The Davos of Beverages: How Danny Stepper built an empire and brought 1,300 industry leaders to Manhattan Beach

by Mark McDermott

In 1994, Danny Stepper was wearing a uniform and a back belt, stocking Coca-Cola shelves at a Food 4 Less in Pacoima. His boss, Robert Macias, would call the store at 4:30 in the morning over the loudspeaker to check on him. The rules were simple: park in the back of the lot, bring in five shopping carts before your shift starts, and remember the store receiver is the most important person in the building. If it’s cold it’s sold. Eye to thigh placements only.

But the most important part wasn’t about the beverages. It was about the people. 

“They have to like you, Stepper,” Macias would tell him. “If they don’t like you, you won’t win, college boy.”

Stepper would be promoted 14 times in nine years within the Coca-Cola system, eventually running the company’s business with Costco — a relationship that would lead to more than $1 billion in business for his own companies over the past decade alone.

Three decades later, Stepper is the CEO and co-founder of L.A. Libations, one of the most influential beverage incubators in the country. He has brokered deals with Molson Coors, Coca-Cola, and Keurig Dr Pepper. He has launched brands with Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Obama, Tom Holland, and Robert Downey Jr. He helped build BODYARMOR from a company shut out of its biggest potential retail accounts to a $1.4 billion-revenue brand that Coca-Cola acquired for $8 billion.

On April 28 and 29, Stepper is bringing more than 1,300 beverage industry executives, Wall Street analysts, retail leaders, and celebrity entrepreneurs to the Westdrift Manhattan Beach for the 31st edition of The Beverage Forum — the conference he acquired in 2024 and relocated to his adopted hometown with the ambition of making it, as he puts it, “the Davos of the beverage industry.”

Hotel room blocks at the Westdrift, the Belamar, and the Hyatt House in El Segundo are already sold out. Walmart is sending a jet with 15 people. There will be 150 retail executives in the room from, among others, Walmart, Target, 7-Eleven, Sprouts, and Albertsons.

“It’s surreal,” Stepper said. “I’m telling retailers, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t be on stage,’ even though they’re really important. And they’re like, ‘I can’t miss it.’ It’s a can’t-miss event.”

It’s even more surreal if you follow the Stepper’s singular career arc, a path that took him from a fairly desperate young college grad to a uniformed Coca Cola dealer and then low-level executive, including an accidental detour as a Hollywood movie producer who brokered an unprecedented global deal, and finally to starting his own company and nearly falling into personal and professional bankruptcy in its fledgling days. 

Stepper, a Manhattan Beach resident whose company is headquartered in El Segundo, is still somewhat astonished by the rapid rise of L.A. Libations as one of the key power brokers in the beverage industry. Nor does he take an iota of it for granted. He’s a man who invented his job, and in the fast-moving world of beverages, it pays to be prepared for continued reinvention. 

“I’m not a young man anymore,” Stepper said. “But I still feel like I’m kind of building the airplane as I fly it.”

Beating the odds

The beverage industry Stepper navigates is defined by a paradox. Half of all growth in the non-alcoholic beverage sector now comes from brands and categories that didn’t exist five years ago. Consumers are, in Stepper’s word, “promiscuous” — constantly seeking what’s new. The infant mortality rate for beverage brands is 98 percent. Only two percent ever reach $10 million in revenue.

That gap between consumer appetite and brand survival is where L.A. Libations operates. The company functions as what Stepper calls the “emerging beverage category captain” for major retailers — a term he made up and talked Kroger and Walmart into adopting.

“In 2011, it was right as Whole Foods was blowing up,” Stepper said. “I’d walk into Whole Foods as a Coke guy, and I’d be like, ‘Where’s the Coke?’ They don’t sell Coke. It was kombucha and weird elixirs — you had to hold your nose to drink it. Our big idea was to democratize Whole Foods. We’re going to take Whole Foods to Kroger and Albertsons and Walmart.”

He pitched the concept to Mary Ellen Adcock at Kroger: let L.A. Libations serve as the outside advisor telling the retailer which emerging brands to carry. She said yes. A week later, Walmart said yes. Their lives changed.

“The retailer is like, ‘How in the world do I know what to bring in? I have better odds going to Vegas,'” Stepper said on the BeerNet podcast. “So that’s where we come in. We vet not only the liquid, not only the branding — we vet the founder, their access to capital.”

L.A. Libations has grown to roughly 100 employees and expanded into a vertically integrated platform that includes a marketing agency, a merchandising company, and an early-stage distribution arm. In 2025, Stepper launched Taste Tomorrow Ventures, a $30 million venture fund investing in emerging food and beverage brands, alongside a $330 million debt facility for purchase order financing.

