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Co-pack/Co-man Bets on Beverage Market Transformation

Wisconsin-based beverage co-packer Octopi positions itself to address a rapidly changing beverage market, as well as a shift from bottles to cans, with two canning lines, the newest of which will produce up to 1,200 cans/min in seven sizes.

Octopi installed one of the first Innofill Can C models, designed by KHS for smaller beverage companies, with an integrated filler and seamer.
Octopi installed one of the first Innofill Can C models, designed by KHS for smaller beverage companies, with an integrated filler and seamer.

It took Mexico City, Mexico-born entrepreneur Isaac Showaki 30 years, six types of visas, and multiple jobs in the brewing industry to realize his dream of becoming an American citizen and launching his own highly successful beverage business, Octopi. What he learned, as he shared at a 2020 Tedx Talk—“Failing My Way into the American Dream”—was that overcoming failure not only requires persistence, but also the willingness and imagination to try new strategies. According to Showaki, the lesson is, “Don’t try and try again. Try, and if you get stuck, try something else.”

Ever since his first visit to the U.S. when he was four, Showaki was determined to make America his home. After studying at Boston University, he had a string of consulting jobs that cemented his love for the brewing industry and that brought him back and forth to the states. In 2011, while on an investor’s visa, he co-founded the nation’s first Latin craft brewery in Chicago. Upon leaving the company and after living in the U.S. for 13 years, Showaki was preparing to return to Mexico when he met his wife—an American citizen—and got his sixth and final visa and then his green card.

Following his bad experiences working with contract brewers, Isaac Showaki built Octopi with a focus on quality and customer service.Following his bad experiences working with contract brewers, Isaac Showaki built Octopi with a focus on quality and customer service.Now a part of the American Dream, Showaki opened Octopi in 2014 in Waunakee, Wis., just outside of Madison. The business, initially offering contract manufacturing and contract packaging services for beer brands only, started with a staff of six, including Showaki, and shipped 150,000 cases of product its first year. Today Octopi has 150 full-time employees, with 30 open positions, ships up to 3.5 million cases of beverage products per year, or 250,000 barrels (bbls) in brewing parlance, and handles virtually any type of beverage that can be packaged in a bottle, keg, or can.

The company is in the process of nearly quadrupling its footprint, with a plant expansion that will house a custom-built canning line. Its current packaging processes include a glass bottling line, a canning line, and a kegging line—all from KHS Group. With its end-to-end services and current and future capabilities, Showaki says Octopi is ideally positioned and “right-sized” to help its customers succeed in the rapidly changing beverage industry.

Bad experiences lead to brilliant business strategy

Just as Showaki learned to switch gears in his personal life when confronted with challenges in achieving citizenship, so too did he take a new direction in business after obstacles he faced during his time in Chicago. As Showaki shares, when he started the craft brewery in Chicago, he knew a lot about the craft beer business, but not much about craft beer production. So, he sought help from the contract brewing industry. What he hoped to find was a dependable partner with expertise, but what he found was “a nightmare.”

“There were very few co-packers, and for the ones that were available, their quality was horrendous,” says Showaki. “The packaging was not what we wanted, and the pricing was terrible. I thought I was going to be able to choose one co-packer and grow with them, but the way it turned out, I had to scramble for volume and capacity. I was working with eight co-packers at a time getting anywhere from a hundred cases, all the way to 3,000 cases per batch. The co-packers were either too small or too large, and the quality was insane—it was low, low, low.

“It was like they couldn’t care less about me as a client. They would push me from the schedule, cancel me without telling me, and I had to pay extra. It was just bad experience, after bad experience, after bad experience. And I always said if I had to leave the company, I’d open a good co-packer that focuses on the client and quality. And that’s where the idea for Octopi started—from having these really bad experiences.”

As Octopi’s website explains, the octopus possesses qualities that symbolize the company’s objectives in the world of beverages. Among them is to be the client’s “extra limb,” helping them to grow their business. Continues the site, “Our objective is to tailor our services to our clients’ needs. From producing high-quality beverages for new brands and developing their marketing strategy to guiding existing brands in their expansion plans and distribution selection.”

Octopi can create beverage recipes, provide consulting and brand development expertise, source materials and ingredients, and aid with merchandising, warehousing, and distribution, among other services, in addition to product manufacturing and packaging.


Watch video   Watch this video from PACK EXPO Connects on the growth of contract packaging through 2025.

As Showaki explains, Octopi is at “the right size,” or the middle spot. “We’re not small, but we’re not gigantic,” he says. “That’s where we really, really shine. We do whatever the client wants. We have small clients that just want to go straight co-packing. They’ll tell us, ‘We’ll send you all the product and all the raw materials and all the packaging, you just put it together,’ and we’re like, ‘Great.’ And we have larger clients who’ll say, ‘You know what? It’s very hard for us to deal with inventory in our systems or SAP or Oracle. We want you to buy everything for us and just charge us for it.’ And we’re like, ‘Great. We’ll do that for you.’”

Another quality of the octopus that Octopi shares is that “just like an octopus, Octopi is in constant motion, adapting to the needs of the industry,” says its website. It adds, “We have the ability to move with market demands and trends to meet the needs of our clients.”

The current “trend” in beverages is complete transformation, according to Showaki. “If you ask anyone right now, the amount of innovation that’s coming out of the beverage industry has never been like this before,” he says. “Where 20 years ago, you used to have milk, orange juice, soda, water, and coffee, and that was it, now there are probably hundreds of categories.

“I believe the market is going to become far more segmented. The beverage market is still going to grow, but now there will be hundreds of different categories you can play in.”

Sensing a decline in the craft beer industry around four years ago, Octopi made significant investments in more processing equipment and capabilities in order to change the focus of the company from being a contract brewer to a beverage co-packer. Today just 30% of its business is beer.

Says Showaki, “Right now we do beer, non-alcoholic beer, hard seltzers, ready-to-drink beverages, craft cocktails, carbonated soft drinks, and adaptogens, and we’ve been playing with CBD and hemp products. The only beverages we don’t do are any dairy products or wild yeast fermentation, like kombucha. But we’re willing to tackle any project that’s exciting and has good volume. We’re willing to take a look at it and see if we can make it work.”

Lately Octopi has attracted the attention of a number of multinationals that want to test the waters—no pun intended—with new products, but don’t want to make multi-million dollar investments unless the products are successful. Octopi’s right-size positioning is ideal for these types of launches.

Investing in the future of cans

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