About Nick Caporella
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.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Nick Caporella's recent appearances.
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Transcript (3 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
Well, it's a commodity market, so to stand out you need a good brand. To do that, you need a reputation. And suddenly there are questions about what's in your product. There were stories that had been circulating that there were chemicals in the product.
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Nick Caporella0:13
It's an ingredient that goes into cockroach insecticide.
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Interviewer0:20
Yeah, you don't want to be consuming exactly that. The very idea sends shivers down anyone's spine. So, if you go back up the food chain of this story, the problem is that the company didn't address those issues as effectively as it should have. If they had, they wouldn't be looking at the kind of earnings reports they got. This broke news on 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. An independent lab? What's that? Look, the rule is founded on many fruits, yes, eat of blueberry, etcetera. They're saying that these are naturally occurring compounds. Just because they were in some of those things we talked about doesn't mean that they themselves are the problem. But they could have done more. I guess it took a long time to respond. And then also in the CEO statement, he hits towards the end. I mean, there are exclamation points in the statement. That tells you all you need to know. He says, 'The personality of the word LaCroix, coupled with the awesome experience of its essence and taste, is unique. Would you trade away that LaLa feeling? No way!' they shout. 'We just love our LaCroix.' You don't usually see this kind of language in anything that's been vetted by a PR team. Well, talk about drinking too much of the Kool-Aid. I think these claims are doing that. But basically, he's had plenty of time to respond to this. They dragged their feet. They thought this was going to get swept under the carpet. It's not. One has to remember the power of word of mouth. This got out in October. People were already chattering about it. This was a cool brand that was consumed by people who thought they knew what they were doing, and now suddenly, do more harm. So the issue about October and what was in the drinks: do you do more harm than good by responding in this way months after the fact? That now has people saying, 'What is really going on?' Well, now I'm going to dig deep and I want to know more. I think the most important thing about a crisis is you respond to me now. Typically, what companies do is they deny it, but then what they wholeheartedly do is they delay it. And clearly, the company clearly delayed this by months.
