
Manoj Bhargava became a billionaire by inventing the energy shot, then turned to salvaging the world’s fresh-water supply, reinventing fertilizer for Third-World farmers, attacking the challenge of distributed electricity generation, developing a promising new therapy for Alzheimer’s disease, and — maybe most difficult of all — removing bias from television news.
But he was striving toward all of that mostly in relative anonymity.
Not so much anymore. The reticent $5-billion man from Farmington Hills is now running a publicly held company in the high-profile media business after committing a total of $110 million last year to acquire a 65 percent share of Arena Group Holdings, which is home to more than 265 brands including icons such as Sports Illustrated, Men’s Journal, and Parade.
Bhargava is blending Arena’s operations with a TV news network and other media entities he already started, hoping to create synergies among the combined digital, broadcast, and print brands and platforms, and planning to model a new type of relationship with advertisers like his 5-hour Energy brand. But the road hasn’t been easy.
Last November, when it was reported Sports Illustrated published AI-creative content, the backlash was swift. Consumers and investors hated reading words coming from robots. Since then, the company’s stock fell to around $1 in early February, from a high of $14 in late 2022.
As the new year opened, most of SI’s roughly 100 staff members learned they could be let go by the spring or become independent contractors. That was followed by Arena Group’s decision to renegotiate the deal with the magazine’s licensor, billionaire Jamie Salter. At the same time, Arena Group missed a large debt payment and a licensing fee.
Salter, fearing his other brands like Forever 21, Brooks Brothers, and Izod would follow suit, revoked Arena’s license but allowed the company to keep publishing the monthly magazine.
As Bhargava navigates the huge new challenge of transforming the media and advertising business, he’s approaching all of his projects with both jarring ambition and matter-of-fact ease that, at times, causes him to be mistaken for being self-centered, and at other times to be misperceived as a perpetual tinkerer.
Actually, until now, he’s remained relatively unknown among the general public and has been rather low-key about devoting most of his considerable financial resources to tackling world-sized challenges in practical ways while also ensuring that his core business, 5-hour Energy, keeps succeeding and providing fuel for implementing his other goals.
Continuously creative, serially innovative, and earnestly directed outward, Bhargava might be called a billionaire sui generis — one who wants to solve some of the world’s biggest problems solely with insight, technologies, devices, and systems that he helps design, market, and deploy. In that way, acquiring control of Arena — an existing entity — was out of character for him.
“I look at fundamental things, so we don’t do ‘cool’ stuff so much,” he says about the vast industrial and consumer-products enterprises that come under the umbrella of his holding company, called Living Essentials. “It’s not about entertainment or convenience. There are no video games; there are all kinds of incentives for doing that, and more money, but that’s really for rich people. In the end, we like to do things that we think are worthwhile for humanity.”
A quarter-century ago, Bhargava came up with the shots — those 2-ounce cans of caffeine, taurine, and vitamins that people buy at convenience-store checkouts for mental clarity and focus, or just to get through the day without nodding off — after imbibing a poor-tasting energy drink at a trade show. He correctly figured he could do a better job of delivering ingredients that bolstered concentration and alertness without having to slosh them around in the huge volumes of liquid used by beverage-sized energy drinks.
With the first $1 billion in proceeds from inventing the energy-shot category, Bhargava began financing his other interests. He started an enterprise called Stage 2 Innovations, a technology and industrial skunkworks where dozens of scientists, technicians, engineers, and others work assiduously on Bhargava’s personal goal of helping solve the biggest problems of the poorest one-third of the world: water, health care, and energy.
“I have 11 startups and three that make money, and I go from one to the other” throughout the day, Bhargava explains. “It’s not about (having one focus). It’s different things at different times.”
While he’s peripatetic, at the same time Bhargava remains devoted to the things he’s dug into. The combination of these factors gives him a leadership style that keeps him and his staff very busy.
“I like getting up in the morning and running like hell,” the 70-year-old says. “To quote Elvis: a little less conversation, a little more action. I like to do something useful every day, and that’s what we try to do. To spend money on toys; I don’t consider that useful.”

That’s how colleagues see it, too. “We get up every morning, work hard all day, have a lot of fun, do some good in the world, and start over tomorrow,” says Vince Bodiford, a former Gannett newspaper executive who is CEO of Bhargava’s Bridge Media Networks, the company merging with Arena, and serves as his main spokesman.
