Celsius CEO Explains How They Win in Energy Drinks

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:25)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Tracy, I have to say, I've been feeling a little lethargic this week, a little bit under the weather.

Yeah, you know, sometimes you wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Anyway, but I'm feeling a little bit better because I've been consuming a lot of caffeine today.

Tracy Alloway (0:44)

Yes, I'm looking at you in the studio right now, and you have with you another Celsius.

Joe Weisenthal (0:50)

Yes.

Tracy Alloway (0:50)

What's the flavor on your one?

Joe Weisenthal (0:52)

I am drinking an Arctic Vibe, which is a sparkling frozen berry edition. I don't know. I have to, I'm not sure, like if in a blind taste test, I would say, oh, this is berry, but it's very flavorful and it's sugar-free and it's perked me up, and I feel very keyed up and ready to go. You are also drinking a Celsius. What are you drinking?

Tracy Alloway (1:10)

I have Cosmic Vibe, a sparkling fruit punch. And it does actually taste like carbonated Kool-Aid. It's sort of nostalgic in some way. But the thing that interests me is, I'm looking at the branding and the ads on the can, and we've talked about this before. We did a whole episode about Celsius. But the interesting thing to me is how this is slightly different from other energy drinks. So it talks about obviously providing energy, but also accelerating metabolism and burning body fat. And I was going through the ingredients earlier, and it has biotin in it, which is something that I take for hair and skin and nails and stuff. So I guess I don't need to take supplements anymore. I can just drink Celsius.

Joe Weisenthal (1:53)

Supposedly you could just drink Celsius. No, I'm fascinated for this for all reasons, for all kinds of reasons. I mean, we've talked about energy drinks for a while. We did a story about the incredible rise of episode about Monster a few years ago, one of the stocks that's actually outperformed Amazon over the same time period.

And if you go into any local deli or bodega or 7-Eleven these days, you just see this wall. And the wall just keeps getting bigger of drinks. And many of them, highly caffeinated energy drinks. And it's sort of fascinating to me, there are all these energy drinks out there that exist.

How is there room for more? It's like, they all like, right? You basically want to consume one and you get a jolt of caffeine, you go about your day. It's amazing that despite this maturity and this size, and we have a Red Bull and Monster and all those, that yet somehow there could still be room for another competitor to seemingly, I know it's never coming out of nowhere, but seemingly coming out of nowhere.

Tracy Alloway (2:50)

Yeah, this is the thing that fascinates me too. So we don't just have different brands of energy drinks, like within the brands themselves, there are so many different flavors now and options. It's kind of amazing. And again, when you go into the store, you see this sort of rainbow of cans on display. The other thing that interests me is the distribution question. So I'm always curious, like, who makes the decisions of what ends up on the shelves in your local 7-Eleven or Circle K or Duane Reed or whatever? Like, how do those specific flavors get chosen, much less even the brands, right? And I think this is something that's come up in a number of episodes now, just how important distribution can actually be to these particular types of products.

Joe Weisenthal (3:36)

Well, I think we should just jump right into it. We really do have the perfect guest because today we're gonna be speaking with John Fieldly. He is the president and CEO of Celsius Holdings. He's been CEO since 2017, been with the company for 12 years. And we're gonna ask him all these questions about how this all works, how you rise to the top in what is clearly a very competitive field. So John, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

John Fieldly (4:03)

Glad to be here, Joe. Excited, Tracy. It's exciting. I like how you brought in our cosmic vibe.

We love the flavors on that, fruit punch, refreshing. That's what it's all about. Glad to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (4:13)

All right, I have a question. So like a year ago, I started noticing that all the fit and cool looking people at my gym were drinking Celsius. And then I was like, well, I wanna be one of the fit and cool looking people at the gym. So I then bought a Celsius. What happened? Celsius has been around a long time, but suddenly over the last year, year and a half, maybe two years, I started seeing it somewhere.