The portfolio is a long list of wins and quieter losses. Zico Coconut Water, which L.A. Libations helped drive to its Coca-Cola exit. Core Water, sold to Keurig Dr Pepper for $526 million. BODYARMOR, eventually acquired by Coca-Cola for $8 billion. And a roster of more recent launches — BERO with Tom Holland, HAPPY with Robert Downey Jr., PLEZI with Michelle Obama and Stephen Curry, ZOA with Dwayne Johnson.

“Everybody’s quick to give us accolades for the good ones,” Stepper said on the BeerNet podcast. “There’s a whole list of ones that we don’t talk about anymore because they didn’t work.”

Even so, the reason L.A. Libations is such a well-respected name throughout the industry is because it has helped brands succeed at rates far above the industry norm. But the grounds are ever-shifting, and if Stepper has any singular gift, it may be a gift for alertness, one that began during those early mornings in a Coca Cola uniform back in the ‘90s. 

“We still fail all the time,” he said. “We think we’re so smart. That 98 percent mortality rate —  our batting average is better than two percent, but it’s not great — just because it’s so hard. It’s such a blood sport, this game. It keeps us humble every time.”

Stepper talks in the shorthand of his industry, where the central fault line runs between “alc” and “non-alc,” and where those two worlds are rapidly merging. L.A. Libations lives primarily in the non-alcoholic space, but Stepper breaks his own rules often. The company brokered the Topo Chico Hard Seltzer deal that brought Coca-Cola into alcoholic beverages. It has partnered with Molson Coors, one of the world’s largest brewers, since 2019. And the Beverage Forum itself is one of the few major conferences that spans both sides of the divide.

“Every alc company wants to be a non-alc company, every non-alc company wants to be an alc company, and we kind of sit right in the middle of that,” Stepper said on the BeerNet podcast.

The convergence is being driven by a seismic shift in American drinking habits. According to a 2025 Gallup poll, only 54 percent of U.S. adults say they consume alcohol — the lowest figure in the poll’s nearly 90-year history, down from 67 percent just three years earlier. For the first time, a majority of Americans believe that even moderate drinking is bad for their health. The decline is steepest among young adults, whose drinking rate has dropped from nearly 60 percent to 50 percent since 2023.

“These kids don’t drink like you and I used to,” Stepper said. “I don’t drink anymore. [Neuroscientist and podcaster] Andrew Huberman is a big cause of it — he said one drop of alcohol is not good for you. And these kids listen to those influencers. People are just being more mindful, and even the ones that are still drinking drink less frequently and drink less.”

Stepper pointed to a trend the industry calls “zebra striping” — consumers alternating between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks on a single night out. “Which, to the way I used to drink, doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said, laughing. “I was just like, give me as much alcohol as possible.”

The result is a beverage landscape in which the old categories are dissolving. Non-alcoholic beer, wine, and spirits sales surged 18.5 percent in 2025, surpassing $1 billion. Functional beverages — drinks infused with adaptogens, probiotics, and other wellness ingredients — are up 18 percent. At this year’s Beverage Forum, a panel on the blurring lines of alc and non-alc will feature the head of alcohol for Coca-Cola alongside the CEO of the Tao Group, which operates some of the world’s most prominent nightclubs and is watching its customers drink less and less.

Still, Stepper is cautious about how far the trend will go. He suspects the pandemic played a bigger role than people realize — an entire generation missed the formative social drinking years of late high school and college. “The jury’s out,” he said. “I think it’s definitely shifted. I’m just not sure it’s shifted as much as we think.”

Confessions of a Coke Dealer

Stepper says everyone tells him he should write a book. He already has the title: “Confessions of a Coke Dealer.”

“I keep saying I’m still living the third act, so I can’t write it yet,” he said.

The first act began with fear. When Stepper graduated from Westmont College in Santa Barbara, his father had just lost all the family’s money. He moved back home, buried in college debt, and made the only plan he had: find the biggest company he could and outwork everyone. So when Coca-Cola came calling, he jumped on it. 

“When I was on salary, all I did was live on my route,” Stepper said. “Weekends, 12-hour days. They saw that, and they kept promoting me. It’s like you can’t hit a moving target.”

Coca-Cola put him through graduate school at Pepperdine and sent him to Seattle to become the first fully dedicated Coke employee managing the Costco account. He was restless from the start — pushing the company to redesign its packaging for the club channel, pioneering the 36-pack that’s still on Costco shelves today, even hiring an electrician out of the Yellow Pages to install vending machines at a Costco gas station in Hawthorne. (“We almost blew up the city of Hawthorne,” he said. “Apparently you can’t do electrical at a gas station unless you really know what you’re doing.”)

