In the early 90s, Amy Taylor had dreams of Olympic gold as an elite track and field athlete.
Back then, she never could have predicted she’d spend the bulk of her career in the beverage business. But after moving to Atlanta (where the Olympics were to take place in 1996) and working for a short time for the Atlanta Hawks, it wasn’t long before she started to work for Red Bull, just as the now-famous brand was beginning to define the energy drink business in the early 2000s.
“My stepdad warned me not to take the job because he had never heard of the company,” she recalled. “And I said, I think there’s something special here. I took my Gen X assignment of creating this Red Bull brand with an American lens on it for the American audience.”
Taylor would spent over 20 years at Red Bull, eventually serving as president and chief marketing officer, where her time there shaped her philosophy on building iconic brands.
“What I learned there was about creating a hot brand and sort of becoming a part of or creating communication within and around the zeitgeist,” she said. “Instead of trying to go fast and hard and drive distribution and awareness at all costs… the brand was building relationships.”
Now, as CEO of Zevia, Taylor is applying those lessons to a different kind of beverage mission. “We are going to materially reduce sugar consumption among the population that we serve,” she said. “If a family switches from carbonated soft drinks to Zevia, they can cut their sugar consumption in half with one move.”
Known for its zero-sugar sodas made with stevia, Taylor says Zevia aims to provide an affordable, clean-label alternative for families. She’s also focused on evolving the brand’s taste and product innovation. “There are 20 molecules in the stevia leaf that can sweeten a product,” she said. “Our job is to go extract the ones that perform best within the beverage. For the part of the population that have had a negative experience with stevia, they’re going to need to come back and try Zevia. And I think they’re going to be blown away.”
Like most food brands nowadays, Zevia is embracing AI. Taylor says they are doing it with a “hacker’s approach,” which means encouraging every department to experiment with new use cases.
“Each department head challenges their entire team, not just their senior leadership, to come up with new use cases for AI,” Taylor said. From creating digital consumer prototypes to enhancing operations and finance workflows, Taylor said the company is exploring numerous applications. “We use AI to challenge our thinking and our assumptions. We want to grow faster because of our ability to leverage AI with the people that we have in the building today.”
Part of Taylor and Zevia’s push to leverage innovations like AI is because the company operates lean (fewer than 100 employees), and new technologies can help them punch above their weight.
“We are small and focused,” she said. “And we are scrappy as hell.”
You can listen to my full conversation with Taylor below and can connect with her (and ask her questions) at the Smart Kitchen Summit later this month.
