Jerome Tse

The man behind the bottle you didn't know was organic

Walk into a Whole Foods, a Target, or a CVS and reach for something cold. There is a decent chance you are holding a decision Jerome Tse made years ago in a college kitchen.

Tse is the founder and CEO of Berri Organics, the Southern California company behind Berri Fit and Berri Lyte - certified-organic, plant-based hydration drinks that now sit on roughly 2,000 shelves across more than 33 states. He runs it from Apollo Street in El Segundo, a fact that reads like a screenwriter's joke about a brand aiming for the stars.

The pitch is disarmingly simple. Most sports drinks and rehydration solutions are, in his words, over-processed. Berri's answer swaps the synthetic for the agricultural: coconut water, sweet potato, guava, ginseng root, sea salt, maqui berries. Berri Lyte carries about twice the electrolyte content of a traditional sports drink. Berri Fit lands with roughly half the calories and a third of the sugar. Same job, cleaner label.

What makes Tse worth reading about is not that he founded a beverage company. It is how he did it - backwards from the way most founders are told to. No war chest first. No hype cycle. He put the product in real hands before he ever asked an investor for a check, and he let shelves, not slide decks, decide whether it worked.

The roster of retailers now carrying his bottles reads like a map of American grocery: Whole Foods, Target, CVS, Wegmans, Sprouts, Stop & Shop, plus Amazon and the company's own website. Getting a single organic beverage into that many doors is a war of inches - slotting fees, buyer relationships, reorders that either happen or quietly do not. Tse fought it one region at a time, and the fact that Berri Lyte kept earning reorders is the quiet proof underneath the flashier headlines.

Test everything. Especially the things you're sure about.

Ask Tse for the one habit that matters and he does not talk about vision. He talks about testing - relentless, unglamorous, never-finished testing. He points to the companies that made it a religion: Google, Amazon, Facebook. Try, measure, learn, repeat. For a small beverage brand fighting for six inches of shelf, that discipline is not a luxury. It is the moat.

His fundraising advice runs against the grain of startup culture. Most founders are told to raise first and figure out demand later. Tse flips it: prove the product in a real market, then raise. It is the same logic that got him into those first three stores with mock-ups instead of a factory - earn belief with evidence, not promises.

He is honest about the cost. There is no myth-making about overnight success. The reality, he says, is a grind - long hours, inflation, supply-chain whiplash, consumers whose habits refuse to sit still. He was not a natural risk-taker. He learned to sit in the discomfort, because the job of a CEO gives you no other option.

The second habit is listening. Tse treats customer feedback as a compass rather than a suggestion box - the input that decides which flavors survive, which claims land, and where the brand points next. It is a deceptively simple loop: ship, listen, adjust, ship again. Combine it with the test-first discipline and you get a company that has stayed close to the ground even as it climbed into two thousand stores. The founders he admires - the ones who turned experimentation into culture at the biggest companies on earth - did the same thing at a scale he is still chasing.