Chris Hunter, founder of several successful beverage brands, including the iconic Four Loko as well as the health-focused Koia, and the unique Not Your Father's Root Beer, shares the story of the gap in the market that he identified that led to the creation of Four Loko, and the process of fighting the government to keep it legal.Hear Chris's full interview in Episode 462 of The Action Catalyst.
Full Episode
So I started selling vodka for this company and they put me in quite possibly the most difficult situation that you can have, which is on premise, which is bars and nightclubs and restaurants in Chicago. And the reason it's the most difficult situation is because every brand is spending their money there. They have big budgets, right?
And so I was going to these places with no budgets and no experience, just asking them to believe my story or to believe in me and put the product in their stores. I did that for a couple months. Then he started expanding my responsibilities. So I managed off-premise, which is stores, grocery stores, liquor stores, whatever it may be, in Illinois. And then they expanded me to five states.
At that point, I realized that I understood, at least enough, the distribution game. In alcohol, it's a three-tier system. So you have the supplier, which is the creator of the product. You have the distributor, which takes the product to the bars or the store. And then you have the retail location.
And so I understood that I met enough people and I was selling a lot of the vodka that was being mixed in with Red Bull. I was 25. I was out also drinking a lot of vodka mixed in Red Bull. And so I said, you know, maybe we should try to do this as a combination ready to drink product. And so I called my old college buddy. He's the guy that I had tried to start Wild Havens with.
And I said, hey, I'm thinking of starting this thing. And he's like, yeah, I'm in. He was part-time in it. A couple months in, we realized neither of us really wanted to do the financial modeling and decks. And I had a buddy who worked for ABN Amro. I called him and I said, hey, what do you think? Yeah, I'm in. And that's how we got started. Wow. Yeah. Our investors were friends and family.
Where I started, being that I'm from Youngstown, blue collar, lower middle class, there was no money from friends and family for me. Fortunately, my partners both went to their families and they put in small amounts of money in retrospect for the size the company became, but that was our investment. We didn't have the experience or the connections to really go raise traditional funding.
And so we bootstrapped it. And looking back, luckily we did because I think that had we had more money in the early days, we would have just spent more money on all the wrong things.
And I'm kind of curious. I mean, one thing that popped out to me was the government regulations and a little battle that you had to kind of jump back into what you faced when you were faced with some of the government agencies trying to keep Four Local legal, right?
Yeah, it's a complex question and situation that was very intense, as you can imagine. But trying to summarize it up in a nutshell, it was really important for us to get aligned on how we were going to address these situations. They were very serious, right? To the point where we were being sued by the FDA, the TB, which governs alcohol. 18 attorney generals.
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