Sanzo Sparkling Water: The Founder and the Costco Push

The pivot behind the can

In 2019, Sandro Roco was a New York area-raised chemical engineering grad from Villanova who had already cycled through three different careers. He had worked at J.P. Morgan in investment banking, taken a turn in the nuclear power industry, and then spent time as head of growth and chief of staff at Bombfell, a venture-backed online styling service for men. The connecting thread was that he kept ending up next to consumer brands, and the gap he noticed was specific. Legacy Asian beverage brands he had grown up with leaned on sugar, preservatives, and artificial flavors. The American sparkling water set he saw on shelf, dominated by LaCroix and Spindrift, used cleaner ingredient decks but did not carry the flavors he wanted to drink. Sanzo was his attempt to close that gap with real fruit, no added sugar at launch, and a flavor library drawn from Alphonso mango, lychee, calamansi, and yuzu.

The product launched in July 2019. It then spent its first full year navigating the pandemic. Sanzo grew five times in 2020 and again five times in 2021, on the back of a direct-to-consumer business with a repeat purchase rate above 30 percent.

The strategy: a category of one, defended by fruit sourcing

The thesis is narrow. Sanzo is not trying to be a better LaCroix, a healthier soda, or a functional drink. It is using single-ingredient Asian fruit as the wedge into a category otherwise crowded with citrus, berry, and stone fruit. The brand markets itself as “the 1st Asian-inspired sparkling water” using real fruit and no artificial flavors. That superlative is narrow enough to defend.

The operator read is that the flavor wall, not the carbonation process or the packaging, is the moat. That is also what makes the licensing work read as on-brand rather than as a distraction. When Sanzo runs a co-branded SKU with Marvel for Shang-Chi or with Pixar for Turning Red, the underlying flavor stays Asian-fruit-forward and the IP partner reinforces the cultural positioning instead of selling a different drink.

Formulation and SKUs

Sanzo sells six year-round flavors in 12-ounce cans: Lychee, Yuzu with Ginger, Mandarin, Calamansi, Pomelo, and Mango. DTC pricing on the site is $29.99 for a 12-pack of a single flavor and $34.99 for the all-six variety pack.

One formulation note is worth flagging. Sanzo has reintroduced a small amount of cane sugar across its core flavors. The current Calamansi 12-pack lists cane sugar in the ingredient panel and shows 1 gram of sugar per 12 fluid ounce serving. The brand’s about page still reads “no added sugars, artificial or ‘natural’ flavors” as of this writing, so the marketing copy has not yet caught up to the current label. The reformulation tightens the better-for-you positioning against true zero-sugar sparkling waters like LaCroix and Spindrift and widens the gap against functional sodas like Poppi and Olipop.

IP-driven SKUs have sat alongside the year-round line in limited runs, including Marvel’s Shang-Chi in 2021, Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, and Pixar’s Turning Red in March 2022. The primary-source trail for current 2025 or 2026 IP collaborations is thin, so the licensing arc reads at this point as a closed chapter.

Retail teardown

The retail arc is the most operator-relevant part of the Sanzo story, because it sequences DTC, natural channel, foodservice, and club in a way that maps to most emerging beverage brands’ choices.

The Costco arc earns the most attention. Sanzo ran a Southern California roadshow across four warehouses in September 2024. A roadshow is a temporary demo, not a permanent set, but it is the standard onramp Costco uses to evaluate a beverage brand. By December 2025, a Calamansi-Lychee-Yuzu 18-count variety pack was tracked at 60 Costco locations under item 1995579, first observed at Northridge, CA and concentrated in Southern California and Hawaii at $10.87 to $18.07 per pack.

The structural read: Sanzo earned a Pacific Region SKU rather than a national rollout, and the variety-pack format hedges single-flavor velocity risk by letting the buyer pick the fruit.

Financing

Sanzo has raised roughly $16 million across three disclosed rounds. The cap table reads as a mix of CPG-focused institutional capital, a few founder-investors who built consumer brands of their own, and AAPI-cultural figures.

A few things are worth noting for an operator reading the cap table. The seed in 2020 leaned on individual founder-operators rather than an institutional lead, which is a common pattern for first-time CPG founders. The Series A brought in CircleUp Growth Partners and added Francisco Crespo, who had run growth for Coca-Cola. The 2024 round has not been formally closed in public reporting, and the celebrity investors named in it — Steve Aoki and Simu Liu — are described as longtime friends of the brand rather than as financial leads. Treat that round as in-progress rather than complete.

Founder profile: Sandro Roco

Sandro Roco is the founder and CEO of Sanzo. He is Filipino American, raised in the New York area, with a chemical engineering degree from Villanova. Before Sanzo, he worked at J.P. Morgan in investment banking, then in the nuclear power sector, and then as head of growth and chief of staff at Bombfell, an online men’s styling service that raised about $10 million in venture funding.

The founding story has a clean version Roco repeats in interviews. From his 2022 AlleyWatch profile: “I noticed that the legacy Asian beverage brands were filled with sugar, preservatives, and artificial flavors, which stood in stark contrast to the ‘clean’ American sparkling water brands I was encountering in other retailers.” The Forbes seed-round piece quotes him on positioning: “We are the first Asian-inspired sparkling water using real fruit and zero sugar.” The “zero sugar” claim has since shifted with the 2025 reformulation, but the cultural-bridge thesis has not.

How Sanzo compares

The teardown view is that Sanzo’s closest direct comparison on shelf is Spindrift, because both use real fruit in a sparkling water format. The flavor wall is what separates them. Sanzo’s nearest cultural-positioning peer is Omsom — a different category but the same operator playbook of building a brand around an under-served set of flavors. Olipop and Poppi compete for share of better-for-you beverage but solve a different problem at a different price.

Press and recognition

Sanzo’s press footprint clusters around its funding rounds. The Forbes seed-round profile by Douglas Yu in August 2020 was the first national feature. Food Business News, Food Navigator USA, and BevNET all covered the $10 million Series A in February 2022. AlleyWatch ran a long-form founder profile in March 2022. The Kitchn published a consumer-side review, and Klaviyo published a marketing case study built around Sanzo’s DTC community playbook.

Where to buy

The fastest path to a 12-pack is the brand’s site at drinksanzo.com, which ships single-flavor and variety packs nationwide. The full retailer set runs from Whole Foods and Target to Sprouts, Panda Express, the Costco Pacific Region 18-pack (item 1995579), and DTC-adjacent channels like Amazon, GoPuff, Thrive Market, and Instacart. For the current store list, the brand maintains a locator at drinksanzo.com/pages/find-us.

FAQ

Related Brand Breakdowns: Graza for category creation in a commodity aisle, and Fishwife for the founder-led cultural-positioning parallel.