Here are some instances of VOLT in the press since 2007.  Click through the images to see them in their full size.

Beverage World’s original interview can be found here.

“It takes some guts to take on the big players in the field, and Owen Ryan did just that when he founded the High Voltage brand in 1997. With two products sporting the name Volt—one designed to compete against Mountain Dew, the other, Gatorade—the company generated a buzz thanks to its high-performance energy drinks and carbonated sodas (the latter of which packs 30 percent more caffeine than traditional CSDs) and its slightly unconventional approach. Company president Bill Sipper believes traditional media—billboards and radio—doesn’t work for its 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Instead, social media virally spreads the word. Volt is available in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida and the metro New York area; it’ll arrive in South Carolina, the mid-Atlantic region and the Midwest next year.

Beverage World: Since Volt was launched in 2005, how have things been going?
Bill Sipper: We started with citrus and diet citrus [sodas] and the high performance sports drinks. We’re doing well with the carbonated sodas; we now have them in tropical mango, blue melon, pineapple and fruit punch and the sports drinks in lemon-lime, orange, tropical punch and blue raspberry.

BW: How are you tackling the big players with just six employees?
BS: (Laughs). Very carefully. Actually, we have seven, including interns. We have the hardest working staff in the beverage industry, and a really good distribution strategy. We are going after some high-density population markets and some high consumption of Gatorade and Mountain Dew markets.

BW: So it’s just a matter of time before people find you?
BS: Brands don’t get built overnight. We’re in this for the long haul. What separates us is that we have a better hydration product, with B vitamins.

BW: What sort of things have you been doing to get the word out about Volt?
BS: We’ve been sending cases of Volt to the White House, after reading that the president’s staff is exhausted. We wanted to make sure they’re making the right decisions and have enough energy.

BW: Do you have a motto or mantra you repeat in the morning?
BS: We’re kind of the antithesis of that. It’s all about getting the message out in nontraditional ways. Every little bit helps, just as long as we stay focused.”

Below is an article written by Matt Casey at Beverage Spectrum Magazine. Here is a link to the original article.

“When Owen Ryan explained his plan to move to North Carolina and found High Voltage Beverages with the intent of taking on Mountain Dew and Gatorade, his own doctor told him to get his head examined.

And why not? His business plan left him hawking two beverages types – citrus soda and sports drinks – in declining categories, both of which pit him in direct competition against PepsiCo, a company so large and powerful that Ryan compared it to Sauron, the bad guy from the Lord of the Rings. To top it off, Ryan was moving away from New York City, one of America’s most proven staging grounds for new beverages, to instead establish his Volt brand in the hills of the Southeast.

But – despite appearances – Ryan’s plan may make sense. He insists that, through positioning the brand as a rebellious upstart, Volt can slice off a piece of Gatorade and Mountain Dew’s combined $10 billion-plus yearly revenue. Both brands, he says, are losing their grip on younger consumers, and that’s where he is staking his claim. To that end, he’s built his base in North Carolina, brought in industry veteran Bill Sipper, adjusted the product and marketing plan to better address his target teenage boy consumers and, from there they’ve been able to gain distribution back in New York City. The next phase of his plan, he said, is to fight his way westward like a 21st century guerilla.

Ryan dreams that Volt will reach California one day, but whatever product bearing the Volt brand name arrives on the West Coast will bear little resemblance to his original concept. His 1997 application for the Volt trademark called the product an electrolyte replacement soft drink. He intended to label the products at different intensities, such as 6-Volt, 9-Volt and 12-Volt, he said. But that idea fell away, and, while Volt still produces sports drinks, it has shifted focus to energy sodas.

That shift in focus preceded a shift in marketing strategy. When Ryan first rolled out the product, he tried to reach his consumers over the radio. Volt’s ad portrayed old men reminiscing about drinking Mountain Dew, and set up Volt as an alternative to your grandfather’s soda. Ryan also finagled some TV spots on ESPN in Northern Florida. But while he was looking for the right crowd, he was doing so in the wrong place. Now, Volt has turned its attention to new media – an idea captain by Sipper, who has unleashed an army of work-for-free college interns to build up the brand’s online profile.

