Greg LaVecchia was standing inside a 1.4-million-square-foot manufacturing facility on September 22nd, short of breath, watching 1,500 Bloom Energy cans fill every single minute, and the only thing he could say was that he could not compute it. That sensation, standing inside something you built from nothing, is what he has been trying to explain to people for months without success. So he stopped explaining and drove to the plant instead. The man next to him was Leo Walter, his best friend from high school and the president of Bloom day-to-day, and the two of them had not said a word for almost a full minute.
From a $20,000 first order to nine plants running at full speed
Bloom’s first production order, placed in 2019, was for 2,500 units. It cost roughly $20,000, which was everything the founders had, and it took weeks, if not months, to sell through. The warehouse visit on September 22nd showed 900,000 cans in a single facility, and Lav noted that amount represented less than twelve hours of current inventory. Bloom now operates across eleven facilities in the United States, with three to five more running in the UK and the EU.
The numbers from the visit landed with real weight. Bloom is currently the number four energy drink at Walmart, having just surpassed Celsius in the most recent four-week period. On Amazon, it sits at number two in the energy drink category overall and holds the number one, three, and seven spots in the TikTok Shop energy drink rankings. The company has sold over half a billion cans in roughly two and a half years since launch in July 2024.
What makes the scale unusual for a company of this age is the deliberate absence of owned infrastructure. Bloom does not own a single warehouse, manufacturer, truck, or forklift. Distribution runs on third-party partners and Dr. Pepper trucks. Lav made the point directly: ‘One of the reasons we’re the fastest growing is because we don’t own a single manufacturer. We don’t own a single truck. We don’t own a single forklift.’ That decision, he argued, is precisely what allowed a brand run by people in their early thirties to reach this size inside two and a half years.
The product detail almost nobody notices
Not everything from the factory tour was about volume. Lav walked through a design decision baked into the can itself: the Bloom logo sits near the top of the can rather than at the center, because when a creator makes a video holding the product, a centered logo gets covered by the hand. Moving it up keeps the brand visible in every frame. That single reverse-engineered choice reflects how the product was built from the start, by people who understood digital content before they ever made a physical product.
Bloom’s early flavor mockups, some dating to January 2024, were also on display. One early option included a kiwi flavor that never launched. A separate pitch to partner with influencer Alex Earl on a co-branded product fell through after she signed with Nestle. That brand, called Unwell, filed for bankruptcy within roughly two years.
Lav put the plant visit in plain terms: ‘Winning is the limitless energy pill. I don’t care how many hours of sleep I got last night. You come and visit this plant and it’s like you have limitless energy for the next three months.’
A tank the size of a daily habit
One tank on the production floor, filled with strawberry watermelon Bloom, was actively feeding the canning line during the visit.
Lav had walked in that morning telling himself he was going to show people something they could not understand from a slide deck or a sales report. Standing next to a tank of his own product, watching autonomous forklifts navigate a spotless floor using only small white bars on the walls as guides, he arrived at the same conclusion he keeps reaching: the only goal worth chasing is one big enough to change the trajectory of an entire family tree, and the only way to know you are on track is to go stand inside the thing you are building.
