Emphasize Quality. It's A Big Reason Why This Company Was Acquired.

0:10Hey folks, I'm Ray Lateef and you're listening to the number one podcast for the food and beverage industry, Taste Radio. This episode features an interview with Branya Shillo, the founder of pioneering canned cocktail brand, Fishers Island Lemonade. It's been nearly 10 years since Branya Shillo launched Fishers Island Lemonade, and despite selling her company to one of the largest beverage alcohol companies in the world, she's still on the grind, promoting her brand one customer at a time and wouldn't want it any other way. Fisher's Island Lemonade markets premium canned cocktails made with a base of barrel-aged whiskey, vodka, lemon, and honey.

0:52Lauded for its unique taste profile and commitment to high-quality ingredients, the brand comes in several flavor varieties and is sold nationally at a suggested retail price of$15.99 for a four-pack of 12 ounce cans. In May, Spirit of Gallo, the spirits arm of E &J Gallo Winery, announced that it would acquire Fishers Island lemonade for an undisclosed fee. In a press release, the company noted that the purchase in part reflected consumers quote trading up to spirit-based cocktails and demanding more full-flavored, higher ABV products. Brawny remains on the Fishers Island board and serves as the brand's official spokesperson.

1:32In the following interview, Bronnie discusses the brand's origins, why quality of ingredients matters when meeting with retail buyers, how after a variety of challenges, she aligned with the right manufacturing partners, why the adage inch-wide, mile-deep guided the brand's distribution strategy for years, and how she built and maintained a relationship with E &J Gallo's leadership.

1:58hey folks it's ray with taste radio right now i'm honored to be sitting down with braunia shillow who is the founder of fisher's island lemonade braunia great to see you hey ray fantastic to be here thank you so much we've seen each other many times over the years i recall you coming to our events more than a few times brewbound lives you ever come to a bevnet live as well I did. I think that's actually where I first met you and John Landis, maybe in Massachusetts, a couple of times in New York. Yeah, yeah. It's been a long time coming to sit down with you and talk about the amazing things that you've been doing with your brand.

2:36Just congratulations on everything that you've achieved. There's just so many things, so many great things to talk about. But I got to ask about the name of Fishers Island Lemonade and how often people butcher it because i think when i first heard about your brand i think i called it fisher islands lemonade or fisher lemonade or island so i'm assuming i'm not the only one there's definitely a few moments where people say you know fisher's island fisher island fisher island iced tea um we're here for we're here to tell people the true story and educate them on our tvs and how great they taste from Fisher's Island Lemonade's portfolio.

3:19Well, obviously you have a long history and deep ties to Fisher's Island. Where did the name come from? So Fisher's Island Lemonade was created on the actual island itself, which is right off the coast of Connecticut in Long Island Sound, but actually a part of New York State itself. So my family owned the only bar out there called the Pequod Inn, which has been around for over a hundred years. and this was the house recipe, Fisher's Island Lemonade. So, you know, back when I was bartending well over a decade ago, this is pretty much how I got the idea behind the bar on a late night of saying, why don't I just can this?

4:01It's, you know, flowing so frequently and so fast and I can't keep up with it. And I was into brewing beer and I was into other things, culinary wise, And I really wanted to kind of tap into the beverage industry and fix a problem that I felt was needed. Going from a family recipe that you can make in your kitchen to creating a packaged beverage brand is, might be a little easy to start, but actually scaling your business is not the easiest thing to do. And I want to talk about that in a moment. But the cocktail itself, the Fishers Island Lemonade cocktail, was beloved by the patrons of the Pequod Inn and also beloved by so many people who didn't even know it existed.

4:46The last time you and I spoke was during our very first, Bebnet's first cocktail showdown competition, which featured a range of RTD cocktail brands all competing against each other for the crown of, well, cocktail showdown champion. And one of our judges, the acclaimed Tony Abuganam, who's an OG mixologist and someone who's pretty well known and revered in the industry, was raving, raving about Fisher's Island lemonade. He's like, where'd this come from? I can't believe I've never heard of this. It's just like he just loved how well crafted and beautiful the cocktail was and continues to be. What is it about the cocktail that makes it so special?

