Jan Verlinden

Jan Verlinden's public thinking centers on a single decision he keeps returning to: leaving a secure corporate marketing career to relaunch his family's lemonade brand. He frames that choice not as a leap into risk but as an escape from a hidden one. "Volgens mij was het het grootste risico om het niet te doen en ongelukkig te zijn, dan het risico te nemen om het wel te doen," he says, arguing that the corporate "golden cage" has a shelf life most people underestimate ¹¹. He did not want to reach 65 with regret, "had ik het maar gedaan," and generalizes this into a broader observation about human psychology: "Mensen hebben voornamelijk spijt van dingen die ze niet hebben gedaan, niet zozeer van wat ze wel hebben gedaan" ¹¹¹². The word he keeps coming back to is "goesting," which he distinguishes carefully from ordinary desire. Wanting to run a marathon is not enough; goesting means training through the rain even when you don't want to. "Ik heb zin om een marathon te lopen, maar ik heb geen goesting om een marathon te lopen, dus ik ga er nooit gaan lopen" ¹². For him, "Goesting is een schoon Vlaams woord. Als je goesting hebt, ja, dan moet je dat doen" ¹¹.

That personal philosophy translates into concrete business discipline. He bootstrapped Ritchie without outside investors, and defends the choice on three grounds: nobody can veto his contrarian moves, negotiations with investors would slow down bold bets, and investors enter with an exit in mind, which conflicts with building something for the long term ¹¹. He is blunt about what actually keeps a company alive: "Dat is de enige manier dat er geld binnenkomt: is dat er iemand bereid is om voor uw product te betalen. Dat is de essentie van zaken doen," and "Uiteindelijk de beste manier om jezelf te financieren is winst te maken" ¹¹. He set his own salary to zero in the early years, refused a standard retail promo demand even when told he would not get shelf space, and has stayed profitable since year one, reinvesting into marketing rather than drawing capital out. When a distributor tried to force him into loss-making 1+1 deals he simply walked away: "En dan heb ik gezegd: dat is goed, dan kom ik er niet in" ¹¹. Underneath this is a clear-eyed acknowledgment of scale: "Je vecht tegen de grootste merken ter wereld met de diepste pockets" ¹¹.

His go-to-market thinking is summarized in one recurring line, repeated across interviews and now embedded in how he talks about the brand publicly: "In horeca you try, in retail you buy" ¹¹. Horeca functions as the discovery and trial engine, while retail captures the repeat purchase, and he has kept pushing this logic even as circumstances changed it. When COVID shut down horeca and retail failed to compensate, he accelerated media investment years ahead of plan, still landing 36 percent volume growth that year, and concluded that horeca presence and media advertising reinforce each other even at a small brand's scale ¹¹¹². That same instinct now shows up in his sponsorship of cafés through initiatives like Kroegtijgers and the Nationale Cafédag, where he frames the support in almost civic terms: "Want een dorp of stad zonder café verliest een stukje van zijn ziel" .

On marketing itself, he keeps insisting that advertising is only the visible tip of the discipline, not its foundation. "Iedereen denkt dat marketing reclame is. Reclame is maar een stuk. De P van product van de marketingmix is stap nummer één," and he is emphatic that taste has to come first: "Lekkere limonade maak je met lekkere ingrediënten, punt" ¹². Packaging, in his view, is a communication tool rather than a container, on the logic that "we eat and drink packaging," and he treats product placement as a more efficient use of scarce budget than expensive TV production, since every euro not spent on a shoot can instead buy reach ¹². This same reach-first logic reappears in how he talks about targeting: asked repeatedly by media buyers who his target audience is, his answer is always "iedereen," reasoning that small brands grow chiefly by increasing penetration, so he avoids niche channels with low reach and high cost per contact even if they feel more "strategic" .

The brand's differentiation claims follow the same product-first conviction. He positions Ritchie Cola explicitly against mainstream cola on health grounds, citing a nephrologist's warning that phosphoric acid burdens the kidneys and can calcify blood vessels, and pointing out that Ritchie replaces phosphoric acid with lemon juice and fermented apple juice and swaps artificial caramel E150d for barley malt, going so far as to note it is a cola some kidney dialysis patients can actually drink ¹². This product-led argument dovetails with an economic-patriotism message he has pushed around Belgium's national holiday, proposing July 21st as an unofficial "Ik Koop Belgisch" day, framed not as a boycott but as "een kleine, bewuste (en vooral héél lekkere) keuze" in favor of local alternatives to familiar multinational products .

Running underneath all of this is a psychological framework about expectations and motivation that he applies to both life and targets. "The secret of happiness is low expectations. Als je teveel verwacht ga je altijd teleurgesteld zijn," he says, and he applies this literally to how he sets internal goals: aiming for 100 and hitting 150 feels like a win and motivates the team, while aiming for 200 and landing on the same 150 feels like failure, even though the actual work and result are identical ¹². He is equally frank about the emotional cost of the path he chose, describing the early years as "een rollercoaster" where "de wins zijn heel leuk, de highs zijn high, maar de lows zijn heel low" ¹². He waves off any framing of Ritchie as a vehicle for a future sale: asked what he'd say if someone offered to buy the brand today, his answer is "neen. Ik amuseer mij teveel. Wat moet ik dan gaan doen, thuis gaan zitten en mijn geld gaan tellen?" ¹².

Taken together, his recur