258. Why Pricklee Rebranded from Cactus Water to Natural Hydration

0:01Welcome to Startup to Scale, a podcast by FoodBevy. I'm your host, Jordan Buckner. Join me as I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs, seasoned industry experts, and everyone in between as we unlock the keys to growing from startup to scale.

0:18Building a CPG brand is one of the most exciting and challenging paths someone can take. And it's a long journey with lots of ups and downs, new opportunity challenges. And it's really fun to see the behind the scenes of how brands are made and built. And so for today's episode, we're just coming off of Expo West 2026 recording this. And I have invited on Quan Yang, who is the CEO and co-founder of Prickly Cactus Water, an awesome hydration beverage, to talk through updates. Because when Quan and I first connected, this was, gosh, maybe like three, four years ago or something now. when Prickly was just getting started.

0:57And so I wanted to get an update on how things were going. And also, they just relaunched a new rebrand and calling it Prickly 2.0. And so, Kwan, welcome to the show. Nice to be here, Jordan. Excited to chat through Prickly Natural Hydration with you. I love it. So for those who maybe haven't heard of Prickly or gotten a chance to describe it, talk with me a little bit about just like what Prickly is so that people can have a sense of the product. Yeah, you know, Prickly, their mission is pretty simple. You know, we want to help families build healthier hydration habits naturally. And so as you can imagine, Prickly is a natural hydration drink.

1:33It's meant to challenge the status quo of these artificial legacy products that are oftentimes packed with, you know, plastic or artificial sugars, neon dyes and packaged in plastic bottles. And so Prickly is packed with antioxidants, electrolytes, vitamin C, and is powered by some very delicious Prickly pears. Absolutely love that. And so I know starting out kind of cactus water was kind of the big focal point and getting started. Is the product still like primarily cactus water? And I'm curious to know like how that has evolved over your storytelling in the last couple of years. Yeah, for sure.

2:05I mean, we launched Prickly in 2021 as a cactus water. And, you know, I guess it's pretty on brand for pharmacists because the most important lesson that we learned in our careers in health care was just like the best medicines in life are the health habits you build at a young age. Right. And so starting out as a cactus water was our solution to all these artificial hydration products that we see on the grocery shelves. And as we were trying to think about building our own families, we just knew that there was a better option. And so it's inspired from a family recipe that my co-founder grew up with.

2:31But really kind of hitting it right on the head of this is what it is was where we started. And then we took a scientific method approach to that strategy of like, let's get on the market. Let's test. Let's learn our way into achieving really what product market fit is. Right. What's the what's the most important way that we can reach as many consumers as possible? reduce any education barriers, formulate the product as approachable as possible, and scale the brand so we can ultimately help as many families as possible. That was always the goal. And it was always about iteration, iteration, iteration before we really kind of stepped on acceleration with institutional capital, growth capital, distribution growth, and everything else as well.

3:05And that was really what kind of led us to this moment in time where we really repositioned as a natural hydration brand. We were always solving for this problem. And I think while the cactus water positioning was great because it differentiated us to get us onto shelf, You know, just that constant learning, realizing that, you know, the education barrier was actually what sometimes prohibited it from scaling to the point where, you know, it really could reach its potential was what led to this moment, right? Just leading with hydration, leading with our differentiation being natural hydration and leading with just incredible flavors that once people consume, they come back to again and again and again.

3:39That all came from our, you know, approach, our scientific method of testing. and yeah we're just really really excited and really proud of everything that led to you know prickly 2.0 as you would call it natural hydration and i think it's really going to be able to set a foundation for us to scale and help as many families build better hydration habits as possible yeah i think that's really exciting you know one thing i know is right coconut water was very big especially coming through like 80s 90s early 2000s and like brands were called like coconut water like it's very prominent that this is like hydration from coconut and there's a certain i think like tropical feeling i feel like especially in the u.s there are a number of people who have like vacation in the caribbean mostly and like had kind of coconut water um or in like coconut and stuff like on vacation so there's like a familiarity at least and like hearing seeing like a straw kind of sticking out of the coconut and really building so there's a strong connection with that things like cactus water i think it's like oh this is really interesting like there's also really great hydration from the water.