5:34Well, situations like this when people who are very well-versed in the industry and have quite a bit to back that up, it's always a wonderful compliment to get them to give that sort of blue checkmark, if you will. But really what it boils down to is real and premium ingredients. And that seems to be one of the things that really disrupted a bit of the industry was, And we were a canned cocktail made by a bartender that came from a real place that already had pre-existing customers that knew of the brand and had shared this for generations. We really kind of just put it on the map, but also made it convenient and be able to sort of drink cocktails wherever you're enjoying your happy place is kind of our motto.

6:25So if you're out on the beach, you know, 4th of July, barbecues, out on the water, fishing, or just, you know, going to a festival and you want something that's a little more premium than, say, like a flavored malt beverage or a craft beer that may be a little bit heavy for, you know, your sessionability of that experience. So, you know, using premium vodka and whiskey is what really just continues to tie us to the roots of the recipe itself. And not altering that, but just continuing to deliver on, you know, ingredients that you can pronounce and ingredients that you can identify. And you really do see and taste in our mix with the whiskey coming through in the original quite prominently.

7:05I think that's where people definitely appreciate the fact that it's a canned cocktail that's very convenient and hopefully more available wherever people are these days. Yeah. You know, the term canned cocktail wasn't, I don't even know if it was a term back when you started the company. And now, obviously, you know, you can find a canned cocktail pretty much at any retailer, any major retailer across the country. But at the time, it just wasn't a known thing. And you said earlier that, you know, you wanted to solve a problem. At the time, you know, did you think it was a problem that consumers were looking for?

7:46Or is it more specific to your ability to service, you know, your customers and the region or the local area where the Pequod Inn was located? I think it starts, you know, initially behind the bar. when you're trying to duplicate yourself, when you're trying to become more efficient in a very seasonal place such as New England. And, you know, for my family's bar, we were only open roughly 14 weeks out of the year. So trying to capitalize on that, especially when you deal with weather as well, that was the thing that I was trying to do was pretty much duplicate myself and make it consistent. So if someone asked for a drink, it was always made the same way, or I wouldn't get pulled off the bar to go ahead and batch up more of it for a really busy weekend that, you know, we had more people than expected.

8:33But additionally, I always was looking for, you know, reasons to probably improve on the product. But then also off island, you know, on the mainland, as we say, is, you know, just trying to carry that memory with you wherever you're going. So if you've been to Fishers, you couldn't get there, you could still get something that brought you back to that happy place. And then as sort of the food and the restaurant industry continued to evolve on sort of this farm to table type concept, it really started to sort of scratch an itch for me, which was, why can't we get this in a convenient form in our beverages?

9:13Why can't we get this type of quality when it comes down to cocktails? There was a beer craze or the seltzer craze. And, you know, I think we were certainly ahead of our times back in 2014 of launching canned cocktails. As you mentioned before, there was there was no category for it. There was no hashtags that people were trying to tag it towards or, you know, sections and categories of write ups or even in Nielsen reporting menus and stuff like that was always like ciders and such. you never really had canned cocktails or even dubbing sort of the category RTDs. So we continued to sort of push and educate and explain what we were and year by year continue to carve out this category that we all now know is as canned cocktails are ready to drinks.

10:05I once spoke with Charles Jolie, who is also an acclaimed mixologist. He's one of the founders of Craft House Cocktails. And when he launched the company, he was talking about how he created the world's largest Moscow mule and that he was batching hundreds and if not thousands of gallons of the cocktail at a time and bottling it. And again, going from a family recipe where you're measuring spirits in ounces to one where you're, again, using a vast quantity of liquid can sometimes dilute the flavor or quality of what you're doing. How did you get up to speed on how to mass produce the cocktail itself?

10:53So that was definitely an interesting feat, you know, science experiment all in all in itself. of, you know, trying to go from your back kitchen where a cocktail is traditionally served over ice. And for us, it was it was batched usually like that day, that weekend. But when it came down to putting it in a can, nobody nobody wanted to really get involved. It was like, oh, you're crazy. That's going to be too expensive. How are you going to put liquor in a can that combines too many regulations and too many industries? It just hasn't really been done before. So, you know, we knew we wanted to work in a can.

