AU company to offer watermelon water, predict $4m in sales
"I was at the Burning Man festival and I was given a cold-pressed watermelon water and at the time was amazed by it," Freeman says. A year and a half later, Freeman has created H2melon. It has the same attributes as H2coco: pure, no added sugar, concentrate-free but with a long shelf life.
Freeman says it was a difficult journey to produce the watermelon water, in particular to achieve the long shelf life. He needed to find exactly the right type of watermelon – and there are more than 30 types grown in Thailand alone.
Freeman's H2coco business is on track to turn over $20 million this year. The serial entrepreneur has high hopes for H2melon, which he is expecting to record $4 million in sales, and thinks introducing watermelon water to the Australian market will be easier than it was with coconut water.
"When I first launched in 2010, nobody knew what coconut water was, nobody knew that they wanted it, it was a pretty hard sell," he says. "I feel over the first three or four years of doing that was slow and then the category gained a lot more momentum overseas and also the decline in sugar-filled beverages helped."
And unlike coconut water, Freeman says watermelon is a familiar taste. "It's very rare to find someone who doesn't like the taste of watermelon," he says.
source: smh.com.au