“There’s not a lot of complexity. (Bhargava) likes to move everyone down the field a little bit every day. And he’s going to touch the whole organization himself, personally, every day,” Bodiford says.
In that way, Bhargava remains much more of a vital leader who’s still inspiring his people, rather than some distant or extravagant Croesus. He signed Bill Gates’ Giving Pledge, but he’s not out there all atwitter like Elon Musk or Mark Cuban; nor is Bhargava buttoned-up, sober, and corporate like Bill Gates; and he certainly doesn’t epitomize the jet-setting and yacht-living approach a la Jeff Bezos.
Maybe not surprisingly, Bhargava is critical of some fellow billionaire philanthropists who, in his view, have misdirected their resources. They “want to do whatever is popular,” he says. “Their aim is to do what they’re really interested in. To me, the bottom third of the world isn’t about what you want to do for them; it’s about what they need. The world is like a customer; you serve the customer.
“I don’t care what’s popular,” Bhargava continues. “I don’t want to be popular. I prefer to quietly do my stuff. But I’m (about) common sense. I’m a student of the obvious.”
For example, when it comes to malicious diseases, even pandemics, “More than 50 percent of the people in the hospitals in the world are there because of water-based diseases, and in poor places, that’s much higher, like 60 percent or 70 percent,” Bhargava says. “If you’re not doing water, you’re not doing disease. And if you solve water, people are stronger and can resist other diseases better.”
Along the way, Bhargava coincidentally has become representative of one of the biggest stories of this century in American business management: the rise of the India-native and Indian-American entrepreneur and corporate leader. Along with Vinod Khosla, founder of giant Khosla Ventures, this group also notably includes Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley and former candidate Vivek Ramaswamy represent the political aspect of Indian-American leadership, as well.
“We’re (nearly) the largest population in the world, so some of us are going to do something,” Bhargava quips. “Yes, (Indian heritage) Fortune 500 CEOs are way out of proportion for our population here, but people who came here have always been immigrants who built this country, whether it was Italians or Jews or the Irish.
“They worked hard and got to where they did with their work ethic. (Indian business leaders) are, at this point, in a wave that’s been rising for a long time. It’s like an iceberg; there was a lot of work below before you got to see what was above the water.”
Bhargava’s backstory began in India, and even rerouted through his native country. Born there to prosperity, he left for America with his parents in 1967 when his academic father enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The family eked through the adjustment to America, but a teenaged Bhargava already was sowing his entrepreneurial seeds, buying a 1953 Chevy dump truck for $400 and scavenging debris from north Philadelphia housing demolition sites.
Bhargava enrolled at Princeton University and lasted there a year, then moved to Fort Wayne, Ind., where his parents had settled and his father owned a plastics company. It was the early 1970s, a tough era economically in the Rust Belt, and a searching Bhargava began reading books in Hindi.
In 1974, he moved to India and spent his 20s traveling there among commune-type monasteries owned and run by an ashram named Hanslok. (Much later, Bhargava would name his not-for-profit entity the Hans Foundation.) He went back and forth from India to the United States, even driving a cab in New York City for a while.
Bhargava finally found a profitable channel for his energies by helming the family plastics business, acquiring adjacent smaller companies, and turning them around. By 2001, he’d taken his PVC manufacturer to $25 million in sales, finally selling it in 2006 and moving to Michigan to be near his wife’s family. They have one son.
These days, Bhargava comes to work bright-eyed and presents himself pretty much in the same way every day: in earth tones and that black 5-hour Energy fleece. Lately, he’s been donning On Cloud sneakers, a brand that has become de rigueur among his staff.
Bhargava’s 10-building, 25-acre complex off M-5 in Farmington Hills is a representation of the man: low-key on the outside but spinning with productivity on the inside. All of the buildings are nondescript in typical industrial-park style, barely identified by signs with labels that are meaningless to the outside world.
There’s the headquarters building for administration. The tinkerers’ workshop that is Stage 2 Innovations. The NewsNet building, where contractors have been erecting huge studios with green screens and state-of-the-art lighting, while reporters and producers are ensconced in a buzzing newsroom. Nearby are a building where water-purification systems are made, and The Meridian, a public event venue.
