Bio

Bob has spent nearly 20 years in the beverage industry but didn’t truly find his passion for it until 2010, when he moved to southern CA to help PepsiCo form an emerging brands team that was initially tasked with nurturing the company’s young premium nutrition brands. It was there that he became fully exposed to the vast world of beverage innovation and entrepreneurs seeking to capture the country’s growing obsession with health & wellness in a beverage format. Bob has a healthy thirst for experimenting in this segment and has developed a reputation amongst his family and friends for getting them to try new beverages – especially ones in which he has a vested interest. Bob joined First | Bev after a two-year run at KeVita, where he helped accelerate the company’s already steep growth trajectory, culminating in the successful sale of the company to PepsiCo at a significant premium to revenue and over $100MM in retail sales. As the senior vice president of sales, he led the team responsible for gaining distribution in the nation’s largest conventional retailers while maintaining thought leadership with the brand’s early adopters in the natural channel. Prior to KeVita, he spent 17 years at PepsiCo in leadership positions across business development, customer development, strategic planning and product commercialization and developed a strong track record for architecting and staffing teams for growth as well as leading them to above-plan results. Naked Juice revenue nearly tripled over his five-year tenure with the business during which he designed and implemented an emerging brands development team that had a unique focus on strategic markets and channels of distribution for PepsiCo’s stable of emerging brands – Naked, IZZE and O.N.E. Coconut Water. He holds a BA in political science from Denison University, where he also was a four-year varsity letter winner for the men’s soccer team and ran his own student discount card business. Bob lives in South Pasadena with his wife, Kelly, and their two daughters, Penelope and Holland. He sits on the Board of Trustees of the Mayfield Junior School in Pasadena and enjoys coaching youth soccer and playing in Pasadena’s adult ice hockey leagues.