Confidential · for Lito · August 2026
XNG
Coconut water, sold to bars as a mixer. The category nobody has claimed.
Coconut water, sold to bars as a mixer. The category nobody has claimed.
Coconut water is a better mixer than tonic or cola. It is dry rather than sweet, it carries whisky and aged rum instead of burying them, and it has half the sugar of a tonic.
It is in every supermarket in Barcelona and in essentially no bars. So I carry my own into venues, which is either a strange personal habit or a gap in the market. I think it is the second one.
Aseptic coconut water has no preservatives. Once opened it is a fresh product — 24 to 48 hours. A bar that opens a litre for two drinks pours the rest away. The waste, not the price, is why it never gets listed.
Bars stock what customers ask for by name. "Rum and coconut water" is in nobody's vocabulary, so no bar carries it, so nobody ever tries one. A closed loop.
Sold by the litre it competes with tonic on cost per serve and loses. Nobody has ever presented it to a venue as a way to raise the price of the whole drink.
All three are fixable. That is the opportunity — it is an operational gap, not a taste problem.
Fever-Tree didn't win because the tonic was better.
It won because a small bottle killed the waste, fixed the ratio so any bartender pours it right, put a brand on the bar top where customers could see it, and let a venue charge €12 for a gin and tonic instead of €8.
XNG is that move, applied to a liquid no incumbent is defending. The unit of the business is one pour, one pack, one drink — and every conversation with a venue is about gross profit per serve.
Every competitor is green, sunlit and shot with a palm frond, because they are all designed for a supermarket chiller at eleven in the morning.
A bar is dark, cluttered and lit from below. The only things that survive there are maximum contrast and one enormous word. On a backbar it sits next to Fever-Tree, not next to Innocent.
Black on uncoated cream, one acid band, the mark running up the tall axis. Branded highball glasses go in free with every account.
A new mixer brand spends its hardest year trying to assemble exactly this list — world-ranked cocktail bars, neighbourhood bars, restaurants and cafés, spread across enough of the city to prove the product travels. It already exists, under one roof, run by people who talk to each other.
Alone, phase one is three months hand-selling fifteen strangers. Inside the group it is a series of internal conversations across four genuinely different venue types — a far better test than fifteen similar bars.
A serve on the menu at the No.4 bar in the world is the single most valuable thing that can happen to a new drinks brand. It is how Seedlip and Empirical broke through. No budget substitutes for it.
I have a drink I like. Your team develops drinks at a level I can't approach. Co-creating the flagship makes it better and makes it theirs — which is what makes bartenders elsewhere pour it.
Ibiza is the hardest and most expensive market in Spanish drinks to enter cold, and it is where mixer brands are made. Dubai is a serious no-and-low market where the zero-proof serve stands on its own.
The risk I'd rather raise than have raised at me: if XNG only ever appears in Confiteria venues it isn't a brand, it's a house pour, and it has no independent value to either of us. So: no open-ended exclusivity, arm's-length pricing from the first invoice, and a phase-one gate that requires three venues outside the group to reorder.
Not projections. These are what I pay today at a cash and carry — the worst price on the ladder, four rungs from the factory. Going direct to the importer in La Roca del Vallès should take roughly a quarter out of them.
That last number is the whole inventory risk of the trial. This is not a business that needs a lot of money to find out whether it works.
I had assumed the waste-free format meant commissioning a small carton from Vietnam — a container minimum, forty thousand units, four months' lead time and real money. It doesn't. The same supplier already makes a 33 cl bottle, and I can buy it by the box tomorrow.
Which means the premium format can be tested in the trial, not a year later. And it comes with the better ritual: the bartender pours the spirit over ice into a branded XNG highball and sets the bottle beside it. The customer tops up. The brand sits on the table in front of them for twenty minutes.
| What the venue pours | Trade | Cost per drink |
|---|---|---|
| Postmix cola, from the gun | — | ~€0.15 |
| Schweppes tonic, 200 ml | €0.55 | €0.55 |
| XNG 1 L — high-volume venues | €3.80 | €0.57 |
| XNG 33 cl — the premium serve | €2.10 | €1.05 |
| Fever-Tree, 200 ml | ~€1.20 | €1.20 |
Being straight about it: the flagship serve replaces a whisky-cola, and postmix cola costs a venue fifteen cents. We never win on mixer cost, in any format. The pitch is that the venue spends seventy cents more and sells a €12 long drink where it was selling a €9 one. Any conversation that gets dragged onto cost per litre is one we lose.
