Eureka: How Whitebox Cocktails turned a negroni into a global business selling millions of cans 

0:14You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Pietro Colina is the co-founder of Whitebox Cocktails, an Edinburgh-based company making full-strength, single-serve classics like Negronis, Espresso Martinis and Spicy Margaritas. Launched in 2021 by a team of world-class bartenders, Whitebox has gone from a lockdown experiment to selling millions of cans and expanding from the UK into Canada, Europe, Asia and the Middle East with the United States next on the menu.

0:53So how do you capture the spirit of a bar-quality cocktail, one that can take five minutes to make... in just five seconds? Well, here's Petro with more on how it all began.

1:13Whitebox is a cocktail company. We've been making canned cocktails since 2021. It started as kind of a very small type of production. It actually came out of lockdown. When we were all in the third lockdown, I actually received a package in the mail because there was this incentive of sending a Negroni to your friend. It was a weird time lockdown, right? Where you had to have like drinks on Zoom with people and all that kind of stuff. So while everyone was at home, Ben, Josh and Alex, who eventually became my partners, had this incentive in basically being like, oh, we're going to send Negronis and kind of create this kind of moment for people.

1:46It's a kind of reconnect. I got one sentence in the mail, and it was just a plain white box, very generic, but with a sticker on it. And it had the Negroni character on this box. I opened up, it was just a plastic bag. Usually they're called Crowback bags in hospitality, where you kind of seal things up. Very simple. Poured myself a Negroni, and it was delicious, but I was very obsessed with this character. I've known one of the founders, Alex Lawrence, for a long time. I mean, I've been in hospitality for about 15, 20 years, specializing in a beverage side of everything. I ran the bar program for I Love Madison Park in New York City, as well as the Nomad Hotels internationally.

2:24I moved to London to open up Nomad. And I quickly connected with Alex just because while I was going through the industry in New York, he was rising through the industry in London, running Lion Group and basically being kind of the creative director of Dandelion in the Mondrian. He used to be now at Sea Containers with Lioness. and he's still kind of part of that company. So him and I were very, very passionate about all things beverage. And every single time we'd meet up, we'd geek out. So the second I saw this package, I called him. And I was like, what's this all about? What's happening here?

2:52And he's like, oh yeah, he's a partner at this distillery called Porter's Gin. They were making gin up in Scotland with Ben and Josh. And they were like, this is just a way to create a moment with our product. And at that point in 2021, I was interested in canned coctus for a while. I was probably looking into the category since about 2017 while I was in New York. You know, you saw kind of the rise in that time of seltzers, things like White Claw and things of that nature. So I was looking in the category. I was really interested in it. In that moment, I was like, you know what? I want to have a discussion about, are you thinking about ever doing this in Cannes?

3:24They're like, actually, we might be thinking about doing it. I was like, I wanted to talk to you guys about it because I'm super interested. And that's basically how it all started.

3:35Being a founder of a company and kind of going through that kind of entrepreneurial journey is very different. But funny enough, the life of the hospitality industry really grows you to start thinking big right from the beginning. I got into the hospitality industry while I was living here in London, and I started at this place called the Mark's Club, which is a really well-known private members club in the kitchen. Super fascinated about cooking. Eventually went to the Culinary Institute of America, which is a kind of prestigious hospitality culinary school. And I thought my whole direction was going to be chef.

4:04I was going to be a chef. I was going to cook. But then I fell in love with wine. Studied wine for a long time. And then basically out of university, I went straight to Love Madison Park. And then eventually I got really into beverage, being part of the bar team. And then we opened up the Nomad Hotel in a neighborhood that was kind of ignored for a long time, which eventually actually got coined the Nomad, which is north of Madison. So now the entire neighborhood is called Nomad after we opened the hotel. So it's quite an incredible story. A lot of people think as a server, you're just serving plates and food and drinks, but you're doing so many more steps.

4:38You know, it's everything about sales, customer service, brand knowledge and product knowledge. So you start learning a language about how to actually engage with people. Also me being in the beverage side, there's so many people who want to sell you spirits all the time if you're running a prominent program. So I would sit every single week with people who would just have new products and be like, this is our new gin, this is our new tequila, this is our new Amaro. They pitch me every single week, every single week. So I understand the storytelling. I understand the brands. And specifically, as you mature into the industry and you become kind of a bar director, you start looking at more of the financing.

