Where Bev Alc Founders Come From - Quench Report Issue #38

Plus: MAS+ Post-Mortem, Ritual Zero Proof's RTD Bet, and Hot Jobs

Author

Matt Rice
May 26, 2026

In tech, you can almost predict a founder's LinkedIn before you read it. Stanford CS → FAANG → startup. In beverage alcohol, that pedigree just doesn't exist. The top undergraduate school for emerging Bev Alc founders accounts for just 2% of funded brands - less than half the concentration of tech's top school. And the names on the top-5 list will surprise you.

What’s on tap for today:

  • 🥇 Deep Dive - Where Bev Alc Founders Actually Come From

  • 🪦 Post-Mortem - Why MAS+ Didn't Pull?

  • 🆕 New Launch - Ritual Zero Proof Goes RTD

🥇 WHERE BEVERAGE ALCOHOL FOUNDERS COME FROM

There's a quiet assumption in venture that the next big brand will come from the same handful of places the last big brands came from. In tech, that assumption is mostly correct - the pipeline is consolidated and predictable around a few elite universities. In beverage alcohol, the education pipeline is wide open, and the data isn't even close.👇️

Methodology: I pulled funded bev alc brands from the past 3 years using Pitchbook, BevNet, and Google, then aggregated founder education and work history via LinkedIn. Small friends-and-family rounds excluded. A deeper sample might surface a few more schools, but the shape of the distribution is unlikely to change.

A few takeaways from the data:

  • Tech has a hierarchy. Bev alc has a flat distribution. Stanford alone accounts for 4.1% of tech founders who've raised pre-seed to Series A. Bev Alc has no standout feeder. Great Bev Alc brands come from anywhere.

  • Geographic spread is dramatically wider. Tech's top 5 is two elite Bay Area schools, two Ivies, and MIT. Bev alc's top 5 is a Midwest public flagship (Indiana), an urban Northeast (BU), a Florida regional (Miami), an urban NYC school (NYU), and a Southern California public (UCLA). No regional center of gravity. No feeder pattern.

  • Pre-founding career paths are all over the map (some examples):

    • Bill Shufelt (Athletic Brewing) - Middlebury → 12 years as a trader at KCG and Point72 → non-alc beer

    • John Enghauser (Jeng) - Indiana → 20 years of top-performing enterprise SaaS/AdTech sales → THC cocktails

    • Pauline Idogho (Mocktail Club) - Wharton MBA → OPIC renewable energy finance → NA mocktails

    • Ray Biebuyck (Hurray's Girl Beer) - NYU Stern → JPMorgan IB → WeWork strategy → Shacksbury cider → flavored beer

    • Jordan Bass (HOPWTR) - Pepperdine → cleantech VC → 6 years running ecommerce at The Wonderful Company (FIJI, POM) → non-alc hop water

    • Merrilee Kick (Buzzballz) - University of Montana → news anchor → teacher → Buzzballz

That's before you add ex-CPG brand managers (e.g. Beam, Smucker, Clorox), traditional winemakers and distillers, NBA players, country singers, actors, rappers, and reality stars. The category is open to almost any pre-history.

THE FINAL WORD
Bev Alc keeps attracting outside capital, outside talent, and outside perspective in a way tech doesn't anymore. The next big brand can credibly come from anywhere… a finance career-switcher, a passion-project distiller, a celebrity who actually cares, an ex-CPG operator who's seen the inside of the big brands and wants to build something different.

Betting on a Bev Alc founder requires different inputs than betting on a tech one. You can't lean on the pedigree screen as hard. Taste, market intuition, learning speed, and the network around the founder end up doing more of the work than the resume suggests.

