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At Circle Beverage’s start in 2015, a team of four employees handcrafted and packaged its star product, Circle City Kombucha. Almost a decade later, there’s been a night-and-day reinvention of the operations as the Indianapolis company tackles contract work from other companies using an almost completely automated process.
The company founded by Matt Whiteside has dropped the trendy, gut-health-focused drinks in favor of packaging products on commission for other companies, also called co-packing.
He and his colleagues have revolutionized the process with automation that rivals that of much larger beverage brands and has allowed it to create a niche among newer, healthier brands.
Casey Newton said he remembers when it used to take a week to accomplish what the company can now do in about 15 minutes.
Newton started with Circle Beverage in 2019, when kombucha was still the focus. He’s now the company’s maintenance technician, but he’s worked every role from hand-filling bottles to liquid batching to supervising production.
“I’ve watched the company grow, like, 300 times, essentially, from when I started,” he said.
Whiteside said while the company doesn’t quite produce at Coca-Cola’s level, it has moved from everything being done by a human in 2019 to almost everything being done by robots.
“[The machinery] takes the empty can and fills the can with liquid and puts the top on it, boxes it, labels it, all of it,” Whiteside said. “And so what our team members are doing is, they’ve transitioned from manual-labor roles to more technically advanced roles.”
Whiteside said the company has spent millions on the mostly automated production line. That shift has allowed the company’s 30 employees to upskill to work with the technology, but he said some manual labor remains.
A $20,000 Manufacturing Readiness Grant from Conexus Indiana for a robotic can sleever, awarded in 2020, contributed to the drastic increase in production.
The can sleever, which doesn’t involve the usual screen printing or laser engraving, allows Circle Beverage to do small runs of flavors and can designs rather than requiring customers to order in bulk—an advantage in the marketplace.
“The problem was, when you get into screen-printing cans, those companies that do the screen printing require a minimum-order quantity,” Newton said. “So a lot of the smaller brands just can’t meet that quota.”
Now, those small brands can have labels printed in whatever quantity they need and pass those labels along to Circle Beverage.
Beverage industry expert Duane Stanford was surprised to learn of the automation Circle Beverage has been able to harness.
The company can leverage the can sleever to attract startups that are still experimenting with products and creating limited runs, he said.
“One of the keys to having a new brand is, you need to be able to pivot quickly,” Stanford, editor and publisher of trade publication Beverage Digest, told IBJ.
Circle focuses on working with newer, health-focused brands that use alternative sweeteners or low sugars.
It co-packs with about 10 companies at a time—a number that balances income and quality assurance, while giving leaders time to work collaboratively with customers, Whiteside said.
Newton said to improve processes at Circle Beverage, he watches the production line to determine where it could run more smoothly. He also watches online videos that market automated products to companies.
Whiteside began his career as a supply-chain associate in college at The Coca-Cola Co. in 2010. He departed a few months later to take an opportunity at Rolls-Royce, where he climbed the ladder working in supply-chain and logistics roles.
At Circle, he networks within the industry all the time, attending trade shows and discussing the prospect of using new technologies with potential customers.
Ryan Henderson, director of HardTech entrepreneurship with Conexus, said what stood out about Circle Beverage as a possible recipient of a Manufacturing Readiness Grant was Whiteside’s creative entrepreneurship and experience.
“We like to see entrepreneurship in manufacturing, and so Matt in particular has had engineering roles at large corporations, including Rolls-Royce. He’s been all over the planet with those roles and got anchored in Indianapolis but got the bug to be an entrepreneur,” Henderson said.
The program with Conexus is intended to bulk up small and medium-size companies, like Circle, that wish to expand manufacturing capabilities.
Circle Beverage always did some co-packing for other companies, even when its main business was making kombucha—a vinegar concoction focused on creating a healthy environment for gut bacteria. The company at one point sold a line of kombuchas in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri and Tennessee, in addition to Indiana.
But in 2020, the pandemic put a strain on resources, forcing a painful 180-degree pivot to co-packing only.
“It was the genesis of the company, so it was absolutely hard,” Whiteside said. “But I think our vision for Circle was always more than a brand; it was to be a great company.”
Newton said being able to get artistic with flavors and “literally drinking fruits of your labor at the end of the day” is satisfying, but now the company can impart that knowledge and assistance to other beverage producers.
“That aligns with our goal of wanting to bring healthier alternatives to the market, outside of soda,” he said.•
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