Beverage and CPG expert: I built the brands, now I build the AI that runs them

I am Jorge Olson. For more than twenty years I have built beverage and consumer brands: distribution companies in the United States and Mexico, more than a thousand products, five companies taken public, and the books founders use to start, Build Your Beverage Empire and Wholesale MBA. Today I am a VC and Managing Partner of CPG Life Fund I and the founder of Guz.ai, the AI lab whose CPG division builds the CPG Life App. The idea is simple: use AI to incubate and accelerate the next brands.

The operator before the investor

Every number below is something I did with my own trucks, reps and money, before I ever looked at a brand as an investor:

• Beverage distribution from a van and a mini-storage unit to seventeen thousand accounts in San Diego.
• Miller Beer for Baja California and the 5-hour ENERGY exclusive for Mexico; with Sandro Piancone, a hundred million dollars in sales across Mexico and more than two thousand products.
• A product into four thousand Walgreens stores without corporate approval, one store manager at a time.
• Five companies taken public, two of them co-founded.

How I work with founders

Founders start with the book, then the app. The CPG Life App, which my team is building now, walks a founder from the idea to the shelf in thirteen stages, scores each one, and answers questions from my beverage books and recordings. It is built to take the work a founder pays consultants for, research, formulation, development, sales and marketing, and run it with AI agents:

1. IdeaIs there a market, and are you the founder for it?
2. ResearchThe category, the competitors, the price a shelf will bear.
3. FormulationWhat goes in the bottle, and what it costs per unit.
4. DevelopmentBrand, packaging, manufacturing, the first run.
5. SalesDistributors, retailers, the margin each one takes.
6. MarketingThe launch, the content, the ads that pay back.

The founders who prove the numbers get more of my time: lab runs on their brand, then a project manager, then the lab doing the work.

What the Guz.ai lab does for brands already on the shelf

Existing brands come to the lab for the work a marketing department does, run by agents and checked by a person before anything ships. Today the lab runs nine product lines with fifty-three agents (as of October 2026):

• PRPress releases written, scored and ranked for search and AI answers.
• PodcastsEpisodes clipped, the newsletter, the show notes, the press.
• AdsAd tests with a budget, a breakeven and a weekly read.
• VideoShort clips with captions from long recordings.
• UGCCreator-style videos for the brand, labeled as AI.
• AmazonListings, images and the profit math per unit.
• LinkedInA week of posts and the outreach, the founder sends.
• WebsitesPages built to rank in Google and be cited by AI.

Three stages, from lab run to done for you

Every service starts small and grows only when the numbers say so:

1. 1. Lab runThe agents run the job once on your brand. You see the output, the score and what it cost.
2. 2. Project managerA person runs the agents for you every week, checks the work and reports.
3. 3. Done for youThe lab runs it end to end, supervised, with a person accountable for what ships.

Advising investors

I advise investors as well as founders. I have consulted for analysts and investors at Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Fidelity, Oppenheimer Funds, J.P. Morgan, Chase and Morgan Stanley, and for pension funds, hedge funds, venture and angel groups, on beverages, consumer goods and investing in Mexico.

AI in beverages and CPG, right now

• 36%of food and beverage makers were already testing AI for new product development (TraceGains survey of 250+ leaders, February 2024).
• 42%of US and UK consumers feel positive about AI used to design food and drink (Ingredient Communications survey of 1,040 consumers, October 2024).
• 83%of the same consumers want it declared on the label, so brands that use AI should say so.

Sources: TraceGains 2024 R&D and Product Innovation Report, March 2024; Ingredient Communications consumer survey, December 2024. As of October 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Contact Jorge · Speaking and training · Books