Starting in the Spring semester of 2009, Sipper unleashed his college minions on Facebook and Myspace –two of the internet’s most popular social networking sites. His team recruited followers, posted videos about Volt, and manned sampling events. Now his first team has moved on, and Volt is on its second crop of interns – including one in New York, to service Volt’s new territory.

“We’re constantly using college interns and I think it’s important that we continue to do that,” Sipper said. “They’re young. They get it. We don’t.”

But while Sipper has changed the brand’s approach to marketing, he’s kept Ryan’s original long-term plan. High Voltage Beverages will use New York as a foothold, Sipper said, but will then move westward state by state. Along the way, he said, the company will focus his efforts on markets that have a demonstrated penchant for citrus sodas.

He’ll also try to garner consumer interest through a constantly-evolving selection of flavors. In the last year, Volt has added four new flavors: Pineapple, Fruit Punch, Tropical Mango and Blue Melon. The brand now boasts six SKUs, and Sipper said he has a two-year inventory of ideas that will rotate in as old flavors rotate out.

If that sounds like what Mountain Dew has been doing with its limited-edition flavors like Game Fuel, Livewire and Pitch Black, that’s because it is. Harrison Krouse, general manager for North Carolina distributor RC Asheville, said that shows that Volt is keeping close tabs on its biggest competitor. And he expects Volt to continue to mirror Mountain Dew’s moves – not identically, he said, but approximately. If Mountain Dew comes out with a beverage in a particular color, he expects to see a new Volt flavor with the same color. It’s worth noting that Mountain Dew’s Game Fuel currently comes in blue and orange versions. Volt recently added a blue flavor, Blue Melon, and debuted its orange-colored Tropical Mango earlier this year.

That kind of variation, Krouse said, benefits the brands, the stores and the carbonated soft drink market as a whole. Most customers continually visit the same stores, he said. When coolers remain the same, they can lose a consumers interest almost to the point of practical invisibility, he said. Introducing a little variety on a regular schedule keeps a door from being stagnant.

So far, he said, that strategy has served Volt well in his territory.

“It’s not taking the market by storm yet,” he said, “[but] we’re happy with it.”

The next leg of the Volt plan puts the product in New York City, in Duane Reade pharmacy stores, which are known among beverage insiders as a proving ground for emerging beverages. It’s in these stores that Ryan and Sipper will find out if their brand is tough enough for the big city.

One point in its favor is that the brand has already proven tough enough to take on a PepsiCo legal challenge. Shortly after Volt appeared on the market, PepsiCo unleashed its lawyers on posters Ryan created for a Volt advertising campaign. The posters featured two crashing football helmets – one with a Volt Logo and one with a Gatorade logo – and the title “Let the Games Begin.”

PepsiCo issued a request asking High Voltage Beverages to cease using the posters on the grounds that they could create confusion, leading consumers to believe “that the Volt product is related to Gatorade.”

Ryan rejected the charge, telling PepsiCo’s lawyers “I can’t imagine any sensible and sober consumer coming up with preposterous conclusion.” He also offered to host a public, one-on-one, Volt versus Gatorade taste challenge.

PepsiCo didn’t write back.

And how’s this for scrappy? While PepsiCo brought the battle to Volt, Volt recently brought the battle to Coca-Cola itself. Shortly after Sipper took over as president, High Voltage Beverage filed a lawsuit against Coca-Cola over its Vault brand of high-caffeine citrus soda. The suit alleges that Vault sounds so similar to Volt that it amounts to unfair competition because it creates confusion in the marketplace – confusion made all the worse because Vault has performed so poorly since its launch in 2005.

Krouse said he’s seen first-hand evidence of that confusion. While trying to build the Volt brand in his distribution area, store owners have told him that they already tried carrying Volt and it didn’t stick. But they carried Vault, not Volt.

The suit is still pending, but, should it succeed, it could give Volt a boost, as it asks Coca-Cola to run a corrective campaign explaining that Volt and Vault are two different products.