Traversing the campus turns up all sorts of interesting people, from the old to the new. There’s Billy Tally, for instance, who runs engineering and operations and has become one of Bhargava’s right-hand aides. Among the newest faces is Ruby Shane, who joined NewsNet as an anchor and producer at the start.
“We have a pretty easy time attracting people,” Bhargava offers. “Most people in this company have an ulterior motive, which is that they want to work for something bigger. Yes, they’ll make money and do well, but this isn’t for some rich guy’s next job. Not everyone is on the front lines, but there’s satisfaction, even if it’s in clerical work, that they’re helping with something bigger, and ‘that’s my contribution.’ At any level, we’re all together, working on something great.”
Part of the appeal of working for Bhargava is how he has cast his vision for the broader purpose of his varied enterprises over the last several years, notably in two documentaries, “Billions in Change” and “Billions in Change 2.” In the films, Bhargava, Tally, and others explain what has become their biggest goal these days: providing enough fresh water to keep developing nations from becoming thirsty. Because so much of the water supply in many tropical and subtropical villages is brackish or “gray,” this is a tremendously tall, and crucial, order.
“It’s not a two-year problem, but decades or 100 years or 200 years,” Bhargava says. “So I look at it as, ‘Let me create the technology and infrastructure to solve the problem, and if it takes hold after I’m dead, that’s fine with me.’ But it will be the largest thing in the world at some point, because (the Third World) is the largest problem in the world today and no one is acknowledging it.”
Bhargava and the Hans Foundation have developed a portable reverse-osmosis system, called Hans 2, that they say is singular in the purity of the water it produces, with a minimum of waste. The small device is capable of producing volumes far beyond anything found in American households today.
“The requirements are so massive,” Bhargava says. “We’re involved in a town in India, 100,000 people, and the whole place has nothing but brackish water. They have to truck in water. But now all the wells will turn out what we can make better than bottled water. And it’s completely funded by us.”
Fortunately, “The biggest guys in (the) water (industry) say we’re a decade ahead of everyone else in the world. We’re at the point where, with the technology, we can fix the world’s water problems. However, water is very political. So, until it gets the attention of, let’s say, climate change, they won’t do anything. Until you turn on the taps in California and you get nothing, governments and politicians won’t do anything.”
Bhargava’s water systems aren’t for everyone. Living Essentials opened a retail store in downtown Birmingham a few years ago to offer the Hans 2 system to local moneyed households. The store closed quickly, although the Hans 2 system is available now through Culligan.
His approach to solving the water challenge has picked up a significant admirer in Mujeeb Ijaz. The founder and vice chairman of Our Next Energy, which plans to build a $1.6-billion EV battery plant in Van Buren Township, has gotten to know Bhargava and admires his approach to philanthropic entrepreneurism — especially the hands-on part.
“A lot of philanthropies lack ground knowledge in developing countries,” Ijaz says. “But Bhargava says: ‘Don’t stand in this market and think you understand local conditions. You have to live there and be part of it.’ I’ve already taken a chapter from his thought process and have visited seven sub-Saharan countries recently. It’s not our core market, but it’s a research project. I wanted to understand more about living and working in villages and how they get energy and water, and I took that approach directly from (Bhargava’s) advice.”
Bhargava’s method for innovation relies on fresh brainstorms, certainly, but also heavily leans on repurposing existing technologies and combining approaches that haven’t been melded before.
“Most stuff we have either repurposed, like great stuff was done and can be so much bigger, or we put it together with something else,” he says. “I tend to like simple, but turn it into something really useful. That’s how we go.”
For example, Living Essentials developed a dye method that allows surgeons “to see from underneath where they’re going to cut,” Bhargava says. “It’s like finally turning on the lights to do surgery.” The technology was used in ophthalmology, but Bhargava’s team took the idea and stretched it.
While his aims coincide with those of many who would save the planet, in typical fashion Bhargava rejects casuistry. “They used to call ‘pollution’ and ‘population growth’ the causes of our problems,” he says. “Then this phrase came along: ‘climate change.’ That’s very fashionable and popular, but in itself it’s not anything. It’s neither the cause nor the effect.
“It’s a little late to stop climate change. You can’t stop it next year.” In the meantime, he says, “You’ve got to sleep tonight, and come up with a solution.”
