For an emerging beverage brand, getting onto retail shelves is only half the battle. Keeping products properly merchandised across dozens or hundreds of accounts can quickly become an operational headache. Missing price tags, out-of-stock shelves, misplaced products, and neglected displays can all slow sell-through, yet hiring dedicated field teams in every market is out of reach for most startups.

Sebastian Smuts, co-founder of Bodhi, is building a solution for brands modeled on the gig economy. Bodhi operates as a national network of vetted gig workers, connecting brands with local talent through partnerships with staffing agencies across the country. The model works similarly to TaskRabbit, matching brands with on-the-ground workers to handle retail tasks in markets where the brand has no permanent presence.

Most bootstrapped brands focus their marketing resources on the top 20% of retail accounts that generate the strongest returns. Smuts says using Bodhi to build out coverage for the remaining 80% of accounts is where the model becomes a growth tool rather than just a maintenance one. Rather than committing resources to markets that haven’t yet proven themselves, brands can use Bodhi to minimally service those markets and then decide where to invest.

Start Small and Build Out

The instinct for most early-stage brands is to say yes to every distribution opportunity, which tends to spread presence so thin that nothing compounds. Smuts believes in the mirroring principle as a GTM strategy: a consumer needs roughly seven touchpoints with a brand before awareness converts to a purchase. If your product is in one coffee shop across town, getting to seven exposures depends entirely on that consumer walking in repeatedly. But if your product is in the coffee shop, the corner store, and the neighborhood bar within a few blocks, those touchpoints naturally stack across a single day.

He suggests picking a dense, walkable sub-market, like East Austin, and working it until the brand is unavoidable there. Start with the easy accounts, push through to the harder ones, and don’t move to West, South, or North Austin until the current one is locked in. A brand that owns South Austin across 40 or 50 accounts, even at modest per-account volume, can be moving 300-plus cases a month within six months, a stable base to replicate elsewhere.

If you have capital, go everywhere at once. If you don’t, the more concentrated and consistent your effort, the faster a modest account base compounds into a real market.

How it Works

According to Smuts, Bodhi can typically deploy a team member to most stores within 48 hours to provide a store audit, producing a detailed picture of the retail environment, whether that means a single brand’s shelf, a competitor set, or the full category. These itemized audits tend to surface issues such as a missing price tag, a promotion with no supporting materials in-store, fewer facings than expected, or a product that shows as in-stock but isn’t actually on the shelf. A product can’t succeed if consumers can’t find it, and brands can’t fix problems they don’t know exist.

Once a problem is identified, Bodhi’s gig worker network can be dispatched to fix it, often the same day. If the audit flags a missing price tag that should read $9.99, the platform immediately pushes a task to a nearby worker to go back in and correct it.

Bodhi runs on a flexible per-visit-based subscription model. Brands purchase a block of visits per month, whether 50 or 500 or more, and deploy them however and wherever they need. A brand can concentrate all its visits in California one month, shift half to Florida the next, or spread them across several states at once.

“We are completely nimble, we have access everywhere, we can do anything at the drop of a hat,” says Smuts. “And it’s all customizable; your audits, your surveys, and your due diligence, essentially, we will custom-create in your format.”

In-Store Tactics

Smuts has witnessed many in-store marketing tactics. He believes sampling remains one of the most effective retail marketing tactics. For hemp beverage brands that cannot offer infused product tastings, an uninfused version can support the industry’s widely used “sips-to-lips” strategy.

On paid placements like end caps, Smuts sees benefits despite the high costs of participation. A mid-aisle position is a destination, reached only by shoppers already looking for something specific. An end cap catches people who may have encountered the brand elsewhere but haven’t added it to their list, and the brand-exclusive presentation tends to convert. The stronger play, he says, is aligning a promotional discount with the end cap display at the same time. The display’s visibility, combined with a price reduction, lowers the barrier to a first trial, and in a hemp beverage, that first trial tends to stick. He cautions against buying end cap space without a clear plan, given the investment involved.

As far as merchandising, Smuts is a proponent of blocking, grouping all of a brand’s SKUs together rather than letting them scatter across different displays. Most retailers default to brand blocking anyway, but it’s worth negotiating for if they don’t. A concentrated visual block draws the eye in a way that isolated facings don’t, and can become the first place a shopper’s eye lands.

The AI Component

Bodhi integrates a brand’s sales data, sampling, geofencing, direct-to-consumer, and distributor engagement data into its proprietary AI platform. Each brand receives a custom analysis of its specific audit history, account interactions, and field outcomes.

The platform is designed to identify patterns between display placement, promotional timing, and retail performance, then suggest similar opportunities in other markets. From there, the platform can cross-reference what’s working in one geography against underperforming accounts with similar dynamics elsewhere, flagging likely quick wins and recommending where to deploy audit visits next.

Beyond Distribution

Distribution may open doors, but execution determines whether a product stays on the shelf. For emerging hemp beverage brands, the challenge is rarely getting into a handful of stores. The challenge is maintaining visibility, pricing accuracy, merchandising standards, and consumer awareness across an expanding footprint. As brands enter new markets with lean teams and limited budgets, field execution is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a core part of running a retail beverage business.