He somehow managed to survive Costco’s combative stance towards the big brands.  “They like to fight, especially big, strong brands,” Stepper said. “Budweiser’s been kicked out of Costco. Starbucks has been kicked out. Coke has surely been kicked out — but never on my watch.” Jim Sinegal and Jeff Brotman, Costco’s founders, liked him. That was the whole thing. Macias had drilled it into him five years earlier, but it also came naturally. Now it was an operating principle. “They liked me. And so I never got kicked out.”

Then Hollywood called. A college friend connected Stepper with the prolific film producer Lawrence Bender (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs), who wanted to make soccer’s “pivotal” movie but didn’t know how to talk to brands. Stepper had an idea: instead of asking permission, ask them for money.

“This was before anyone was doing that,” Stepper said.

While still a Coke employee, Stepper traveled to Europe with Bender, met with Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, and came home with $45 million in financing from Adidas — the largest brand equity deal in Hollywood history at the time, producing Disney’s Goal! trilogy without traditional studio financing.

“He goes, ‘When are you leaving Coke?'” Stepper recalled. “And I go, ‘Dude, I’m not leaving Coke. What are you talking about?’ And he says, ‘Dude, you’re a movie producer now.’ And I go, ‘I don’t even know what that is or means.'”

Stepper moved to Europe and spent four years making soccer movies (the Goal! movies were a hits overseas but not in the U.S). Blatter liked him enough to ask him to produce the official FIFA World Cup documentary for the 2006 tournament in Germany. Then he came home. He was flying too close to the sun, he said — single, with unlimited resources, rubbing shoulders with people (such as Harvey Weinstein) whose behavior set off his alarm bells.

“I’m plagued with enough self-awareness to know this isn’t sustainable, the way I was living my life,” he said. “I missed the people at Coke. I needed some normal people in my life.”

He later co-founded Madvine, an entertainment marketing venture within Relativity Media that brokered deals between Hollywood properties and brands like Evian, Absolut Vodka, and Mondelez. But he was already being pulled back toward beverages.

He called his old Coke colleague Dino Sarti and proposed starting a beverage company. They named it L.A. Libations — after their daughters, Lauren and Annika.

“It’s a pretty sexy place today,” Stepper said, “but just talk to our wives about a decade ago. We’ve had some really dark days building this company.”

The darkest days came in 2019. Coca-Cola had invested in L.A. Libations in its early years, buying 25 percent of the company at a $48 million valuation. “We thought we made it,” Stepper said. “Man, little did I know, five years later, I’d be in an even worse position….But, you know, it’s just the ebb and flow of life. How it works.” 

A series of regime changes occurred at Coke. New leadership didn’t see the value in L.A. Libations and pulled the plug on the services agreement that had been keeping the company afloat.

“They kind of just pulled the rug out from under us,” Stepper said. “I personally financed the company. If my wife knew what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t be married to this day. I bet it all. All the money that we made in movies — everything was out there. We never missed payroll. We never let anyone go.”

Right when they were about to hit the wall, Molson Coors came in. “They said, ‘Hey, we’d like to do that Coke deal that you had. Can we do that?'” Stepper said. “That was late 2019, and we just haven’t looked back since.”

What Stepper had by that point, more than capital or distribution, was a network of older operators in the industry who had decided he was worth backing. He calls them his wolves. Michael Repole, the co-founder of BODYARMOR, called Stepper when the brand had hit $100 million in revenue but couldn’t get into Walmart, 7-Eleven, Sam’s, or Costco because of a Gatorade exclusivity deal. Stepper called the senior leadership at 7-Eleven, where L.A. Libations had just delivered a huge return on the Core Water exit. “I said, I think this one’s got legs,” he recalled. “I think you guys should not have an exclusive with Gatorade.” The exclusive broke. BODYARMOR got into the chains. The brand went from $100 million in revenue to $1.4 billion before Coca-Cola bought it for $8 billion.

“I was raised by wolves in this business,” Stepper said on the BeerNet podcast. “Guys like Michael Repole and Lance Collins [a serial beverage-industry founder behind brands including Fuze, NOS, and Core Water, and co-founder of BODYARMOR alongside Repole].” 

“I am just trying to make them proud at this point.”

Stepper is candid about the stumbles even in the good years. ZOA Energy, launched with Dwayne Johnson, did $80 million in its first year and $150 million in its second, but Stepper says the team had the product wrong from the start — five SKUs with sugar, five without, in black 16-ounce cans that looked like Monster Energy.

