change in one affects the others. We manage product evolution as a connected system so fixing cost does not weaken flavor, sourcing, or production performance.

Eight decisions. One framework. Most engagements run through all of them. None skip any.

Eight Decisions. Five Minutes. One Read.

The Scale Readiness Checklist is the Craft Scale Engine in self-diagnostic form. Same eight decisions. Built for founders who want a read on where they stand before booking a call.

Five minutes. You leave knowing what’s solid and what still needs work.

Download the Checklist

Pre-Engagement Diagnosis

One example. The document arrived before the contract did.

Diagnostic Case

He Found $97,000 In Our Formulas Before We Signed Anything

“Before we signed anything, Matt sent us a full breakdown of our portfolio cost structure. He identified nearly $100,000 in annual liquid cost we were carrying in the wrong part of our formulas — not in the extract systems we’d been focused on, but in our juice architecture. He also told us exactly which SKU was already efficient and shouldn’t be touched. We’d been optimizing in the wrong direction for months. That one document reoriented everything. We moved forward within the week.”

— Founder, Multi-SKU Craft Beverage Brand | ~$400K Annual Ingredient Spend

“After years of asking other developers to help us turn the idea into something commercially workable, we finally found someone who told us the truth — and delivered on it.”

Premium RTD Brand Founder

Someone Has To Own The Connections. Not Just The Pieces.

Every founder we work with already has people responsible for the pieces: the formulator, the co-packer, the packaging vendor, the broker. What they often don’t have is anyone responsible for whether those pieces hold together under real production conditions.

The first conversation is where we determine whether your situation needs integrated commercialization oversight, or whether the pieces you’ve already hired are enough.

What A First Conversation Actually Produces

One recent example. No engagement signed. The diagnosis happened before the brand committed to anything, and so did the handoff.

Recent Example

He Told Us He Wasn’t The Right Fit, Then Fixed It Anyway

Situation: A beverage brand came in frustrated with a product development challenge. They weren’t sure whether the problem sat with them, with the formulation, or with the partners they were working with.

What changed after the call: We assessed the situation and were direct. The specific technical challenge needed deeper expertise in a particular ingredient system than we could provide. Rather than continue the engagement or walk away, we called the vendor who could actually solve it and orchestrated the handoff ourselves.

What the founder preserved: A development path that kept moving instead of stalling, without paying a consultant to fake expertise they didn’t have. And a relationship that held up for everything that came next.

“He told us he wasn’t the right fit — then called the vendor who was and made the handoff himself. That’s why we came back for everything else.”

— Founder, Beverage Brand

Find Out If Your Situation Is The One We Built This Firm For

Not every brand needs the integration layer we own. Some are early enough that a formulator and a co-packer alone are the right setup. The point of the first conversation is to tell you which one you are, and if you’re not the right fit, where the better fit actually lives.

✓ You’ll get an honest read on whether the integration gap is your real problem
✓ You’ll hear what the next decision is, regardless of whether we’re part of it
✓ You’ll know whether Rapid CPG is the right seat at the table, or whether someone else is

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