An alumnus of Procter & Gamble's branding apparatus is launching his own wine company in Cincinnati in August, hoping to rehabilitate a much maligned segment of the industry.
Jake Whitman, a former brand manager for P&G's Gillette Personal Care strategy business, is launching Really Good Boxed Wine, a direct-to-consumer wine brand based in Cincinnati. The brand launches and boxes start shipping to Ohio customers on Aug. 28.
Whitman told me as a consumer of wine, he was always underwhelmed by the boxes of wine he's bought over the years. It piqued his curiosity.
"Why can't you buy better boxed wine? I always assumed there was some technical reason," he said.
"I started doing research, and I learned that in other countries like France they put high-end wine in boxes. A lot of the wine we drink from France and Italy is shipped in plastic bladders."
Following his stint at P&G, Whitman moved to California's Bay Area for the last four years, where he got to know a number of vineyard owners. He sources his grapes from Ketcham Vineyard, where he got to know the owners so well they're hosting a tasting for his upcoming wedding.
When consumers buy mass market boxed wine, the kind widely available in most grocery or liquor stores, the box will often say "California red" or just broadly "California" without specifying where the grapes are grown.
Whitman said that's because most of them are produced on giant 500,000-acre commercial vineyards.
"They aren't producing quality grapes," he said. "Wine is an agricultural product, and the care you put into your grapes matters."
The Ketchum Vineyard is situated in the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County. With its climate of warm and cool days, it is perfectly situated for pinot noir grapes, which have more delicate and sensitive skins, Whitman said.
Really Good Boxed Wine's first release will be a pinot noir made with Ketchum Vineyard's grapes. Whitman hopes to gather data from the launch and learn about how people are consuming the wine, what they like about it and what they'd change before a broader nationwide launch, aiming for Black Friday 2021.
The price point for Really Good Boxed Wine is $60 for a 3-liter box. That contains the volume of four standard 750 ml bottles, averaging out to be about $15 a bottle.
"Our promise is that every wine we put in the box would retail for at least $40 per bottle standalone," Whitman said.
"This wine doesn't work if the wine inside isn't really good. There are other options out there if people want to drink mediocre boxed wine."
From a business standpoint, boxed wine makes a lot of sense too, he said. For one, a box costs a lot less to ship by weight than the equivalent volume in glass bottles. It also stays good longer – boxed wine is good for up to six weeks after it is opened, as opposed to a bottle which will go bad two to five days after opening.
There are other environmental benefits: glass bottles require temperatures of up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit to make, requiring a lot of energy, and it takes four bottles, four corks, eight labels and four foil tops to sell the wine that would go into one box.
"If every consumer switched from bottled to boxed wines for 97% of wines produced to be drank within one year, it would be the same as taking 400,000 cars off of the road," Whitman said.
Really Good Boxed Wine will be available online-only to begin with, though Whitman is pursuing retail partnerships. Online customers can sign up to a subscription service where boxes will be automatically shipped to them at regular intervals of their choosing. Subscribers will also get a discount on each box and have access to limited edition releases.
The vision is to have three to five core wines available for purchase, and then partner with vineyards for those limited edition small batch runs of wine.
Really Good Boxed Wine had been self-funded until Aug. 9, when Whitman closed on a $300,000 round of funding.
Whitman said his role at P&G was a bootcamp for when it came to launching his own business.
"Brand management is not just a marketing job, in some ways you're a mini-CEO of whatever brand you're working for," he said.
"P&G teaches a focus on the consumer, and particularly with wine you really have to understand your consumer. Consumer habits are changing. Direct-to-consumer wine sales are up 200% over last year, and even though the world is coming out of Covid, that doesn't seem to be changing."
