How CoAqua Outsold Coconut Water Giants with Packaging & Flavor

What we talked about.

Sunny Ray sits down with Tony, co-founder of CoAqua, a coconut water brand built from the earth with distinctive packaging and flavors. Tony shares his path from a construction family in New Hartford, New York, through West Point where he played Division 1 hockey as a goaltender, to a finance career at Merrill Lynch and Raymond James working with business owners. He describes how his business partner Justin discovered the original CoAqua brand in New Zealand, sparking a vision that led them to acquire and rebrand the company. Tony explains how packaging, quality ingredients, and an extended pasteurization process differentiate CoAqua from competitors, and how the brand grew from near zero traction to a breakout Sprouts Farmers Market deal, thousands of retail doors, and unexpected wins like becoming a top seller inside OpenAI's offices. He also discusses sustainability choices around aluminum cans, and the company's mission driven giveback through the Bikes for Kids Foundation, which supports at risk children. The conversation closes with Tony's outlook on CoAqua becoming a household brand within five years.

A former West Point goalie and Wall Street broker explains how packaging and taste turned CoAqua into a coconut water breakout hit.

The questions, and the answers.

You grew up in New Hartford, New York. What was life like for you as a kid and what did your family look like?

I had a good childhood with a loving mom and dad. I grew up in a family construction business, so my parents and grandparents were always working. I started helping out before I could even remember, stapling contracts and sweeping. I also played a lot of hockey growing up, which was the main focus of my childhood.

You ended up at West Point playing D1 hockey as a goaltender. What drove that decision and what did it teach you about pressure?

I wanted to serve, and my grandfather was in the military for about 30 years, so that drove it. I liked the idea of an academy. I actually left West Point after failing a drug test between freshman and senior year. I moved into a $250 a month apartment and loaded trucks at UPS for six months while figuring out my next steps.

Is it true that after West Point you went into finance at Merrill Lynch?

Yes, I sold windows, doors and siding for my family's business for about three years and grew a big territory across eastern New York. My brother-in-law got me an interview at Merrill Lynch, where I became a stockbroker, passed my Series 7 and 66, and eventually moved into private wealth management for ultra high net worth clients before joining a team at Raymond James serving business owners.

At what point did you start thinking about building something of your own?

At Raymond James I worked with a team that only dealt with business owners, so I got exposure to their balance sheets, teams and other founders, and I started feeling like I could do something like that too. My business partner Justin discovered the original CoAqua on a trip to New Zealand and brought it back for me to try, and I had this surreal vision of the brand on billboards and ringing the bell at the stock exchange. I told him let's do it.

Was there a single moment where you thought this is actually going to be really big?

We had incorporated in mid 2020 and spent over a year pitching retail buyers with basically no traction, to the point my family was joking about it at Thanksgiving. Then on December 23rd we got a distribution request email followed by an acceptance email from Sprouts Farmers Market, and we landed about 300,000 dollars in purchase orders in a single day. That was the sign we could actually succeed.

You guys are now in over 3,000 stores. How do you scale a brand that fast without losing quality?

We have strong manufacturing partners with big capabilities, and we stay in front of them constantly, even taking calls with Asia at one in the morning from my driveway. We travel to Vietnam a few times a year to meet partners in person, and we maintain very stringent quality control standards, rejecting a lot of what gets manufactured to make sure customers get a good product.

You were ranked number one in unit velocity in the west and voted top new product at Meta's vendor fair. What's driving that consumer love?

I think it's a few things. Studies always show packaging is what gets people to grab a product off the shelf, so that's huge for us. After that it's taste, which comes from quality ingredients like young green coconut water. We pasteurize for twice the normal time, which caramelizes the sugars and makes our core flavor taste like a liquid dessert, and everything else uses real juice, not concentrate.

You donate 2% of your revenue to the Bikes for Kids Foundation helping at risk kids. Why is that mission personal to you?

I cold called a sales trainer just to thank him and the conversation turned into an hour long call where he pointed me to Bikes for Kids. We go into Title One third grade classrooms with a book called Think Big, Work Hard, Be Kind, Never Give Up, and give bikes to kids who write the best essays, though everyone ends up getting one. Kids in the program graduate and go on to trade school, military or police academy at a much higher rate.