Lee Schill is joining Crooked Pop as Chief Commercial Officer, a hire designed to close the gap between the brand's East Coast retail launch and the full national footprint its founding team is targeting. Schill spent 20 years at Diageo across retail, convenience, club, and on-premise channels before serving as Senior Director of Distribution at Zevia — a combination that gives Crooked Pop unusually deep coverage on both the alcohol distribution side and the better-for-you soda shelf.
Why This Hire Signals Scale
For operators and buyers tracking the hard soda segment, the executive pairing here is worth noting. CEO Ben Weiss built Bai into a nationally scaled better-for-you beverage brand that Dr Pepper Snapple Group acquired for $1.7 billion in 2016. Schill's mandate is the commercial infrastructure that determines whether a challenger beverage converts retail presence into durable velocity — distributor network depth, channel sequencing, and execution at shelf. Together, they represent a playbook that has worked before in adjacent categories.
Crooked Pop launched across the East Coast in April at Total Wine and Harris Teeter, and has since secured a distribution agreement with Reyes Beverage Group, the Illinois-based mega wholesaler with national reach. The brand has also locked in first-mover in-stadium partnerships as the Official Hard Soda of the Philadelphia Phillies, Atlanta Braves, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers — on-premise activations that typically accelerate off-premise trial in surrounding markets.
What the RTD Category Is Watching
The hard soda segment has struggled to define itself against hard seltzer and canned cocktails, but Crooked Pop is positioning its OSAVA™ formulation — a proprietary fermentation process using ancient grains to produce a clean, neutral alcohol base — as a genuine point of difference, not just a better-for-you label claim. The product is USDA-certified organic, zero-sugar, and gluten-free, a trifecta that lands squarely in the functional-permissible zone buyers across grocery, convenience, and on-premise are actively expanding. Schill noted the formulation itself as his primary reason for joining: "Crooked Pop is the rare case where the liquid itself is genuinely different."
For beverage distributors and multi-channel operators, the Reyes relationship is the more immediately consequential signal. Reyes Beverage Group is one of the largest beverage distributors in the country, and bringing them on at this stage of a brand's trajectory typically indicates the founding team is not planning a slow regional rollout — they are building for compressed national timelines. Operators in convenience, grocery, and on-premise who track the RTD cooler door should expect accelerated market entry in Midwest and Southeast corridors where Reyes has density.
The celebrity equity roster — NFL players Brandon Graham and Rondé Barber, musician Zac Brown, and NBA star Trae Young — adds a layer of earned-media infrastructure that complements paid distribution without requiring the brand to outspend category incumbents. That strategy mirrors how Bai built awareness before Weiss had the budget to compete on traditional media weight, a pattern worth tracking for brand launch teams working in the better-for-you beverage space.
For operators evaluating RTD assortment decisions heading into 2027 planning cycles, Crooked Pop's commercial build — Diageo-trained CCO, Reyes distribution, stadium exclusives, and a founder with a $1.7 billion exit — represents a credibly capitalized challenger brand moving faster than its current shelf footprint suggests. Buyers who waited on hard seltzer before it was already crowded will recognize the pattern. Coverage of how RTD trends are reshaping on-premise beverage programs offers useful parallel context for operators making assortment calls now.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