4:42So naturally, there is great at storing water. But did you find, is that where you mentioned the education part? Like people are just less familiar with like that you could, the water had, or cactus had water in it and that you could drink it and what it would taste like? Yeah. So we actually use the fruit of the cactus called the prickly pear and that's pureed and that's where all the natural hydration benefits come from. And, but to your point, I mean, when you compare the size of that market and the awareness of that prickly pear, look, the prickly pear market is actually quite large and there's a flavor.

5:06It's actually really exciting. You see it in all these different formats, and I think it's scaled pretty dramatically. We've seen the data of that too, right? Just that as a flavor trend has been growing exponentially over a year. But when you compare that to your point that the awareness and familiarity with coconut water in its intrinsic format, I mean, the markets are different sized fundamentally, right? And I think you've seen this again too. I mean, even when Poppy first launched, they were a apple cider vinegar tonic, right? Or when Bi first launched, they were a coffee fruit extract product, right?

5:35And so the ingredient education piece is not new. I think where coconut water, you know, really established was that there was a demand for natural hydration. Consumers wanted something that wasn't artificial. And if anything, I think it validated just how big that market was, because even to this day, that category is still growing. Right. And so from our perspective, the prickly pear market isn't the size of a coconut water market, right? But it's far larger than the apple cider vinegar market, and it's certainly larger than the coffee fruit extract market. And so all these, what you see consistently is all these brands realize that it's really the benefit that consumers are looking for, not necessarily what is creating that benefit, right, and wrapping their heads around that.

6:14And it's like most consumers have what, you know, one thing that they remember about a brand or they might have, you know, you might have 10 seconds to get, you know, what it is that they're consuming, why they should consume it. But if you're spending all that time educating ingredient, you know, you kind of lose out on really what the solution is that you're trying to solve for. Right. And I think for us, that became really the core of it is like, would we rather somebody walk away with, you know, a fun factoid about prickly pears and cactuses? Or would we rather rather than walk away with like truly an understanding of this is a solution for myself, for my family is that I would much rather give to the people that I love, you know?

6:48And again, I think coconut water was able to do that in a bigger way because, to your point, it's already consumed in that format. And maybe the fruit itself is something that's certainly more familiar. But even to that degree, what we've done with natural hydration is even taking it one step further where you're still not limited to one single ingredient like coconut water is. As big as that market is, it's still limited to an ingredient that is still less familiar than, say, a strawberry or watermelon or a raspberry. And I think the way that we've now positioned enables us to really kind of continue to build in partnership with what coconut water has done to establish this natural hydration market and just really kind of push that forward and just help create a better option than what we've always had growing up for this next generation of families.

7:33I love that, Quan. And so, you know, what you just said is so insightful and reminds me of the Clayton Christensen jobs to be done framework of understanding, like, what job is your product actually doing for consumers? and like when someone's going to the grocery store, I'm pretty sure just like I go on a limb, like very few people of any are going and looking for cactus water. For sure. Or even quickly to be that for that matter, right? Like these are all new brands that, you know, people don't really know. Exactly. And so, right, they're going and looking for hydration and they want it to be from a natural source, but they're going in primarily like, I'm looking for something to keep me hydrated for the day and like to drink beyond water.

8:09It's going to taste good. It reminds me like with my journey in T-Squares, you know we positioned ourselves as like a tea infused energy snack or they're like bite-sized energy bars but it really took i don't know why it took me this long but like two years and there's like i have never gone into the store looking for a tea infused energy snack right like that's not a problem i had like yes i wanted something that it's like a snack that'll hold me over and give me a natural like energy boost but i was using the wrong language and so it just wasn't resonating with consumers and so that's so smart kind of with the prickly 2.0 branding of like really leaning into hydration and flavor kind of as the two foremost elements.

8:47And then when people are like, oh, but like, was it made out of? And then they see the natural ingredients. So like, oh, this is like simple and natural. Like, OK, I can stand behind this. I agree fully. And I think right there seems so obvious in hindsight, you know, to your point is one of those things where you look back and you're like, well, if we had thought about it this way, we probably would have done it earlier. But I think funny enough, the prickly pear mark is actually much larger than maybe like an apple cider vinegar or even a coffee fruit, which actually created this sense of like, well, this is a scale.

