Expo season is finally back, live and in color?  These trade shows are great opportunities for Sovereign to network with specific audiences and make new connections, both as a supplier of flavors, R&D services, and to procure new raw materials.  Due to COVID, new challenges in how to sample products at the expos have been presented.  However, these obstacles have also brought about new opportunities that have sparked creativity when it comes to how we choose to represent Sovereign at the shows.

One of the new guidelines at many of these expos stated that the products shown had to be commercially produced and sealed.  Our days of pouring from a large bottle or cutting protein bars into bite sizes for the taking are gone (for now).  Luckily, we have made a great connection with a pilot plant in Minnesota called The Lab. The Lab offered their services to help us package a commercially produced beverage (created by us) to hand out at the upcoming expos.

Before we get to the finished beverage, we have to go back a few months.  With the ever expanding capabilities of our flavor and analytical lab, our team has developed a method of matching high end spirits–think Clase Azul, Woodford Reserve, Tanqueray Gin.  These finished flavors are then given to our highly talented flavor team to build out into finished flavors that can be used in a wide variety of applications.

In R&D, it is our responsibility to show our flavors in their best light. Many of those times it is in a tangible product (food or beverage) that allows the customer to not only see the flavor, but to experience it.  Any given expo can be filled with tens of thousands of people, and you only have a few moments to capture their attention. Showcasing our flavors in a finished product is a great way to showcase our capabilities. After some deliberation, our R&D team put together a 0.0% ABV Mai Tai Mocktail! We picked a drink that contains flavors that were representative of our talents and equally enticing to the audience that will first see this beverage-craft brewers.  With the non-alcoholic spirits sector gaining popularity, our spirit flavors are the perfect solution to mimic some of the consumers favorite spirits.  In addition, the spirit flavors can be used to flavor the next generation of malt-based seltzers and/or top note the spirit themselves. These applications can increase the reach of a brewery’s audience.  The other flavors used in the Mai Tai-pineapple, orange, orgeat–are also very popular among breweries as we see more and more tropical flavors popping up in beers and seltzers.

Sovereign is leading the way for developing flavors based on spirits and using them in novel applications to give our customers a competitive advantage.