11:30And I just felt like that was the best vessel for it versus, say, glass, specifically coming from, you know, an island, you know, habitat and doing a lot of boating and traveling. You don't really want glass on a boat. Plus, there's a lot more real estate for being able to design and tell your story on a can. Cans were also getting hot again. So we're just trying to work together to basically put this idea into manufacturing. And when you mentioned scaling up, that certainly had its rounds of trying to get the flavor profile correct to try to source things on a larger level, which on some level, you can have better access to those ingredients and better pricing depending on what you're going for.

12:14I mean, I remember certainly throwing down a large chunk of money in the early days, just trying to buy a tractor trailer load of cans and making sure that we were investing in the right route to market. and like shrink sleeves at the time 10 years ago weren't quite really as good as they are today. And I just felt that the lines on the can with a shrink sleeve that had a little bit of a bump or a wave in them wouldn't come through in our intention with the branding with all the stripes that we have on our logo. But liquid wise, just trial, trial, trial and taste. I love being in the kitchen. That's something that I take a lot of pride in.

12:56And, you know, I think that comes through in our cocktail and staying patient and believing in what you do was something that I constantly rooted myself in. And it was hard for me to be patient. Specifically, my family can back me up on that. But knowing that this was something that I saw in our customers and felt that the industry hadn't quite, you know, really embarked on yet and continuing to focus on premium, premium, premium. And our story was something that I started to see the light bulb come off with our distributors and with the retailers and specifically at events. As soon as people tasted our product, it was just, it was lights out.

13:37People were lining up down the hallway, just trying to get a sip of what this new thing was. And honestly, lemonade as a category and what we are making for canned cocktails, lemonade-based, it's a win-win. It's America. It's something that people grew up with. So it's a familiar palate. It's a familiar recipe that people can approach with confidence. Yeah, that's a really good point. Sometimes when people hear about cocktails that they're not familiar with, they might be a little hesitant to try them or buy them or invest their money, spend their money on that type of product. But lemonade, as you mentioned, is ubiquitous.

14:18It is American. It is America, as you pointed out. It's just something that everyone knows. But the cocktail itself and what people know about its flavor and expectations on how it should taste was pretty specific to the Pequot Inn. When you were introducing it to others, I assume you wanted that experience and those expectations to remain the same. But when you're using, as you mentioned, premium ingredients, premium vodka, barrel aged whiskey, lemon and honey, there can be a pretty significant variation in flavor across those ingredients. You know, how did you find suppliers that could help you maintain consistency and taste and quality across those ingredients?

15:02I was pretty particular. I went and met everybody. And that came down to a lot of in-person meetings, trying to be very particular and defined in what I was looking for. But I also had a base. We were making this for generations. And for years, I had mixed and made this behind our bar. So I knew what I was looking for. Just trying to basically source and put everything together with a budget in mind, too, was probably the hardest thing. But ultimately, the manufacturing process of putting our recipe in a can was also quite a large hurdle, more so than sourcing. Because you're putting basically the beer industry together with the liquor industry on a manufacturing level.

15:50And the TTB probably didn't have that come across their desk really before. And that was a lot of different rounds and revisions of explaining what we were from day one. So there's a handful of threads you can pull on there with how did you stay consistent with sourcing and keeping things true to the roots. It's really getting to know your vendors and getting to know your ingredient base and just staying true to what you believe in. I mean, there's a lot of times where people would say, hey, this is really great, but it would be more widely distributed if you went malt and a lot easier to make and less hurdles for you to get through.

16:31But I guess that's where my stubbornness paid off. For sure. Although when you're starting out, you don't have a ton of leverage with your vendors. You don't have a ton of leeway with your suppliers. You can ask for a certain price, but they certainly don't have to meet that price. How do you negotiate when you are young, and by young, I mean a young brand, and are looking for quality, but can't necessarily pay for it? I don't know, I'm scratching back 10 years thinking about how that all came together. I felt that not sacrificing on quality was a big piece. So the investment that I made in things like our whiskey and, you know, supplying and finding the spirits and working with vendors to try to work on terms and, you know, tell them my story.

