H2coco, an Australian company which offers coconut water is planning to add watermelons to their product line with the launch of their new business H2melon. Founder David Freeman explains where his inspiration for the idea came from:
"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.
