About Us
Our Founding Story
The formation of CaskAide LLC can be traced back to a Rutgers Business School (RBS) Marketing Assignment. The founders, in the middle of their Executive MBA program, had been discussing a home brewing recipe and working on a small brew in progress. For a marketing presentation assignment a list of companies to study from automotive, apparel, retail and brewing were available to chose from. Since the topic of the day had been craft beer brewing, we selected a craft brewer to research. The semester continued through a series of 3 presentations each incorporating the business skills we were accumulating in marketing research.
The following semester this worked cascaded (pun intended) into a full research project involving in depth interviews, market analysis and research and a consultancy with a regional craft brewer. A few Beers of course were sampled in the process of this work and the project and subject matter began to grow on us. As we continued our project with the mission of identifying opportunities to grow the beer market for our target brewery, one of the opportunities we identified along the way was to provide consumers with another packaging option similar to box wine that did not currently exist for beer. Recognizing the compound annual growth rate of box wine and its acceptance by consumers in the market, despite the potential stigma of packaging that did not include a bottle and a cork, it seemed natural that such a packaging model would likewise receive acceptance by beer drinkers in the market as it would provide benefits to the consumers as well as throughout the supply chain.
Our MBA team was just thinking of this as a novel concept initially, but recognized that no one else was working on this yet. It seemed plausible and many “thought experiments” were performed, but developing such a box for beer would be full of challenges since, unlike wine, beer is carbonated. It would take time, energy and a fair amount of investment capital to do this as we continued to think about the prospects.
During the course of our studies an RBS Business Plan Competition with a sizable cash prize was promoted and we jumped on the chance to compete. In the process of building our plan, the founders dove in head first and began company formation, patent filing preparation, product development through a series of prototypes and began cultivation of our social media footprint.
http://myrbs.business.rutgers.edu/case-competitions/business-plan
March 1st, 2019 we presented our business plan in the competition and placed in the 2nd prize tier level.
With this cash award now contributing necessary capital for machining, measuring and research equipment, we are now in a full development cycle to produce an affordable and commercially feasible alternative packaging for the beer industry.
Stay tuned for more updates!
Mission statement – Dedicated to the development and commercialization of unmet packaging needs for the beer, wine and spirits industry.
The Founders –
• Phil Keyes LinkedIn
- Analytical Chemist; MBA, Supply Chain Management, LSS-GB Certified
- 25+ years in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research and Development
- 10 years of home craft Brewing including 2nd place in the “War of the Worts”
• Doug Hansen
- Marine Affairs/Political Science; MBA Finance
- 20 years in Marine Terminal Management
- Lived and worked across multiple cultures/countries/regions in the World
- Responsible for Strategy in a company generating nearly $1B in Revenue handling almost 25% of North American container trade
• Mike Kim
- Marketing; MBA, Supply Chain Management, LSS-GB Certified
- 13 years of Automotive Industry Product Management, Sales & Marketing
- Managed over $70M business in revenue in two step distribution model
- Beginner Brewer