17:27They got behind it. There's a lot of people that were like, you know, this is interesting. I want to work with you. I've never done something like this before. But it was it was pinching pennies for a long time. And, you know, I remember having to be turned away when one of our first deliveries was getting ready to be picked up. And I didn't have the funds to, you know, have that truck hit the road and that truck did not hit the road. So I had to go back to a bit of the drawing board and figure out how I was going to make ends meet so that we could get enough money back into the bank. And, you know, really working those terms with distributors and, you know, trying to sell in larger orders was kind of the name of the game.

18:08and getting those distributors and those sales teams and those, you know, accounts in those territories to believe in it so that it would build up our capital so that we had more to work with. And I definitely attest that to some of the early distributors in the, you know, Connecticut market that, you know, got on board from day one. But, you know, one of the other things that came with that was the fact that we were already an operating place. So people knew of Fisher's Island Lemonade. It wasn't this brand new thing where you're coming out with a brand new name and trying to market something.

18:41It was something that was, oh my God, I can't believe you did this. This is gonna be amazing. So you already had built-in liquor stores and restaurants and consumers asking for it and demanding it in other state borders. And that quickly really just propelled us forward, which I think isn't always the case when you're starting out and you're building something from scratch and you're trying to scale it. So that's definitely a bit of an area of luck for us, but we knew that going into it. We knew that there was something that we didn't want to mess with, especially when it came down to the recipe.

19:18You want to stay consistent in what people already knew and had for years before it came in a can. Did you have a sense of how you wanted to price the product and what margins you needed to be successful or at least break even? Yeah, this was a fun story. I remember trying to learn the industry at the same time and say, okay, I need to make X in order to stay profitable and afloat and pay my bills. I need to make sure that the distributor has a certain percentage in the retailer and so on and so forth. But then back into a price that specifically, say, a consumer is purchasing at a liquor store for a four-pack, that's not going to break the bank on that sort of trial.

20:03So I was like, all right, me, I'm not going to probably spend more than a$20 bill on something that's brand new for trial. And so roughly working within that price range, and we were never$20 a four-pack, but I figured once you get up to the register, you're really not going to be peeling more than that. So we priced it at$15.99, a four-pack, and roughly around$9 to$10 was a suggested price on premise because that's also what it was priced at our bar. And we wanted to make sure that that didn't fluctuate too much and everything stayed whole. Fun story is I remember when I first had to convince my mother, who was the manager of the Pequot, to buy my own product and have to take a hit on the margins.

20:52And she definitely was a pretty difficult gatekeeper and saying, well, why should I pay more for something that I can make myself? And I was like, well, this is part of a bigger situation of building a brand. And it's about fixing a problem of efficiency. So your bartenders can go ahead and make something else and be available to wait on customers more so than just being pulled off and making something batch by batch. That was always a fun sort of family dinner conversation. And I think to this day, I have in our office, you know, the signed bill from our distributor that I signed for and delivered off the hand truck.

21:30And, you know, buying that wholesale is, you know, pretty, pretty fun memory. But ultimately, taxes, too. Taxes came in real quick, real fast. You know, we didn't know what to price it at. We thought we knew what to price that, but all of a sudden being taxed as a liquor item and not as a beer item, specifically being in a 12-ounce can, was a new hurdle for everybody who ever touched the product, from the state to the distributor to retailers having to understand why we were almost sometimes double the beer that they purchased. And that was a learning curve for everybody. There was definitely a turning point where I was like, we're either going to fold real quick or we're going to have to fight some of this legislation.

22:16So still a bit of both. You know, we're trying to make sure that each state is understanding what our TDs and canned cocktails are so that it can be, you know, fairly available and on shelf for people to, you know, consume just as if they were going to have, say, a double IPA or a canned wine. Just going back to your mom and handing her the invoice to be a fly on the wall when you're like, mom, you owe me$4 ,000. And she's like, what? Whatever the cost of the invoice was. You know, getting customers to understand the value of what they're buying can sometimes be the most challenging part of marketing a premium brand.

22:57getting them to understand that a four pack at$16 is a much better use of their money and better way to spend their money than say, you know, a four pack or a six pack of beer or going to a bar and buying, you know, a single cocktail. So what was that process? Because as we know, and you know, despite the fact that you had great relationships with your distributors, we know that distributors don't sell your product. Oh yeah. That's quite the statement. You know, So liquid to lips, as they say, is definitely a major tool. And I think everybody's toolbox in this industry, you got to taste it. You got to make sure that people understand what they're investing in, what they're buying, whether it's a retailer, a bar, or even customers themselves.

