Jones Soda shareholders hear about new distribution deals at annual meeting

After years of bleeding cash, Jones Soda is returning to its roots.

For the Seattle-based soda company with a stock price that's lower than the price of a bottle of its soda — $1.01 for a share, $1.19 and up for a bottle — that means catering to people who think chicken-nugget-flavored soda is a good idea.

Dean Colson fits that bill. The 11-year-old from Puyallup was among about 100 people who attended Jones Soda's annual shareholders meeting at Experience Music Project (EMP) on Wednesday.

He watched the presentation of new CEO Joth Ricci, then made a public recommendation: lunch-pack-flavored sodas.

The lunch pack is similar to Jones' Christmas, Hanukkah and Seahawks packs in featuring flavors never seen before in the soda world. Colson envisions chicken-nugget, pizza, French-fry and hamburger flavors.

It would be something for the kids, with whom Jones is clamoring to reconnect after problems with its national rollout of canned soda a few years ago devastated its profit and stock price.

While focusing on that huge effort, Jones lost a lot of convenience and other small-store accounts that are important to reaching the young customers who are its base.

To fix the problem, Ricci is pushing for Jones to add 100,000 new distribution points this year.

Partly, that means moving into new territory like Quebec, where Jones began selling soda this spring. It even rolled into Starbucks stores there, despite having lost its U.S. Starbucks account a few years ago.

It also means coming up with new products and packaging that appeal to more stores, like a new line of sodas for the Latino market that will ship next week and an energy drink called Jones GABA that costs about $1 more than Jones' sodas.

And, Jones wants to do more with its fun, customizable labels, which Ricci called "our single most-important asset."

Labels that gave people a choice between Democrat and Republican in the presidential race, then hailed the new chief with "Orange 'You Glad for Change' Cola" "blew the doors off the place," Ricci said, with "the place" being Washington, D.C.

Despite such hyperbole, Ricci's presentation was more button-down than the lively annual meetings that founder Peter van Stolk used to hold in a cramped room with folding chairs at Jones Soda's headquarters in South Lake Union.

In contrast to van Stolk's excited descriptions of new flavors and his penchant for peppering sentences with "like," Ricci focused on the numbers.

There was a chart showing Jones' string of quarterly losses and a map showing its distribution (25 percent of cases are sold in the Midwest, 3 percent in the Southeast).

He talked about a customer survey in which more than 60 percent of respondents knew who Jones Soda was, but only 2 percent buy it frequently, most of them because they can't find it.

"That tells me that there's opportunity," he said.

Even the requisite video with blaring rock music — which was fitting in an EMP auditorium — was more subdued than usual.

Ricci said he was glad that the auditorium was only half full, taking it as a sign that shareholders are no longer burning with questions about the company's direction.

He asked an employee to follow up with 11-year-old Colson, possibly the only attendee in Jones Soda's target demographic.

Jones gets some of its best ideas from young customers, Ricci said.

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com