Dirty Virgo: Non-Alc Cocktails, the Mainstream Moderator, and Why Big Beverage Can't Move Fast Enough

James Zackler, co-founder of DIRTY VIRGO, joins us to talk about building a non-alcoholic cocktail brand for the mainstream moderator — not the sober-curious wellness crowd. Drawing on his background at Pernod Ricard, Anheuser-Busch, and Blue Bottle, James shares why he and his co-founder bet on non-alc cocktails over non-alc beer, how they self-distributed by hand-delivering product to bars and clubs, and what it's taken to scale from 30 on-premise accounts to over 90 retail doors. We also get into fundraising on proof rather than vision, and why he believes big beverage companies are structurally too slow to win this category themselves.