9:16This fundamentally is a scalable channel. It's a scalable ingredient. It's a scalable industry. But from our perspective, there's just because it doesn't mean it's it's the it's the it's the the most maximal way that we could reach our mission. Right. And and reach as many consumers as possible. And so we've always been in that mindset of like, there's something here. Clearly, there's a clear resonance with consumers. There's a clear demand for it. But how do we really make it as approachable as possible? And that journey to your point of iteration and testing is pretty essential to getting there, to getting a product market fit.

9:46And, you know, I think sometimes, you know, going too quickly, starting to chase distribution too early when that hasn't been solved for, it just kind of really is hard to rewind and solve for later, right? And so that was always something that we wanted, we were really attuned to from the beginning. And, you know, we're really fortunate that we got there at the end of the day. I love that. And so I'm excited to like break down some of the changes. Would that love to do is to share, look at kind of prickly through time. And so what I would love to do is just kind of take a look at what the product has looked like a little bit.

10:20And so I have a couple of images, right? I think this was one of the original designs for the can, right? Yep. Kind of how we started, how it went and where we are today, for sure. Yeah, I love that. So just to give like a context, this is like one of the originals. And for those listening and not watching super fruit water and having the prickly pears the flavor kind of call out and then i think through your other kind of redesign yeah good picture here is this your kind of second major one correct yeah leading into cactus i guess taking a more specific approach from going from super fruit which again i think this all comes down to just the marketing funnel right like how many questions do you have the answer to get to the point and so the question is superfood.

11:01What kind of fruit is it? Well, it's a fruit of a cactus. So now we move one layer down, right? Well, what kind of fruit is a cactus? It's, oh, it's called a prickly pear. How do you get water from a cactus? It's like, oh, we puree it. Oh, what are the benefits? Okay, it's good for hydration. It's natural hydration. Is this an alternative to these plastic bottles of sports drinks and vitamin waters and things of that nature? It's like, yes. So just like deleting all those levels of education to get to the point, I think is really what you're seeing. I love it. And so this is kind of taking a look at the new branding that just came out.

11:28And so walk me through then the um the kind of hierarchy on the new product packaging and um and why some of these call outs on here yeah are you sharing yeah and so for this one and this is kind of on the prickly home page right you can see the prickly and natural hydration about how do you kind of walk through the the main call outs yeah i think you know the first thing you probably see is just the flavor. And you see a strawberry, you see a mango, you see a prickly pear. I think universally are two new flavors of watermelon and a mixed wild berry as well as very familiar ingredients that, you know, as a parent now of two, two daughters, four and two years old, my two-year-old knows what these things are.

12:09And so it just becomes an easy thing for consumers of all ages, families to really understand, wrap their heads around this, feed with that bias of, less of a bias of like, what is this going to do for me and more of a bias of like, which flavor do I like more? Right, and start there, right? And I think everyone's got that initial intrinsic sense at the end of the day, we sell a food and beverage. So just eating through your eyes was really important for us and just communicating the flavor first and foremost. And so that's what you see. And then I think from there, leaning next into really what is this thing?

12:38Right. And so before, as you mentioned, cactus water, now natural hydration, getting to the why as well as the what is was was, again, important for us to contextualize. What is this replacing? What is the job to be done here? Right. And then with naturally, with natural hydration, what are some of the benefits that comes with, right? The antioxidants, the electrolytes are probably things that consumers are already looking for. It becomes kind of table stakes, but it helps to just communicate the functionality beyond just the flavor. So that's kind of how we think about it. Lead with flavor, then lead into the what and the why.

13:08And then ultimately, what is the functionality of it? I love that. And thanks so much for like walking through because it always helps to get a little bit behind the scenes of how products evolve over time. I was actually just having a conversation with someone the other day and the idea that like it's not if but when a product will need to evolve and change. And it can sometimes be very relieving to have to make that decision, but also just be challenging because you have product in market. You have existing kind of cans printed. And you're like, OK, no, we need to change. But how do I time this?

13:39So I kind of want to walk through as well, like with the new branding, how do you think about transitioning from those older can designs into the newer ones? Did you have to like let retail partners know and like how did you communicate that whole process? Can you take me behind the scenes? You know, it's so funny. We were we were a finalist in a Nielsen pitch competition in last May and we were on stage. And, you know, one of the judges, the CEO of Nielsen, Tracy Massey, she asked a question at the very end. And she was like, is this niche? After we've been talking about hydration. And we're like, well, hydration's not niche, right?

