W hen Pongsakorn Pongsak was growing up in Thailand, his preferred cooling drink was fresh coconut water. Widely sold by street vendors, it’s extracted from young, green coconuts that are cultivated in abundance in the tropical country. But when he traveled overseas as an adult, Pongsakorn looked in vain for that taste of home. The fruitless search ignited a business idea: packaging Thai coconut water for overseas markets.
“Our coconuts in Thailand have a lot of aroma. So I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t we bring the good ones to the world?’” says the 45-year-old founder of General Beverage, in a video interview from the company’s Bangkok headquarters. Today, his IF brand of bottled coconut water, launched 12 years ago, is sold overseas through General Beverage subsidiary IFBH—an acronym derived from Innovative Food and Beverages—a company he runs as CEO.
IF has become the top-selling coconut water brand in mainland China, the company’s biggest market. Shanghai-based China Insights Industry Consultancy pegs IFBH’s market share there at over a third—28% from IF and 6% from Innococo, a coconut water drink it touts as a healthier alternative to conventional sports drinks. The two brands compete against a dozen-odd players such as local Chinese brand Delgarden, which also sources its coconut water from Thailand, and has a market share of under 5%. Other rivals include homegrown Qingshang Drink as well as American brand Vita Coco and Thai beverage company Malee group’s Malee Coco.
Pongsakorn is confident that IF can continue to stay on top. “When people think about coconut water, IF comes up automatically,” he says. “We want to keep our brand reputation at that level.” In 2024, the company’s sales surged 80% to $158 million, while net profit nearly doubled to $33 million. IFBH attributed the jump to buoyant demand for its drinks in China, which accounted for 97% of revenue last year. (Privately held General Beverage, of which Pongsakorn owns 91%, had revenue of 3.5 billion baht ($108 million) and net profit of 101 million baht in the same period, according to a filing with Thailand’s Commerce Ministry.)
Emboldened by his Chinese success, Pongsakorn is eyeing broader expansion. In June, he successfully listed IFBH on the Hong Kong stock exchange, raising $145 million. The IPO attracted a swathe of cornerstone investors including Black Dragon, an investment fund backed by Soopakij Chearavanont, chairman of Thai agribusiness-to-telecoms conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group, as well as UBS and a fund affiliated with Chinese VC firm HongShan.
“Beyond execution, the company’s well-defined strategy, deep understanding of consumer preferences, and ability to leverage Thailand’s unique coconut advantage to build a globally competitive brand stood out,” says Anisa Keeratiworanan, director of private equity at pre-IPO investor Fullerton Fund Management, a unit of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, over email.
The Thai CEO retains a 60% stake worth $700 million, which makes him one of Thailand’s wealthiest. (The minimum net worth to qualify for this year’s list of Thailand’s 50 richest was $420 million.) Reaching this personal net worth milestone hasn’t slaked Pongsakorn’s thirst for growth and he plans to deploy some of the IPO proceeds to expand IF in markets beyond China.
Pongsakorn’s ambition seems well-timed. With consumers becoming increasingly health-conscious, plant-based drinks, such as coconut water, has been one of the fastest-growing segments in the $1.1 trillion global soft drinks industry. According to U.K. research firm Euromonitor International, global retail sales of such drinks grew over 10% on an annual compounded basis between 2018 and 2024 to $4 billion, outpacing the soft drinks industry average of 6.6% over the same period. With its high content of natural electrolytes, coconut water has become popular as a low-sugar rehydrating alternative to sports drinks such as PepsiCo’s Gatorade.
For starters, Pongsakorn says, he will aim to grow IF’s footprint in the U.S. and Australia, where it barely has a toehold. The two countries accounted for a miniscule percentage of the company’s $158 million revenue for 2024. “The idea of expanding beyond China highlights IFBH’s ambition to be a global brand,” says Nathanael Lim, Singapore-based beverage insights manager at Euromonitor.
IFBH was able to get on top in China because it “came in the right place at the right time.”
Pongsakorn sees “a huge opportunity” in the U.S., the world’s largest coconut water market with retail sales of $1.4 billion for 2024. While IFBH wouldn’t elaborate on how it plans to navigate the 19% tariff imposed by the U.S. on imports from Thailand, making inroads into a mature market implies big potential but also a challenge for IFBH, says Elsie Sheng, an analyst at Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA, which coordinated IFBH’s IPO. Entrenched players in the U.S. include Vita Coco, which is backed by celebrities such as Madonna and Demi Moore, and imports its coconut water from Latin America and Asia.
Vita Coco’s dominant position has so far been unassailable despite onslaughts from beverage giants Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. In 2013, Coca-Cola acquired Zico, then the second-largest brand in the U.S., but sold it back to its founder seven years later after a period of declining sales. PepsiCo’s portfolio included the then third-largest coconut water brand, O.N.E., until 2021 when it divested part of its juice business, retaining Brazilian coconut water brand Kero Coco.