While Bhargava maintains the vision for his enterprises, he also gets involved in nitty-gritty details. So, for example, while a couple of years ago he hired Jeffrey Sigouin from elsewhere in the consumer-goods industry to helm the 5-hour brand, Bhargava remains deeply involved in the specifics, including personally approving new flavor formulations that are crucial to the shots category.
“He approves every flavor because, if it doesn’t taste good to him, he doesn’t think anyone else is going to like it,” Sigouin says.
In earlier days, Bhargava tangled with some state attorneys general over the nutritional aspects of 5-hour shots — they criticized its caffeine levels as too high for minor consumers and investigated the brand’s claims for vitamin content, resulting in several millions of dollars in fines and a change in how 5-hour advertised. It’s also been a while since Bhargava celebrated the demise of yet another energy-shot competitor by adding a symbolic “gravestone” to a display of foiled rivals in his office.
Bhargava’s priorities, indeed, continue to evolve. One of his aims, depicted in the first documentary, was to deploy in remote villages a type of bicycle-like generator his team had developed. “By pedaling for an hour, you can have electricity for 24 hours,” Bhargava says. Then his team pivoted to developing an attaché-sized generator based on solar panels.
Overall, his interest in revolutionizing decentralized energy generation has slipped in priority, for the moment, at least. “I’m waiting for the next level of technology, which will be sodium solid-state” batteries, Bhargava explains. The technology “may not work for cars because (the batteries are) heavier; cars and iPhones require battery density. But for a lot of applications, a little less density isn’t going to do anything.
“Once it goes to sodium solid-state, the cost of batteries is going to plummet by 90 percent because sodium is cheap. You can give everyone electricity for practically nothing.”
Satisfyingly, Bhargava has already knocked out huge achievements that make living easier for thousands. His team and the Hans Foundation developed Shivansh Farming, a super-fast composting method that’s now being used on more than 10,000 Indian farms, along with being tested elsewhere.
In “Billions in Change 2,” Bhargava said: “There are more than a billion rural poor. To educate them so they can write computer code is not practical. What they need help in is what they’re already (doing) — farming. The largest costs for farmers (include) fertilizer.”
So Bhargava’s team invented a “self-made” method that involves gathering agricultural waste, tree leaves, cow dung, and other organic material that’s typically lying around subsistence farms, layering it, turning the pile frequently, and monitoring the reaction that turns it into “incredible fertilizer” in just 18 days.
“When (farmers) put this fertilizer on their land, they get incredible amounts of produce, (and) the next round gets better because the soil has improved,” Bhargava says. “The water requirements are lower,” and cutting required amounts of urea and other agricultural chemicals “has a huge impact across the world.”

Alzheimer’s is Bhargava’s newest frontier. So far, drugs and existing therapies have only been able to slow a patient’s decline from the pernicious disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the drug Leqembi, a new type of treatment by Biogen, but Bhargava believes his people are developing something that’s tremendously promising for the 6 million Americans — and many others globally — who have various stages of Alzheimer’s.
“We came up with a way that, in some cases, has reversed Alzheimer’s,” Bhargava says. He describes it as a mechanical method of stimulating the circulatory system that involves a person lying on a medical bed with pairs of inflatable cuffs that cross the lower limbs at strategic points.
“It’s not pharma; it’s a noninvasive treatment that squeezes in between your heartbeats, like a secondary heart. It enhances blood flow, and that’s a fundamental (component) of health,” he explains. “If you had trash in your head and didn’t have blood flow, what would happen? It would rot, and then all sorts of bad things would happen.”
The aim of the Cerezen ECP (external counter pulsation) therapy, he says, “is not allowing a decline at all and, in some cases, reversing” the course of the condition. “There are no side effects from our therapy, and the contraindications are similar to those from walking on a treadmill.”
A technician wraps the cuffs, which resemble those used for measuring blood pressure, around a patient’s calves, thighs, and hips. Images from “Young Frankenstein” and “Emergency!” come to mind. “When I first looked at it, I said, ‘Are you (engineers) kidding?’ ” Bhargava said in “Billions in Change.”
“Is this (a scene from) Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian,’ volunteering for crucifixion?”
But then the device begins agitating the legs, visibly engaging the extremities, in between heart beats — delivering even more oxygenated blood to the extremities, and reducing angina and related symptoms. “It’s a wellness device,” Bhargava concludes.