5:10You start looking at partnerships. So I work with a lot of different brands from big brands like Diageo, Pernod, Suntory, everything. And I understand their strategy every single year and how it develops. So it was interesting going into Whitebox from the beginning because you have a lot of trepidation because you're like, I'm an amateur. I have no idea what I'm doing. and then you slowly start talking to more people who've done it and you're like, wait a second, this is exactly what I've been doing for many years.

5:40The cocktails itself are based off of bar-quality cocktails. So if you see the differentiation of Whitebox to a lot of other products, our ABV is high. Our margarita is about 20%, 19-20%. And it's what you would expect from a bar experience. And you pour it into a glass with ice, you rim the glass, you garnish it. it becomes a kind of a ritual for a lot of people. And that's what we're trying to create. In the beginning, it was really the Negroni. Negroni is a very simple recipe. It's a three-ingredient cocktail. It's gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari. Obviously, if you're looking at doing a canned cocktail, one of the most difficult ingredients is Campari.

6:17We are a small brand. We're not going to go and start buying Campari and putting it in canned cocktails because it's just not feasible in terms of financially feasible. So it was really about trying to create and try to find all and source all the great products to create that flavor of Campari, to create that right flavor of sweet vermouth. And I actually took a lot of research and development. You know, there's rooms in White Routes that it's just all bottles. And it's all different, you know, concentrations, all different textures that we make in-house. And there's a lot of R &D process behind it.

6:47Fortunately, a lot of us come from a bar background and a tasting background. There's a lot of arguments, a lot of, you know, a lot of back and forth. and then you know there's a lot of ideas like this is the perfect cocktail okay well now how do we do 100 ,000 of these. The design is a big part of our brand I think it really jumps off of the shelf I think it really has a statement when it goes next to a lot of other canned cocktails. I love the designs of each of the cocktails I think you know a cocktail is really much a personality and each of the designs gives that personality of the cocktails but if you read every single type of business book, marketing book, spirits book, you know, about branding, everything should look like it's in a range.

7:29You know, when we were going into the market, everything had like, these are five different cocktails with different pastel colors, you know, this, this, this, this, it has the same branding on everything. It's like, instead of old fashioned, it says mojito, it says something else. So right from the beginning, we're like, we don't want to do that. We want to be completely disruptive. We want to have this kind of more kind of whimsical branding and personality. And that's basically what we decided to do. And the Negroni to begin with has the Negroni man on it. Really, really kind of fun and it pops off of the shelf.

8:01But if you're looking in the beginning when we were a nothing brand and we were starting looking for money and investment and things like that, every single person in the spirits industry worked for Diageo or giving us advice or working for a different venture capitalist. They're like, why is everything different? Why does it look the same? So we actually started looking at more, not only the design of the can, but really at how everything is placed on the can, the locations of it, how every can has an instruction of how to serve it perfectly on the can. And then looking at also the top of it and actually having that as the unison where it's this white box.

8:33So every single time you pick up a can, the first thing you see is white box and then you have the can itself with a completely different personality.

8:44Right now, the expectation is kind of outperforming everything we ever imagined, to be honest. You know, it started very small. The first year, we basically had 200 independent retailers. We really focused on independent retailers right from the beginning, only in the UK, in Scotland and everything. The next year, we grew to 400. The following year, we got up to 1 ,000 different distribution points in the UK, started looking at different international markets as well in Europe. And I think last year, we were so proud, we hit our one millionth cocktail salt. And it was a huge moment for us. And we were like, wow, this is really picking up.

9:18It's absolutely crazy. And then this year happened, and we're about to sell two to three million cans just this year. The dream, I think, five years down the line is that, you know, we are in more markets. Right now, we're in the UK. We're in Canada. We're in UAE. We're in China. We're in Norway, Ireland, France, Denmark. We get to collaborate with some really cool event companies. I think I would love to see Whitebox for different festivals, different moments like sporting events, different arenas. Our uniqueness as Whitebox, we get to create really cool specs and customize cocktails very quickly.

9:59And I think we can do a lot of really cool customization for like fun companies or like fun venues that kind of bring people together.

10:13that was Pietro Colina the co-founder of White Box Cocktails and you can learn more by heading to whiteboxcocktails.com and that's all for this episode of Eureka we'll be back at the same time next week the program's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars you can listen again and find out more at monocle.com or follow us and catch up with the archive wherever you get your audio. If you'd like to get in touch with the team, do feel free to email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye, and thanks for listening to Eureka.