“We had it all wrong,” he said on the BeerNet podcast. “If we’d launched ZOA like it is today, it would be a billion-dollar brand. I have zero doubt in my mind.”

Even so, ZOA is a big success story, and one that Stepper at first wanted no part of. He took a call from a guy he knew at Jagaurnaut Capital, a private equity firm. 

“We want to do an energy drink with you,” the guy said. 

Stepper was candid. “Look, I’m not sure the world needs another energy drink,” he said. “Unless you have something really special, unique and different, I’m not really sure I want to do it.” 

“We have The Rock,” the guy said. 

“I’m in,” Stepper said. 

The ZOA partnership had its own full-circle quality. The connection to Dwayne Johnson came through Jaume Collet-Serra, the director Stepper had given his first major job on Goal II — and who had gone on to become Johnson’s go-to director on films like Black Adam and Jungle Cruise. Once again, it was something beyond the product. The Rock came to him because he had a friend who really liked Stepper. 

“Somehow they put together that we knew each other,” Stepper said. “And Jaume’s like, ‘Oh, Danny, he’s the greatest.’ What a small world.”

A home game  

The Beverage Forum was founded more than 30 years ago by Michael Bellas as a gathering of the industry’s most senior executives — the CEOs of Coca-Cola, Constellation Brands, Pernod Ricard, all sharing a stage with Wall Street analysts. It was the kind of room where, as Stepper recalls on the BeerNet podcast, a bottle cap salesman once walked up to the CEO of Coca-Cola and tried to pitch him on the spot.

Stepper first attended the forum in 2019, when Bellas called him and asked him to come. His company was running on fumes at that point but Stepper did what he always does, which is to keep on keeping on. 

“I couldn’t afford it,” he said. “We had no money. Like, we were done. We were about to hit the wall. But I put the flight on a credit card, and I took Walmart and Bristol Farms, the first retailers that had ever been to the Beverage Forum.” 

 The keynotes were impressive — the CEO of Coke, the CEO of Pernod Ricard — but the audience was half empty, there were no actual beverages at the beverage forum, and the venue was, in Stepper’s assessment, “kind of a cheesy hotel.”

“I’m like, man, this could be so much more,” he said.

A few years later, Bellas called Stepper. He was done. The forum was his legacy, and he wanted it to live on. 

“I’ve shopped it around,” he told Stepper. “Nobody wants it.” 

“With that  sales pitch, I’ll take it,” Stepper replied.

The first thing he did was move it to Manhattan Beach. The second was to rethink the model from the ground up. Every beverage conference Stepper had ever attended was thrown by a media company — not by a beverage operator. He decided to create the conference he’d want to attend as a person investing a few thousand dollars and a few days of his time.

“It better be worth it,” he said. “I better move my business forward. I better get some deals done. The only way that really happens is if there’s a lot of retailers present.”

Then came an epiphany about celebrities. Every celebrity seemed to have a drink. It was an emerging trend in the industry, and one Stepper, with his unusual career path, was uniquely well-positioned for. If he brought the celebrities, the retailers would follow — and the retailers were what mattered.

“I asked the Rock. He said, ‘Dude, I love you, but I am not going to the Beverage Forum.’ I asked Gwyneth Paltrow. She said no,” Stepper recalled. “Then I asked Robert Downey Jr., and he said yes.”

Downey came, got on stage, then spent the morning meeting with every major retailer in the building — Walmart, Kroger, 7-Eleven. By lunchtime, he’d launched his brand, Happy Coffee, into 40,000 doors, meetings that would otherwise have required weeks of private jets, security, and scheduling.

“The word got out,” Stepper said. “These agents, they all talk. So now every celebrity that has a drink wants to come to the Beverage Forum.”

This year’s program features Jason Kelce, the retired NFL center and co-owner of Garage Beer, in a keynote conversation. Chris Pratt and Jocko Willink will discuss their protein brand Jocko Fuel. Elizabeth Banks, co-owner of Archer Roose Wines, will share a stage with Sprouts Farmers Market’s chief merchant. A Wall Street panel features managing directors from Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Evercore unpacking how tariffs, M&A, and private equity are reshaping beverage strategy. Joe DePinto, the longtime CEO of 7-Eleven, will receive the forum’s Lifetime Achievement Award — a full-circle moment for Stepper, whose Core Water deal made 7-Eleven’s venture arm its first outsized return on a beverage investment.

“There’s a ton of sizzle,” Stepper said. “But don’t twist it. It’s about the steak. If you show people a good time, they’re going to enjoy it, but they’re not going to come back the next year. They’re going to go, ‘Yeah, it was fun, but I can’t afford it.’ It’s not about the fun. It’s about doing deals, moving your business forward.”

