Blackout Punch, with Chris Hunter (Entrepreneurship, Food and Beverage, Business, Leadership)
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So I go to Chicago and I refuse to get a nine to five type gig. And that was fine in theory until there was one day where I could not pay rent. And my now wife cut me a check to cover rent. And I was like, man, I really got to do something now. You know, necessity or desperation, whatever you want to call it, will make you do some interesting things. And I had collected a lot of contacts and business cards. One of them was a guy that was involved in a startup vodka company. And long story short, I bugged him. literally email and call every day until he gave me a job. And that's what got me into beverages.
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Today's guest is Chris Hunter, the founder of several successful beverage brands, including 4Loco and Not Your Father's Root Beer. His new memoir, Blackout Punch, An Entrepreneur's Journey from Chaos to Clarity, tells the story. How are you?
Good to meet you. Good to meet you as well.
Yeah, so you're hailing from Miami right now, but where did you grow up?
Yeah, good suspicion that I didn't originally grow up in Miami. I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. Historically, if you look back generations of my family, it's probably that there were a lot of Italian and Irish immigrants that were working in the steel mills. Youngstown was once a booming metropolis at a time, top 10 city. Once the steel mills closed and the auto manufacturers started shuttering, the city just got decimated. So I remember growing up, my great-grandmother had these pictures of Youngstown as this hotspot, right? Downtown was thriving. People were all over. And I'm like, where is this place? Because I didn't know any of that.
I can't imagine. We're going to talk about your whole successful commercial enterprises. But I'm always kind of curious. Usually... You know, high school or even a young recent graduate isn't necessarily thinking like, man, I'm going to start all these amazing beverage companies. I got to know what were you on the track to do or what were you thinking you were going to do?
So I don't know that I had a big aspirational kind of career path, except for that. I was like, I want to be rich. And growing up in a lower middle class family, like you recognize the restraints that money can put on a family. And I was fortunate that I got into a couple classes that were, they called them advanced classes. They were really just opportunities to think outside the box. I got to do an internship when I was in like fifth grade, like all these unique things. And I feel like it opened my eyes to like what I want to do isn't here or at least isn't present in my life. I don't know what it is. It's going to be something different. That coupled with the fact that I always had this entrepreneurial spirit is kind of like I could figure this out.
I'll find unique ways to make money that excite me. Helped me into what I ended up doing. I could not have mapped out my career path, though. What was the first business venture for you? Yeah, I mean, you can go way, way back and say the first business venture was, you know, being a first grader coloring pictures out of a coloring book and selling them door to door. I did that, right? But really more, and there's many of those examples along the way, but maybe more officially was in college, there were three businesses that I started. One was never really structured as a business, but it was actually the largest and it was called Fusion Projects, which ended up being my business. the parent company of Four Loko. And it was a promotions business.
So I would do nightlife promotions, mainly in Columbus, but in other cities across the country. It paid really well. It was a heck of a job for a college student, bringing people together, especially out at a bar or a nightclub. And I met a lot of people. The other business I started, which was actually with one of my Fusion Projects partners was called Wild Havens.
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