The FDA has approved Cerezen ECP for enhancing blood flow and overall cardiovascular efficiency, but Bhargava is aiming this therapy at a much larger objective: getting a government-approved trial to see if it can mitigate Alzheimer’s. “We are ahead of everyone else in the world in Alzheimer’s, right here in Detroit,” he says. “This is the biggest thing that could hit health care in a long time. And this is Alzheimer’s; it’s not ingrown toenails we’re talking about. This is the issue.”
In any event, the goal is very Bhargava. “There’s not that much more I can do with 5-hour,” Bhargava concedes. “I can increase 5-hour sales by a few percent, or I can do something much bigger.”
Fit to Print

His 5-hour Energy brand dominates its category and already was a household name. But something was bugging Manoj Bhargava that he couldn’t solve even from his lofty position in the consumer packaged goods business.
Namely, the moguls of modern media, who have turned over management of their advertising slots to “programmatic” algorithms, weren’t heeding his complaints about how ineffective and expensive it had become to promote 5-hour Energy products on their platforms.

“Media companies have become so enamored with the delivery and distribution technology that they’ve forgotten their customers — the advertisers,” Bhargava says. “We buy advertising for 5-hour, and from when we started 15 or 20 years ago, it costs 10 to 20 times as much now. It’s so expensive. And there’s so much noise (in advertising). The noise has doubled. To get through all of that, our media people said it has become cost-prohibitive.”
So, Bhargava not only acquired his own TV network two years ago and immediately began expanding it, but last summer, he also engineered an even bigger gambit by acquiring most of Arena Group Holdings as well as control of ShopHQ, a TV-shopping channel, and minor stakes in Audacy, which owns 235 radio stations and a podcast network, and Cumulus Media, best known locally as owner of WJR-AM radio in Detroit.
Back in the day, 5-hour’s TV advertisements were a breakthrough: practical appeals about the benefits of energy shots, a new product, depicting typical scenarios in the office and the home, and they helped catapult the brand to success. By now, 5-hour Energy products are ubiquitous.
So why is advertising — much less the creation of an entire TV network from the ground up — necessary at all?
“As with any national CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand, advertising is like having the power in an airplane,” says Vince Bodiford, who has run Bhargava’s media properties and now is co-CEO of Arena Group. “You have to keep the power on. If you start to throttle back on promotional advertising pressure, you’re going to experience and feel that in sales.
There’s constant pressure to stay No. 1, and to do that, you need promotional advertising — and TV clearly is a huge part of that.”
For that reason, since 2021 Bhargava and Bodiford have been cobbling together a huge TV- and online-news operation in Farmington Hills called Bridge Media Network. At the moment it consists mainly of NewsNet, and the Sports News and the Highlights channels. In large part, the enterprise is aimed at filling a void once occupied by the now-defunct CNN Headline News, but without the ideological liberal twist. NewsNet’s tag line is, “News as it used to be.”
“We thought of news and said why not do something unique?” explains Bhargava. “Everybody says the same thing: We don’t have news anymore, just opinion. It’s not even rational or common-sense opinion.”
Bhargava bought the concept and the initial platform for Bridge from Eric Wotila, an entrepreneur in Cadillac, in 2022. To grow it, the key to Bodiford and Bhargava’s strategy has been to purchase dozens of low-power TV stations around the United States, and to make NewsNet and the sports network available online.
Content-wise, they’ve brought in proven journalists such as anchor Jill Washburn, formerly of Fox 2 in Detroit, and no-nonsense, seasoned newspaper executives who remember how to make objective editorial decisions.
The network is available online as well as via popular “over the top” platforms such as Roku and Hulu. And, more and more, viewers can access NewsNet “over the air” through high-definition antennas that are increasingly included on new televisions and can pick up dozens of stations — including the ones Bhargava now owns.
Bhargava’s move in August vastly amplified his investments in the media world. He gave Arena $50 million in cash and a five-year guaranteed advertising commitment of $60 million from his brands. Among his first objectives, he says, will be to get his new media properties to pay attention to consumers who are 40 years or older, rather than the millennials who remain the shiny object in the U.S. market.
But, even with a much bigger cudgel to achieve his advertising aims for 5-hour than he had just a few months ago, Bhargava pledges that adding Arena and its built-out brands and operations to his stable won’t blow up Bridge Media.