Even without that kind of boost, the brand may eventually make its way to California.

“Quite honestly, I think it will take a number of years,” Sipper said, but Ryan has hope. Sprite, he noted, first appeared in the 1960s, but didn’t reach Los Angeles until the early 1980s. Today, things move a little faster, and Sipper has hard-wired the brand to the internet, one of the strongest and fastest growing forces of our time. With that plan, maybe it’ll take Volt less than two decades to go coast to coast. And, by the time it does, maybe it will carve off a significant sliver of Mountain Dew’s business.”

CHARLOTTE – High Voltage Beverages has added three new flavors to its VOLT line of carbonated soft drinks.

The new flavors of Mango, Pineapple and Fruit Punch join Orange and Tropical Punch as refreshing new VOLT tastes in the soft drink cooler.

Like the original citrus shock VOLT, these new soft drinks are powered by taurine, ginseng, guarana and caffeine to give drinkers the charge they crave.

“Our Orange and Tropical Punch flavors have proven very popular with the highly active young people who are our customers,” said Bill Sipper, president of High Voltage Beverages.

“The original VOLT citrus shock soda continues to be the cornerstone of the brand,” Sipper said. “But our customers like variety. By adding Mango, Pineapple and Fruit Punch, we are broadening their choice, which is always a good thing.”

All VOLT soft drinks are distributed through convenience stores in 20-ounce bottles.

CHARLOTTE (Nov. 1, 2008) – Alarmed over the reported flagging energies of the McCain presidential campaign, VOLT soft drinks has begun delivering cases of its product to McCain offices in several states.

  “We’re an underdog brand and even though 54.2% of our employees have already voted for Sen. Barack Obama, we’ve got to be true to our roots and help the underdog,” said VOLT founder Owen Ryan.

 VOLT, a line of energized high performance sports drinks and high octane sodas, is quickly becoming the brand of choice among athletes and other active young people.

 “Since VOLT works so well to energize our consumers, we thought it was a natural to bring some energy back to a presidential campaign that, according to some sources, is losing steam as we go into the last weekend before the election,” said Bill Sipper, president of High Voltage Beverages, maker of VOLT.

 Toward that end, Sipper and VOLT founder Owen Ryan delivered cases of both VOLT high performance sports drinks (which competes with Gatorade) and VOLT citrus shock soda (which competes with Mountain Dew) to McCain headquarters in North Carolina, New York and New Jersey.

“As the new kid on the block, VOLT competes against mighty Mountain Dew and Gatorade, and is being outspent 100 to 1 by those overdog brands, so we had to face the music and endorse the old guy, because he’s the underdog now. Besides they really need VOLT’s energy now according to recent media reports,” Ryan said.

As an additional contribution to the election effort, Ryan said “North Carolina is a battleground state and a free VOLT soda will be available at VOLT’s offices on Election Day to any voter who needs an extra kick in the butt to get to the polls.” VOLT’s headquarters is located at 6000 Fairview Road, Suite 1200, Charlotte, NC.

“VOLT wants to encourage everyone to vote,” Sipper said. “That’s why we joined with Guitar Hero, MySpace.com and several other nationally known brands to sponsor the Ultimate College Bowl, a voter registration drive put together by Whytuesday.org.”

Or, as Ryan put it in more flamboyant terms:

“As election day and a new choice looms, give us your tired, your poor, your discouraged and fatigued huddled masses who just happen to be blindly loyal to the traditions of the current beverage industry establishment – incumbents – Mountain Dew and Gatorade. We know you are yearning to break free of the underdog position and be re-energized and seek victory.” Find out more at www.drinkvolt.com

VOLT soft drinks join Guitar Hero, MySpace.com and several other nationally known brands to sponsor the Ultimate College Bowl, a voter registration drive put together by Whytuesday.org. 
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Owen Ryan, founder and creative director of High Volt Beverages, knows a thing or two about taking on the big guys and coming out on top.
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Marketing a fledgling sports beverage line takes a lot of time and dedication.
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Local businessman puts his sports drink up against the big boys.
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