A venue can't learn four, and each extra one dilutes the training. Two of them do different jobs: one needs a story and twenty seconds, the other needs none at all. These are a starting point — the flagship should be finished properly with your team.
50 ml ron añejo · 150 ml XNG · lima
Henri Charrière escaped Devil's Island on a sack of coconuts. French Guiana is rum country, so the story, the geography and the liquid all line up. The name is the marketing — one sentence and the drink is memorable for good. For cocktail and hotel bars, on the 33 cl bottle-and-glass serve.
50 ml whisky · 150 ml XNG · lima
A direct swap for the whisky-cola that is the default long drink in Spain. Same speed, same glass, same bottle already on the rail — and it doesn't turn sickly by the third one. Instantly legible, no education needed: the volume serve for neighbourhood and late venues on the litre.
150 ml XNG · 80 ml soda · lima
Every venue wants a no-alcohol option that isn't a sad Coke, and charges €6 for it at near-total margin. The easiest listing we'll ever get — and the one that works in Dubai.
On the name: we won't own "Papillon" — cocktail names generally aren't protectable, and if it catches on any bar can pour one with someone else's coconut water. That's the trade. It's worth taking, provided XNG is the ingredient everyone assumes it's made with. Which is exactly how Fever-Tree won.
| Opening position | Equity | For |
|---|---|---|
| Me | 65% | Idea and full-time operating role, on four-year vesting — I'd propose that myself. |
| You / a Grup Confiteria vehicle | 25% | €50,000, plus a separate written venue partnership agreement. Board seat or observer, as you prefer. |
| Option pool, unissued | 10% | First commercial hire and a bartender-ambassador. |
Two separate documents, deliberately. A shareholders' agreement for the equity, and an entirely separate supply agreement at commercial pricing. If the shares and the listings are one deal, the company can never price fairly to its biggest customer and every future investor discounts the revenue line as related-party. Costs nothing now, worth a great deal later.
Line-by-line breakdown of the €50,000 on the next slide. Everything is negotiable except keeping those two documents apart.
| By type | € | % | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inventory | 10,340 | 21% | Recoverable — it converts back into cash as it sells. |
| Market-facing spend | 10,690 | 21% | Labels, glassware fitting, serve cards, trade events, delivery. |
| Assets | 4,030 | 8% | Branded glassware, bar mats, the trademark. |
| Compliance and legal | 6,770 | 14% | Shareholders' and supply agreements, FBO registration, lab analysis, SL formation. |
| Overhead | 3,500 | 7% | Gestoría, product liability insurance, logistics. |
| Founder draw | 12,000 | 24% | Twelve months at €1,000. Below market, deliberately. |
| Contingency | 5,410 | 11% | Commodity price, FX, print reruns. |
€13,000 on signature funds the whole trial, the company formation, the legal work and two months of draw. €37,000 on the gate — a reorder rate above 40% at week four, and at least two of three venues outside the group reordering. If the trial fails you are out €13,000, not €50,000, and I'd rather find that out cheaply too.
A container of own-printed cartons — that is €35–45k on its own, and the 33 cl discovery means we don't need it yet. No market-rate salary. No Ibiza; that's the next phase, funded from revenue or a second round. No sales team and no consumer advertising: every euro here is trade-facing.
The obvious question, answered before you ask it: €1,000 a month is not a living wage in Barcelona, and a founder who runs out of money is a risk to your investment. I'd rather be straight that this is the tightest line in the budget. If you'd prefer it properly funded, the raise is €75k rather than €50k and the extra goes to eighteen months of runway — not to a bigger production run.
Supplier, origin and nutrition data read from the product's own packaging. Cash-and-carry prices are what I pay today; importer pricing is estimated and not yet quoted. All margins, budgets and the equity structure are assumptions for discussion — not quotes, valuations or forecasts. Regulatory position under EU Reg. 1924/2006 and 1169/2011 is being reviewed by a food-law adviser. Private draft, August 2026.