“This is good for both companies,” he says. “There are many more win-win opportunities to come.” And his recent moves in media “Are just a start. It’s going to be fun.”
— By Dale Buss
Energy PEAK

Having vanquished all other comers in making 5-hour Energy the kingpin of the energy-shot business, its creator isn’t ready to give up the ride anytime soon.
“If someone came and said, ‘We’ll give you a zillion dollars,’ I might sell it,” says Manoj Bhargava, creator of 5-hour Energy and founder and CEO of Innovation Ventures in Farmington Hills. “But no one has shown up yet. It would be a bunch of money, and only big guys could afford it.”
In the meantime, Bhargava continues to look for ways to enhance the commercial juggernaut that enables his philanthropy. He’s finally turned to an obvious one: Get into the energy-drinks business, the vast category that’s made up of 8-ounce and 16-ounce single-serve cans and was created at about the same time Bhargava invented energy shots. The market is now dominated by Red Bull, Monster, and PepsiCo’s Rockstar.
After many years of staying out, 5-hour took the plunge into its new category two years ago. Bhargava’s formidable competitors had learned, over the years, exactly how to appeal to the mostly young, mostly male, gamer-over- indexed market for the caffeine-fueled, jolt-you-awake, keep-you-alert-for-the-long-grind bottles of totally processed chemical elixirs.
That didn’t dissuade Bhargava; he had succeeded by cultivating much the same market with his 5-hour shots. “We’ve got that established 5-hour Energy name, and we can leverage that name,” Bhargava says. “The jury is still out on (our success in energy beverages). We’ve had to develop a whole new distribution system.”
In spite of the challenges, he believes 5-hour has an edge in its new category. “It just tastes incredibly better,” he asserts.
Some observers say it’s about time. “It makes sense, with their successful platform in shots and a very well-known brand,” says Duane Stanford, editor in chief of Beverage Digest.
“It’s almost derelict not to try to leverage that. But shots are so different, do you want to let yourself get distracted?”
Jeffrey Sigouin is 5-hour Energy’s president and COO, and he provides a fuller explanation as to why the company finally got in and why it did so in the 16-ounce segment first.
“That category had been experiencing explosive growth for a decade,” Sigouin says, “and we know from our research that consumers who join the 5-hour franchise typically come to us from energy drinks; about 30 percent of them use both. The people we lose, we’re losing to energy drinks.
“This was talked about for years” inside the company. “We thought it was shameful to watch our franchise potentially under attack when we had the technology to get into the energy beverage business,” says Sigouin, who came to 5-hour Energy with experience in packaged foods, the private-label grocery world, and the GSK pharma outfit.
Bhargava wasn’t dissuaded even though Coca-Cola pulled out of the energy drink category after a very short run. PepsiCo had bought Rockstar in 2020 for nearly $4 billion, so it wasn’t surprising that Coca-Cola launched Coke Energy shortly thereafter. But COVID-19, and the company’s subsequent decision to vastly cull its product portfolio, helped Coke terminate Coca-Cola Energy in mid-2021. The decision signaled just how difficult the energy drinks category could be, even for a legendary beverage enterprise.
The 5-hour brand now is daring to compete with Monster, et al, despite the fact that “energy drinks typically sell for 40 cents to $1 less than our shots do,” Sigouin says. Currently, 5-hour shots retail for around $3 or so at thousands of supermarket and convenience-store checkouts.
“We had a value-proposition issue,” Sigouin says, “so when we went into energy drinks, we went with 16 ounces because of the high price, and we were very bullish that was the right move. Plus, there’s less discounting at that price point. We figured the 5-hour name would be enough to make it the right move.”
The brand’s energy drinks are available in six flavor-specific SKUs labeled “Extra Strength,” and sporting about 230 mg of caffeine in each 16-ounce can, versus a category-typical 130 mg, according to Sigouin.
Yet succeeding in the energy drinks category “has been tougher sledding than we thought,” Sigouin concedes. “Our premium price coming out versus brands more established in that space gave us a difficult time getting trial.”
The challenges in building a distribution network also still dog 5-hour, despite brand recognition of its shots, because “there’s a completely different system for shots than for beverages,” Sigouin explains. “It’s hard for us to get national chain distribution because we can’t yet service all stores. It’s been slow going.”
— By Dale Buss