To grab shelf-space in American super-markets, it’s crucial for IFBH to find the right distribution partners, says Euromonitor’s Lim. He also suggests that IFBH, which gets almost all its coconut water from Thailand (with a small amount from Vietnam), should consider diversifying its sourcing base to avoid potential supply chain disruptions.
Pongsakorn counters that he may consider tapping other Southeast Asian countries as IFBH expands, but for now, Thailand will remain the primary coconut water supplier. He would like to stick to offering his “Thai taste to the globe” as a way to distinguish IF from Vita Coco, which sources from a global network that includes Brazil, Sri Lanka and several Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand. Further down the road, Pongsakorn says he will introduce drink variations suited to local preferences in both the U.S. and Australia, adding that it’s too early to provide details.
For his new forays, Pongsakorn could also draw upon his experience in China, which is the third-largest market for coconut water after the U.S. and Brazil, according to Euromonitor. He acknowledges that IF’s success in China was largely because it “came in the right place at the right time.” To test the market, he first launched IF in Hong Kong in 2015, selling the drinks through convenience stores and supermarkets. After making headway there, he plunged into the mainland two years later, but prioritized online sales through Alibaba’s Tmall and JD.com, capitalizing on one of the world’s largest e-commerce user bases.
Another positive factor, Pongsakorn says, is that the Chinese appreciate Thai cuisine; that led to derivations such as jasmine rice-flavored coconut water and mango sticky rice-flavored coconut milk. IFBH’s marketing campaigns also sought out younger consumers. Popular Chinese actor-singer Xiao Zhan, enlisted as IF’s global brand ambassador, promotes drinking the beverage as a “moment of nature” and was shown guzzling a bottle in a commercial projected on the LED-clad exterior of a 58-story tower in the southwestern city of Chengdu. In another branding exercise, giant-sized sculptures of a green coconut and a bottle of IF were recently installed at a waterfront park in Shenzhen.
Pongsakorn maintains that IFBH’s asset-light business model gives it a strong competitive edge. The company outsources everything from ingredients, bottling and distribution to General Beverage and 11 other manufacturers but takes measures to ensure quality control. For example, the parent outfit was until April the sole supplier of raw coconut water, which it sources from farmers selected by IFBH. The farmers contracted to harvest the coconuts and extract the water are required to follow stringent guidelines to prevent oxidation and contamination.
Over the next two years, IFBH plans to diversify its supplier base and reduce the quantity of coconut water it gets from General Beverage to no more than half of its total requirement. “There’s a lot more behind our business model that other companies can’t copy, like the relationships we’ve built on the supply chain side and the brand we’ve built on the consumer side,” says Pongsakorn.
This model allows IFBH to focus on marketing and has driven “accelerated growth” as compared with its peers, confirms Euromonitor’s Lim. CLSA estimates that IFBH will log an annual increase in revenue of 30% over the next two years. Its analyst Sheng says that the company is likely to retain its lead in China, where the coconut water market hasn’t yet been fully tapped. She points to IFBH’s “above average” customer rating on e-commerce platforms and notes that it’s appreciated for its high-quality, affordable products.
“When I really go deep into something, I give it everything… That’s me. No U-turn.”
For Pongsakorn, the path to beverages had some detours. With an undergrad degree in business from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, he began working in 2004 at his family’s Suwan Group, which has interests in textiles and real estate. He started out as a marketing manager at Suwan Spinning and Weaving, before being appointed managing director of a family-owned golf course near Bangkok.
During his M.B.A. studies at the New York Institute of Technology in 2010, the idea of setting up his own venture took hold and he latched on to beverages after seeing the array of brands stocked by American supermarkets. Back home, he set up General Beverage in 2011 to produce a range of fruit juices, which he launched two years later, starting with grape juice infused with aloe vera. He pivoted to coconut water in 2015, later introducing a range of vitamin waters under the Vitaday brand, which continues to be retained under General Beverage and sold domestically.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for healthy drinks rocketed and General Beverage struggled to ramp up production to meet it. That prompted Pongsakorn to spin off the company’s international business in 2023 to form IFBH. Then he expanded the production base by enlisting other contract manufacturers.
Looking ahead, Pongsakorn is planning to diversify the portfolio beyond coconut water, which contributed close to 98% to IFBH’s revenue last year. Roughly 2% of sales were from other beverages such as fruit juice and Thai milk tea, with the rest from plant-based snacks, including coconut crispy rolls, quinoa chips and sun-dried bananas. In addition to introducing new drinks, Pongsakorn has earmarked $26 million for potential acquisitions in Asia, the U.S. and Australia of producers of healthy beverages, plant-based snacks and alternative protein products.
Coconut water, a niche product today, has the potential of becoming as big as orange juice, Vita Coco cofounder Michael Kirban once disclosed to Forbes. Pongsakorn says it will continue to be his mainstay, in line with his mission to bring his childhood favorite to the world. “When I really go deep into something, I give it everything,” he says. “That’s me. No U-turn.”