Ben Gilbert

Yeah, they were pretty late to the game in waters.

I mean, I think the story of the last...

25 years is they sit there in a privileged position and look around and wait and see and then when something really starts happening then they go become active in it and they just have to sort of hope that all the assets they have including the coke distribution system makes it okay that they're not first to market on some of these things but i don't know sometimes it's really cost them and the biggest most interesting one is monster energy do you know the story behind monster energy

Yep.

So Monster started.

Do you remember Hanson's Juice?

Yes!

That is Monster.

I don't have the entire story because this is the Coke episode, not the Monster episode.

But at some point, the Hanson leadership realized that they did want to get into energy drinks, but their current brand was not going to be effective in doing so.

And so they came up with this really crazy brand that felt dark and dangerous to counterposition the cleaner aesthetic of Red Bull and ends up going great, better than they ever could have imagined.

So there were various times early in the transition from Hansen's Natural to Monster where Coke could have bought it, but it was subscale and then there were sort of lulls and growth and it was sort of false starts in it becoming the big giant thing that it became.

And also energy drinks as a category, people weren't sure how durable it was.

You know, is this really going to be the thing that it became or is it a fad?

Yeah.

So in 2012, Monster reached out to potential buyers, including Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but Coke decided against pursuing it because the price was high.

Monster's market cap was $11 billion at the time.

Oh, goodness.

Yeah.

So what ended up actually happening much later on, Coca-Cola was like, ah, crap, we should have done that.