🪦 POST-MORTEM: WHY MAS+ DIDN'T PULL

When Lionel Messi puts his name and likeness on a sports drink and Mark Anthony Brands picks it up for distribution, you'd be forgiven for assuming the launch works. Mas+ hit US shelves in late 2024 with what should have been every advantage a launch can have: the most globally recognizable athlete in the world, premium retail distribution, broad placement at Walmart, 7-Eleven, and major c-store and grocery chains. Yet, just last week after nearly 2 years in market, Mark Anthony announced it has been officially discontinued.

So what happened? By every indication, the product just didn't pull.

A few weeks after Mas+ launched, I went on a market survey with one of the leading ABI distributors in the country. Mas+ was everywhere. The company and its partners didn't just get distribution, they killed it. End-caps, 80-case floor displays, one of the strongest launches I've ever seen.

The displays looked amazing. Actually too amazing... Nothing was being pulled from them, they looked untouched. I asked one of the guys I was riding with when the display had been set up. A few days ago, he said. Not selling a single unit from a giant display a few days in is not a good sign. I asked what he thought of the brand. "Yeah, I'm not sure this is going to work. The displays look nice though." A few weeks into the launch, partner leadership in the field was already skeptical.

A few thoughts on what went wrong 👇

  • Packaging echoed Prime at exactly the wrong moment. I'm not going to litigate whether it was confusingly similar, but the bottle shape was certainly close. In my opinion, shoppers saw Mas+ and read it as another Prime. That works when Prime is hot. The timing could not have been worse here, Prime was already cratering by mid-to-late 2024. Having Prime come to mind with consumers was the last thing this brand needed.

  • Taste. Mark Anthony wanted something different in the market, so they leaned into stevia as the sweetener. Stevia is tricky, most brands mask it with other sweeteners, and while Mas+ used a touch of cane sugar, the stevia shone through. Many consumers reported a metallic taste.

The data backs it up. Mas+ velocity was down 20-30% in year two vs. its launch year and decelerating velocity is never a good sign, especially that early. The comparative was uglier: Mas+ was turning at roughly half the rate of Prime, and Prime itself was already down 60% YoY. Losing badly to a brand in freefall is about as damning as the comparative data gets.

The Final Word 

Mark Anthony has forgotten more about launches than most of us will ever know, but this was a clear miss, and an instructive one. The beverage industry keeps blurring. Large bev alc incumbents are increasingly looking toward NA (both alcohol-removed like NA beer and "born NA" categories like energy, BFY soda, and hydration), and Mas+ shows the playbook doesn't port automatically.

🆕 NEW LAUNCH: RITUAL ZERO PROOF GOES RTD

Ritual Zero Proof, the non-alc spirits brand that built its reputation telling consumers to "mix it like real spirits", just launched a line of RTDs.

For the better part of five years, Ritual's core thesis has been that the NA drinker wants the ritual of making the drink… pouring a measure of NA tequila or whiskey, adding tonic or ginger, garnishing it, calling it a cocktail. The brand identity, packaging, and shelf placement all reinforced that thesis. It was essentially a NA RTS (Ready To Serve).

The challenge with RTS is generally trial. A 750ml bottle of Ritual runs about $30. For a consumer, that's a lot of money to spend on something they might not like. Most RTS brands don't turn unless you spend a small (or sometimes large) fortune on sampling and events - liquid to lips is key. If you aren’t really careful, you find yourself spending $100 to make $90.

I don't know Ritual's business, but I suspect the EBITDA margins and cash flow weren't where they wanted them. A $13.99 RTD that screams "Margarita Flavor" is a substantially lower consumer risk than a $30 bottle of NA tequila. I think this is going to work.

The Final Word

Watch the unit economics. RTDs typically carry better effective gross margin than RTS once you account for the sampling spend RTS requires to drive trial. If Ritual sees velocity in RTD that they never saw in RTS, expect other NA spirits brands to follow quickly.

THIS WEEK’S HOT JOBS IN BEVERAGES

These roles came to us via ThirstyTalent.ai. Want your open role featured? Email: [email protected] 👇️ 

THANKS FOR READING

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