BevNology Consulting revolutionizes beverage innovation, spearheads micro-functionality trend

This profile is part of a special new Food & Beverage Insider series, #innovationnation. Look for more great features like this in the coming months.

After a 20-year stint working in R&D at The Coca-Cola Co., Louis Heinsz, president and co-founder of BevNology Consulting, felt like he was “leaving something on the table.”

“I always felt a little bit frustrated by that experience because I couldn’t really do as much as could have been done in terms of innovating in the [beverages] market,” he said. “I always felt like there was something left behind and left on the table. I wanted to be part of that business and of innovating and pushing the whole sector forward with creative ideas.”

In 2010, he co-founded BevNology Consulting, a small-scale, boutique design development firm primarily for “entrepreneurs that are doing creative, interesting things as a service.”

Today, BevNology continues to serve primarily beverage entrepreneurs with design development services. The firm also offers small-scale manufacturing capabilities and occasionally works with small beverage companies in need of R&D support.

Louis Heinsz, co-founder and president of BevNology Consulting

“The primary focus and the reason for its existence really is to take the vision of the entrepreneur and convert that into tangible products that line up with whatever their imaginations were conjuring up,” he said. “It’s primarily design and it’s all based on a perception of a consumer need.”

Since its inception, BevNology has also added to its services the capability to manufacture stick packs of powders. The commercial, yet small-scale, capabilities include blending and manufacturing stick packs and tubs. The firm also offers co-packing services for hot-fill beverages.

Single-serve powdered stick packs or pouches and tubs of dry ingredient beverage powders are rising in popularity — a trend fueled by the rise of e-commerce, Heinsz said.

“People are migrating away from the convenience of liquid bottles toward these powdered packs,” he explained. “The business model works for [e-commerce]. It’s cost effective to ship through the standard mailing channels and, of course, it’s more cost effective to get [products] up on e-commerce platforms.”

Importantly, the move toward powdered beverage mixes converges with another key trend shaping beverages: micro-functionality.

Functionality today, according to Heinsz, is getting “micro-targeted” to address smaller and narrower problems that people are addressing. “The targeting for functionality is getting narrower and narrower,” he said.

One of BevNology’s clients, VINIA, uses bioreactor technology to manufacture grape skin extract. “That ingredient has a very specific functional purpose,” Heinsz said. “It’s to make the [vascular] system in your body more flexible [and provide] more oxygen carrying capacity.”

The company is working with BevNology to design a sports performance beverage product around its ingredient.

The micro-functionality trend is further fueled by consumer resistance to drugs and medicines, Heinsz added.

“Beverage is uniquely positioned to deliver a lot of this kind of functionality in a way that lines up with people’s own attitudes about their lives and lifestyles,” he said. “I see that as being really the new frontier for beverage.”