With each passing day, we are one day closer to our product launch. It has been a busy process building our company from the ground up, but it's one that has been both exciting and rewarding. Each day we are blessed with many opportunities to learn something new. The past few weeks have been crazy trying to sort out a few issues, mostly concerned with scaling our processes, like carbonation, finding a cost effect purified water source, and label application. When you make a few bottles here and there, things are easy, but as you can imagine, when bottling upwards of 2,500 units the process becomes quite different. As we grow we will be able to use fillers to help in this process, but until we reach that level, we will be doing it all by hand. :)
Carbonation. What to say about that. This "simple" step has caused more than one issue, to say the least, and has left me asking myself over and over; "Now why are we carbonating this?" We could have been selling our drink for months now had we bottled without it... but the overall product just wasn't as good. The carbonation makes it exciting, more energetic, and overall more refreshing and enjoyable to drink, It's not in our nature to cut corners, so forward we pressed.
To start we purchased a soda stream. It works great, but on a larger scale not so much. We went to our local home-brew shop to pick their brain for some advice on the best way to make large amounts of seltzer water. They recommended we buy a kegging system (keg, C02 tank, and tubing) set it up, and fill the keg with water. This didn't work, so we packed it up and brought it back. After digging a bit deeper, we realized that most every bar has seltzer water on tap. That's what we needed so we set out on a mission to get one for ourselves; an industrial grade carbonator that is. We called up our local restaurant supplier, placed and order, and bam, we were good to go.
Our next step was to get a large supply of purified water that didn't cost an arm and a leg. It's crazy how the simplest of things, such as purified water, can add so most cost to each bottle. After a few phone calls, and a bit of research we decided to purchase a reverse osmosis water filter, think Dasani water, to solve our problems.
A few days later, the system was at the house, and we were in business. The water tastes great, and will pay for itself after filling 1,000 bottles. Can't beat that!
Now the real work can begin; bottling.
While we bottle, our labels are off at the printing shop. They should be back the first or second week of May. We are excited to get our samples back and see how they are looking. We had to slightly alter the colors a bit due to the printing process, but I'm happy that Danny at Cut Pak brought it to our attention before we started printing. The final colors look great, and an expensive and time consuming mistake was avoided. Wish us luck in the weeks ahead as we will be busy busy busy getting these bottles to market. We will keep you posted on when they will be available for purchase. You will be able to do so on our website, and we will ship these handcrafted bottles of goodness right to your door step! Until then... Happy Healthy Living.