Ritchie

“It is sometimes easier to know what you don’t want, than what you do want in life” says the founder of Ritchie. Signs of a midlife crisis are not immediately apparent in him; yet he knew from his well-paid director’s job at Pepsico that he could not do it for another 20 years. The confrontation with a photo from his childhood – in shorts next to the tubs of lemonade bottled in his parents’ brewery – and the current trend towards craft products kicked off the revival of family lemonade. Still, Jan had once decided not to take over the brewery, and take a different path. But now all the ingredients were present for the new Ritchie: the momentum, the appetite and, above all, a fantastic product. “Ritchie was already in my father’s range, and as a marketer I can say that it is a name that works in all languages. Moreover, it had a nice logo and a nice bottle to boot. All I had to do was add another layer to it with my experience to adapt to the zeitgeist,” says Jan Verlinden.

Zeitgeist

That zeitgeist plays all to his advantage. Not only consumers are begging for more authenticity, the retail sector itself is also offering more opportunities for quality home-grown products. Jan is only too happy to fill this new niche, but he also realises that even for someone with his background, it won’t be a walk in the park: “I went into it with the awareness that it could go wrong. The chances of it flopping are still higher than the chances of it being a success.”

Anchor points

Besides his pitch at KBC Start-it and the guidance process at Unizo, he considers applying for a Start Loan at PMV/z as one of the decisive moments towards entrepreneurship: “You look at that file in a very rational way and confront you with pertinent questions. Because you may have all that experience at Pepsico, BAT and Mars, but a lot of things still remain a blind spot.” The loss of a Chinese supplier of glass bottles that was replaced by a Dutch one, but with the minimum order volumes suddenly being much higher, suddenly additional financing had to be put on the table. The Start Loan was the most suitable at the time. And then when Ritchie was included in the range of the 36 Belgian Délitraiteur shops. “Then I lived on a cloud for a week” says Jan.

Export

In the long term, Jan has a double ambition. The first is to become part of Belgium’s culinary heritage in the foreseeable future: “In five years’ time, if you ask someone to name a Belgian lemonade, I hope they say Ritchie.” With fame, he aims to fulfil his second ambition: to bet on exports. “We have a tradition in Belgian beers and chocolate. I would also like to add a Belgian lemonade to that culinary tradition, with the intention of hopefully getting abroad one day.”