23:45I have tried to do as many festivals and just general liquor store tastings as possible because we're not something like a leading lemonade out there that's a malt beverage. This is a much different taste on the palate. It's very clean. It's non-carbonated, which is something that's different than what's out there even a decade later. And we're also one of the only dual spirit-based RTDs still today. And that's a major thing that I think comes through when you first taste and you have that, you know, hits your palate and really quench your thirst. So we try to do as many of the tastings as possible so people understand the quality that they're actually tasting with Fisher's Island Lemonade specifically.

24:31And then after that, you know, we start to talk about the ABV. Fisher's Island Lemonade Original is 9%. So at 12 ounces, that almost drinks and can be, you know, served two drinks per can practically. It's very easily seen to, you know, you grab a pine glass, boil it over ice, and you're still going to have like almost a quarter of a can left. So it's hard to, you know, push back when you can see and taste and deliver on those things. And then when you compare that to what's being priced out on, say, a menu, you know, when you go out for maybe a margarita, you can pay 14, 15, 16 bucks these days for a margarita over ice.

25:10You don't have that little like, you know, side, you know, back of extra lemonade to sip on. So there's real value there when you start to look at all the comparables, apples to apples. And then when you look at the sessionability of the product, you're like, wow, that's really smooth. That's 9%. That has all of that in there. So those seem to very much go a long way when we can kind of deliver on some of those bullet points. And then it's really fun to get into the story. It's nice to be able to talk about how this was developed and why I started this product. But those are things specifically that I try to hold for, you know, as sort of round two, but ultimately sort of discuss the facts first because other things you just can't deny.

25:57Now, I recall 10 years ago and many years even prior, the lemonade, the hard lemonade that was out there and most well known as Mike's Hard Lemonade. And I'm sure there was some confusion among consumers and probably retailers and distributors as to whether Fisher's Island was directly competing with or a similar kind of product to Mike's. How did you overcome that confusion? And, you know, what really resonated with all parties involved? You know, surprisingly, that wasn't as big of a hurdle as one would have thought. Like I mentioned before, the tastings were just, you know, a huge component as to how we got, you know, fishes on the map.

26:39We were doing tastings at beer and wine festivals. I gotta be honest, I don't think I've ever seen Mike's at some of these festivals. So that was something where, you know, if we were doing a trade show, you'd be seeing new items. and you know mike's has been around for a long time and that was something that even side by side it's a very different product it's a different category with the base and then even you know some of the sweetness as well and again non-carbonated so there's a couple of different features there outside the fact that just lemonade lemonade and it's you know got alcohol in it when it also refers to you know the the cooler or where you're going to be merchandising fishers aisle lemonade we didn't want it next to my card lemonade because of six pack for 9.99 was something that you're not able to really explain to a customer when you're not able to do tastings so I remember at the time seltzers spike seltzers and honestly double apas were still much the rage about a decade ago and we wanted to be in the cooler set cold lemonade purchase it you know as if you're going to go and consume it a couple hours later, going to the beach or going to the party.

27:53You don't want to buy it warm. And so getting in the cooler was really important, but making sure that we were in that cooler door where other people were shopping that would maybe trade and trial fishers. And that was Spike Seltzer at the time. And so when people are building a cooler and they're looking for those, you know, those refreshing products, we wanted to make sure we were there. And thankfully, that's where a lot of the retailers also saw fit and And distributors continued to follow suit and work with their teams to make sure that Fishers was merchandised correctly and that it was cold.

28:26And I owe a lot of that to the beer distributorships in the early days who were definitely big proponents of merchandising those cooler sets. Now, a lot of times beer, F &Bs, canned cocktails, they are sold in the cooler case. But in the instances where they're not, it seems like an issue that beverage entrepreneurs have been facing forever. whether you're a non-alc brand, operate a non-alc brand or an alcoholic beverage brand, everyone wants to be in the cooler. Everyone wants to be in the cold case. It's great for trial. But again, there's a limited amount of space in the cooler and convincing a retailer that you belong there is not an easy task.