14:14But we found our niche in natural hydration. And we'd already been thinking about all this stuff for like months, right? I mean, obviously, the number one challenge we'd always experienced as a brand was the education gap. And so we come back and I'm in the hotel room with our head of growth. And we're like, man, have we just hit niche bottom here, you know? And we're sitting there and we're like, this is, how do we educate our ways out of this, right? And that was sort of a moment in time. And I got to thank Tracy for that because it really was the jumpstart for us to take that really seriously because we'd already been thinking about it.

14:44Right. So kind of at that moment, we went to all of our retail partners. We were going through the Whole Foods Market on the Verge accelerator program. And so actually our buyer at Whole Foods and our buyer at HEB were actually pretty instrumental in helping us shape this. Right. And so we would just give them rounds and rounds of sort of here's where we are with the design. Here's what we're thinking and just validating these this train of thought with them. And and they were pretty instrumental in helping us get and land the plane on where we ended up with. And so we had their support from day one.

15:13And so we were just really kind of in the last couple of months selling the expo. And we're now sort of at the tail end of that transition of sell through where the older cans are kind of, you know, moving out of D.C.'s and stores. and now you're seeing the new cans, you know, replace them on shelf right as we head into hydration season. And so the timing of that was really, really, you know, just great from our perspective. And that was also intentional when we were looking at, you know, Q4 and we're like, you know, we had all these POs and we were like, do we want to produce another full round of the previous packaging?

15:45And that delays the launch. And so what we actually ended up doing was pausing a lot of our business in Q4 to really prioritize producing the new product, getting that out there and starting this process earlier. And ultimately that ended up launching at Expo West, which we could not have asked for a better time for. Right. And so that's kind of how it all played out. And now we're just all, you know, gears ahead on pushing out Prickley Natural Hydration to the 2026 year. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that a little bit behind the scenes because making a change can be a little daunting, right?

16:15Because it has real business decisions. A lot of times The bigger you get, the higher volume you have to order. You have to get everything right. And it is impossible to like perfectly time everything. And so you have to give yourself some grace to allow this like kind of transition period where it can be a little awkward than like getting those out kind of onto the market. And so I think that's, you know, really helpful to see as you're doing this. And I guess I'm curious, like, have you, as you were making these packaging changes, what type of of testing if any that you do around the design the messaging to make sure that it was really resonating i mean i think we were just getting so much feedback at all stages i mean this the process was a 10-month process so it wasn't like you know we just started out and here we were we we had a lot of intrinsically we had built so much entrenched knowledge having been on the market for about four years of that time you know having done gosh like 5 000 demos as a team, you know, collected all these insights and understanding what was important and more important, the understanding even the competitive set, right?

17:15Because a lot of times when, you know, even for us, when we're designing, you kind of get put in the silo where you're like, I'm going to build something and it's going to look like this because it looks aesthetic or it fits a certain, you know, vibe or trend of the moment. And I think our approach this time was to kind of approach it in a different way, which was like, let's take all the knowledge we have. We're not just trying to build the most aesthetic can. Of course, that's a part of it. We want to build a product that's going to stand out on shelf and win in retail what does that take because at the end of the day we realize that you know no matter what um product market fit was the single most important thing to get to in order for us to scale because your your product is doing 95 if not more percent of the work and so if that's not there the tactical solving of like it's not working because of xyz tactics or this is not the right way of merchandising or this is not the right tpr structure, price point, right spot in the store, like all those things are table stakes, but they sit on top of the foundation that if it's not there, you're just churning and churning and churning.

18:14So we were just so focused on getting different perspectives on like how to nail that. It wasn't just about nailing the nicest packaging. It was like the one that was going to win on shelf. Right. And so we're getting perspectives, obviously, all this learning we had from the demos, but also we were getting store level feedback from all the relationships that we built in store. We were getting buyer, obviously, feedback as we were talking about. Right. We have a pretty strong advisory network and just, you know, the years that we've built in this industry just had a lot of really smart people around us, smarter than us to kind of provide that feedback.

