Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, National Beverage
Search every verified Nick Caporella interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Nick Caporella, chairman and CEO of National Beverage, was criticized by crisis management professional Dean Crutchfield for the company's delayed response to questions about ingredients in its LaCroix sparkling water. Crutchfield said the company had months to address the issue after news broke around October 1, 2018, but did not respond until January 2019 with what it described as an independent lab test. Crutchfield characterized the delay as "dragging their feet" and suggested the company may have hoped the controversy would be "swept under the carpet." In a statement attributed to Caporella, he wrote with exclamation points that "the personality of the word LaCroix coupled with the awesome experience of its essence and taste is unique" and asked, "would you trade away that LaLa feeling? No way, they shout we just love our LaCroix." Caporella, a 1979 Horatio Alger Award recipient, has described his upbringing in a Pennsylvania agricultural and mining area during the Depression. He said that at age 11 he collected scrap metal and coal, and later started a site preparation business before becoming president and CEO of Burnup and Sims. In his award acceptance speech, Caporella credited a philosophy lesson from his father about carrying blocks in both arms as enabling him to "achieve far beyond my wildest dreams." He accepted the award on behalf of his parents, his wife Thomasina, and his family.
“Well it's a commodity market so to stand out you need a good brand to do that, that needs a reputation and it suddenly there are questions about what's in your product and there were stories that had been circulating that there were chemicals in the product.”
“It's an ingredient that goes into cockroach insecticide; yeah you don't want to be consuming exactly that. The very idea sends shivers down anyone's spine.”
“If the company didn't address those issues as effectively as it should have, and if they had, they wouldn't be looking at the kind of earnings reports they got.”
“This news broke on was it October 1st or something like that when they were first accused of this; they then responded in January with what they said was an independent lab test.”
National Beverage CEO blamed its earnings miss on "injustice." Dean Crutchfield of the crisis management firm Dean Crutchfield ...
1979 Horatio Alger Award Recipient Nick A Caporella, possessed of an irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit, has built a number of ...
Sign in to search the full transcript archive, filter by topic, and access every quote from Nick Caporella.