Stepper lives in the Tree Section of Manhattan Beach with his wife Tara and three school-age children — one at Mira Costa, one at Pacific, one at Manhattan Beach Middle School. 

When Stepper first left his parents’ house after landing the Coke job, he moved to Manhattan Beach because he surfed. With the exception of four years in Europe making movies and a stint in Seattle with Coke, he has been here ever since.

“I’ve raised three kids here,” he said. “I just love it.”

The decision to move the Beverage Forum to Manhattan Beach was strategic but also deeply personal.

“I wanted to make it a home game,” Stepper said. “Our office is down the street from the Westdrift. We are not party planners — we have no idea what we’re doing. I thought, the easier I could make it, the better.”

It turned out to be a stroke of genius for another reason. “Everybody in the Midwest and the Northeast — they’ve been freezing all winter,” Stepper said. “They can’t wait to get to Manhattan Beach in April.”

He acknowledged that the conference has already outgrown the venue — he could probably sell four times more tickets if he moved it to a larger location. But he has no plans to leave. “I want to keep it here and keep it intimate, because we got the right formula.”

While Manhattan Beach has been focused on preparations for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Stepper’s conference has quietly become one of the biggest annual events the city hosts, filling every hotel in town and spilling into El Segundo.

Richard Montgomery, the four-time former Manhattan Beach mayor, attended the first Manhattan Beach edition of the Beverage Forum in 2024 and came away stunned.

“I had no idea the volume of it,” Montgomery said. “I had no idea the quality.” 

Montgomery had seen Stepper around town for years, and at one point just knew him as a guy who made soccer movies, but had no idea what that really meant. He was still on council when Stepper brought the forum to town, and helped him secure the friends-and-family rate from the Westdrift — the city owns the land beneath the hotel — and connected him with Manhattan Beach’s Michael Sullivan, the LA Car Guy dealership owner, who donated a Porsche for this year’s hole-in-one raffle. But it wasn’t until Mongtomery saw Stepper operating as the connector at the forum that he really understood his sway in the industry. 

“He’s a retail marketing genius,” Montgomery said, noting that if he returns to council again, he hopes to officially name Stepper an ambassador for the city of Manhattan Beach. 

The economic impact on the city is substantial, Montgomery said, noting that the Forum generates transient occupancy tax by selling out every hotel in town as well as generating spending at local restaurants, shops, and services over the two days of the conference. But its impact is beyond financial, Montgomery said. The forum has a global reach —  it also takes place in London and Miami, but calls Manhattan Beach its flagship event — and reveals a side of the town that is little-recognized: as a place where deals get made. 

“The story of Danny and his success, what he’s done,” Montgomery said. “He’s helped put Manhattan Beach on the map. Not that we weren’t already on the map. Don’t get me wrong. But he just adds to the star quality that Manhattan Beach has.” 

Stepper will be the first to tell you that he got by with a lot of help from his friends. Last fall, Robert Macias retired. Stepper, the college boy who had slept with one eye open waiting for the 4:30 a.m. loudspeaker, sat down to write a tribute to the man who had hired him on October 10, 1994.

Macias, it turned out, had been pushed out of Coke a few years earlier — just as Stepper had been, years before that. Stepper brought him into L.A. Libations, where Macias built Relentless Trade Solutions from the ground up. Advantage Solutions eventually came calling. They did a deal.

“Today he is the closest thing I have to a father,” Stepper wrote on Linkedin. “When Coke was done with him, like they were with me, he of course had a home with us.”

Macias had been at Stepper’s first movie premiere in London. He was at his wedding. He was there when his kids were born. He was at his father’s funeral.

“He has such a huge impact on my life and so many people’s lives,” Stepper said. “He taught me how to wake up in the morning.” 

If there is a moral to the tale of Danny Stepper, it has something to do with hard work and the ability to maintain a near boundless sense of what is possible. It also has to do with the help he received and the friends he made along the way, and the resulting sense of gratitude that permeates this stage of his unlikely career —  when he has somehow actually managed to create the “Davos of the Beverage Industry” in his adopted hometown. 

“We were done,” Stepper said, reflecting on how close his career came to ending seven years ago, and on what it had taken to get to a Tuesday morning in April when 1,300 people were about to show up in his town. “Every time we think we’re good at something, we just remember — man, we’re so blessed to even be here.”

The Beverage Forum takes place April 28–29 at the Westdrift Manhattan Beach. For information, visit beverageforum.com.