18:42And then ultimately get to a point where you're just like, all right, you got to trust your gut and intuition and trust that there's not going to be a perfect data science that's going to say this is the answer. But some of the imperfect data and the qualitative knowledge that we've accumulated gave us enough confidence that this felt very much like the right direction to take it. And so far, it's been just extremely validating to see it perform. I love that. So, Kwan, you know, you know, more than I do, how competitive the beverage set is. And like everyone's fighting for that cooler space. There's so many options.

19:12There's like a rainbow of colors. And I think the packaging definitely helps to stand out. But I'm kind of curious, how do you think about the role of both like the product and marketing to drive sales and get people to pick up prickly off the shelf in terms of like how much work you're doing in store for merchandising versus online activations to build the brand awareness, build the vibe of what you're doing and kind of pull people into the stores to move the product? Yeah, I think we believe in the 80-20 rule, right? So 80 % of our marketing spend is going to go towards bottom of funnel things like promotions, displays, merchandising, store pricing dynamics, things of that nature.

19:55And then I would also put in that 80 % now increasingly more so digital retail marketing spend just because of just this constant migration towards better data and convenience and different formats in which people shop. So that's really where we look at the bulk of our marketing, quote unquote, spend. And then the 20 % is very much the brand awareness piece, right? It's like now that we have this product that's really easy to understand. It's like if we drop the Paladin at the beach or in Miami Beach or in California and we just walked away, we know that people will understand it now without having us stand there and provide this sort of like 10-minute education session on what a prickly pear is or cactus water.

20:32Getting to that was really important for us to feel comfortable investing in that 20 % because that sort of it becomes a game of telephone where somebody that picks up this product, whether it's a UGC creator or an influencer or just somebody who's, you know, you know, finding our product on social media, they need to then tell that next person, right? Tell their kin, their friends, their family what this is and explain that to their audience. And so if they can't do that without a really complicated creative brief or a conversation with us to just make sure the right points are hit, that game of telephone just becomes really diluted over time.

21:03And it feels like a really leaky faucet in the grand scheme of marketing. And so we didn't want to invest in that top of funnel conversation until we got to this point. Now that we're there, we feel really comfortable building out our PR engine, our, you know, our creator engine, our creative engine, and then, you know, building enough of a base for us to then stack on ads, you know, awareness ads on top of that. But I always think, at least in today's day and age and in today's sort of funding climate where I think, you know, brands are just so much more focused on profitability and strong business fundamentals, like that 80-20 split for us will probably not change even as we scale.

21:40So yeah, I do think that that's so important. Like focus your energy on one level. And especially when you mentioned like that game of telephone that people play, I think one of the most insightful ways of knowing how successful a brand is going to be is when you ask your customers, like, how do you describe our product to someone else? Right. Because then they can really highlight what the main benefit is and see if they can see it in three seconds. Right. Or they try and prickly and saying, hey, this is like really delicious and I get hydration from it. Or are they saying like, if I'm trying like Chobani has the like a new dairy shake they came out with and it has like, I don't know, 28 grams of protein.

22:16And they're like, hey, it's this drink that gets me 28 grams of protein from from dairy. And like, what are those words and things that consumers are saying to actually drive that that adoption? Because then you can understand like, oh, is the is it resonating? They're the key things that they're focused on, flavor first, functionality, grow nutrients to really build that as part of your story. really harnessing that to to grow and i think that's so important and so i was going to say on that i think the part of that that's really important is it goes back to it what is the job to be done what are we replacing at the end of the day a consumer might have eight drinks or so over the course of a day like the solution isn't add another one right it's not add two more like otherwise there's no end to the functional beverage set or whatever innovations are coming down the market.

23:02And even our position in cactus water was that it was at another one because it wasn't solving a clear problem, at least not in the two seconds that you're communicating it, right? They're not getting to that point of like, oh, this is replacing my, you know, juice or my plastic bottled sports drink for my kid or my family. And I think getting to that was so important so that there was a clear understanding of like why this is a better solution at the end of the day. And timeliness of why now too is also really, really key because if we'd done this five years ago it wouldn't have worked anyways even with this product i just think that the consumers evolved so much in the last five years and this market is so ripe for for disruption with an offering like prickly that isn't even just about sodium it's just really about everyday hydration that you give your own kids your own parents and your own friends right and i think that that simplicity is really what's resonating today's zeitgeist that is so cool kwan thanks so much for being honest sharing about prickly i'm so excited to see the new branding out into the world and be following along with the with your journey.