The drink has become a true staple in Belgian hospitality: Ritchie is back, and it's entirely thanks to Jan Verlinden, who traded his career as a marketing director for a garage full of boxes and a backpack filled with bottles of lemonade.
Where did the story begin for you?
"It started with a photo. I was flipping through a photo album from my childhood and found a picture of myself surrounded by crates of Ritchie. That's when the thought struck me: maybe it's not such a bad idea to bring the favourite lemonade of my youth back to the market. It seemed like a crazy idea at first, but it kept nagging at me until I finally decided to go for it. At that point I had spent 25 years in marketing for large companies. But I was tired of always having someone above me who could shoot down my ideas. I still had more than twenty years left until retirement, and I had no desire to spend them in that kind of environment. It's easy to say what you don't want. Much harder to know what you do want. In the end, my choice was pretty simple: I wanted to enjoy myself until retirement."
Was there a turning point between the idea and the decision to actually start?
"As a marketing director at PepsiCo, I could clearly see a trend coming. People were craving authenticity. At the same time, I noticed that the well-known soft drinks were far too sweet or packed with artificial ingredients. I knew that everyone enjoys a good lemonade now and then, and that there were actually very few good alternatives on the market. That insight, combined with that photo, flipped the switch. I also had something most founders don't: a recipe, a packaging design, and a brand name that were already in the family. My father had made Ritchie until the late seventies, at the brewery in Lubbeek. That was a strong foundation to build on."
Not every startup begins in a garage, but yours literally did?
"Yes, quite literally. During the first four years after the launch, my garage was Ritchie's warehouse. All the boxes, promotional materials, and deliveries left from there, all handled by me personally. Every morning I'd set off with an almost fully loaded car. It was a good day if I came home with an empty one."
How did you deal with the uncertainty of those early days?
"The biggest challenge was that uncertainty. Would the concept catch on enough? First, café and bar owners and retailers had to be convinced to stock Ritchie, in the hope that they would then convince their customers too. I literally cycled around the Leuven hospitality scene with bottles of Ritchie in my backpack. Once I had convinced them, I took that to the drinks wholesalers. Step by step, the story began to grow. One customer became ten, one point of sale became several, and slowly but surely Ritchie found its place."
Scaling Ritchie: The inside story from our CEO
What made Ritchie work isn't just the nostalgia: it's the lean, calculated playbook that Jan ran behind it. He outsourced everything non-core: production and logistics are fully outsourced, with admin and stock-flow handled through Odoo, keeping the company a one-person operation with two independent sales reps.
Marketing was treated as calculated risk, not sentiment. Verlinden called his Masked Singer placement "a stunt," estimating the investment wouldn't pay off in year one, a bet a traditional agency would likely have rejected, but one that built recognition fast. The custom bottle mold alone cost around €50,000, a deliberate design investment to stand out on shelf. The results: around 2 million bottles sold per year and revenue approaching €7 million, without external investors or a big team, just disciplined execution.
Lode Uytterschaut
Did you know back then that it could fail?
"Absolutely. I was aware of the risk from the very beginning. I thought the chance of the project failing was greater than the chance of success. But I saw enough opportunity in the growing demand for authentic products to go for it anyway. And if I'd received a euro for every person who thought I was crazy, I'd probably already be set for life. You don't just launch a new brand in a market dominated by some of the world's biggest FMCG companies. But the fact that something is difficult doesn't mean it's impossible."
Who could you count on during that period?
"For administration and financial advice I could rely on my accountant, but for the rest it was largely solo pioneering. What I did learn: it's crucial to surround yourself with people going through the same kinds of experiences; entrepreneurs who know what it feels like to live with that uncertainty. So you know you're not alone."
What do you know now that you absolutely wished you'd known then?
"That you can never fully predict the market. I had perhaps underestimated how difficult it is to build something in the soft drinks sector. But I also think I wouldn't have wanted to know that. As an entrepreneur, you sometimes need a little naivety. It gives you the courage to start, and you figure out the rest along the way."
Jan Verlinden is the founder of Ritchie, the Belgian lemonade his father launched in the seventies and which Jan revived in 2019. Ritchie is today available in more than 2,000 points of sale across Belgium and the Netherlands.
