Christin Marvin: 0:08

If you're a restaurant owner or operator looking to increase sales or enhance your beverage program, listen up. Today I'm interviewing an owner and producer of one of the most explosive beverage trends for 2024, the non-alcoholic cocktail. Join me for this conversation with Louie Catizone, co-owner of St Agrestis, about his family heritage behind the brand, why he decided to add a non-alcoholic cocktail to his product line, why the non-alcoholic beverage space is exploding, and give tips on how to increase sales in your restaurant by making their non-alcoholic cocktails accessible to guests and your staff. Welcome to the no Hesitations podcast, the show where restaurant leaders learn tools, tactics and habits from the world's greatest operators. I am your host, Christin Marvin, with Solutions by Christin. I've spent the last two decades in the restaurant industry and now partner with restaurant leaders to help them overcome burnout, increase retention, reignite their passion and drive successful businesses. I also work directly with restaurant leaders through one-on-one coaching and group workshops to help them identify their blind spots, build their confidence and overcome challenges in their business. If you're curious about learning more, visit my website at ChristinMarvin. com slash Contact to book a 15-minute goal-planning session.

Christin Marvin: 1:36

This podcast is sponsored by ScheduleFly. Schedulefly provides a simple, web-based and app-based restaurant employee scheduling software backed by legendary customer service. If you are using pen, paper, excel or fancy scheduling software with tons of bells and whistles that you don't use, schedulefly is perfect for your business. When I was a regional manager handling seven locations, schedulefly was our go-to for scheduling. It's hands down the easiest platform that I've ever worked with, and their employee scheduling tool is awesome for shooting out mass messages about crucial restaurant updates. Visit ScheduleFly. com and mention the no Hesitations podcast to learn more and get 10% off. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hi Louie, how's it going?

Louie Catizone: 2:28

You're great. How are you?

Christin Marvin: 2:30

I'm so good, I'm so excited to have you on the show. I shout this from the rooftops all the time on content newsletters and talk about it on the podcast. I'm a huge fan of the non-alcoholic space. I quit drinking a little over two years ago and my husband and I got sober together and we studied wine. We studied mixology. My husband was in the wine business for 15 years. I've been in restaurants for the last 20 plus years.

Christin Marvin: 3:01

We loved pairing something delicious to drink with our food, and that didn't change when we got sober and so we immediately started to go out and look at liquor stores and restaurant menus. When we go out to eat and say what's available and this again two years ago it was a lot of water, it was a lot of soda and it was a lot of non-alcoholic beer and there's some delicious beers out there. But I'm not a beer drinker I never really have been and I started to drink some non-alcoholic beer and they just fill me up. So I switched over to sparkling water pretty quickly. But we wanted some non-alcoholic wine and we were having a really hard time finding great, great products and we wanted some non-alcoholic cocktails and the negroni is one of my favorite cocktails of all time, and so when we discovered you're phony negroni cocktail, I had a moment where I had to just step back for a second and go OK, finally this is happening.

Christin Marvin: 4:02

So I'm super excited to have you on the show today and tell your story and talk about St Agrestus and the product line that you have and why you're in this NA space. And I'll tell you this is really funny Literally an hour ago I'm not making this up I had a friend in Denver who owns a couple of really hip, trendy Mexican restaurants, text me photos of the phoning agroni and the Amaro falso and say oh my god, you and Tyler have to try these. These are absolutely amazing. You're going to love them, whatever I'm bringing them in to the restaurants. And I was like I'm talking to Louie in an hour dude. So anyway, yeah, lots of fun stuff to talk about. So thank you so much for being here.

Louie Catizone: 4:46

My pleasure and thank you. Thank you for such kind and supportive words. It's an honor to be talking to you about it till. Thank you Awesome.

Christin Marvin: 4:57

You bet. So let's get started. I'd love to have you share your story. I think your family history is super, super interesting, and why you decided to start St Agrestis in the first place.

Louie Catizone: 5:11

Cool, yeah. So my father moved from Southern Italy Calabria the toe of the boot, illustratively when he was 17,. I grew up in a first generation Italian-American household that spoke a lot of really a Southern Italian dialect, but Italian for all intensive purposes, with a really strong connection to Italy. We still own the home that my dad moved out of when he moved to the US and I used to spend my summers in said home in this little town in Calabria called Magisano, and my connection to Italy has just been always very strong.

Louie Catizone: 5:53

I ended up getting into the wine and spirits industry accidentally, as many of us do, and sort of started to see the rise in popularity of things like Negronis and spritzes and a lot of the Italian culture. And growing up we weren't allowed to have American sodas in the house. We had to have Italian sodas, always with a bitterness to them. That was my dad's rule, and my mom, being Italian-American, didn't have an issue with the rule either. She grew up in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn where the distillery is in Green Point, so she enforced the rule and was happy to enforce that rule too. But we grew up kind of like a little bit weird relative to our friends. Folks would come over they'd ask for a Coca-Cola. They'd get something bitter and citrusy, not anything like what they'd ever tasted, and it was kind of like a thing we were made fun of a little bit for growing up and then fast forward to being on the important distribution side of the industry in New York in 2014, 2015. And I started hearing Friends who I grew up with, who maybe even made fun of me for the bitter drinks and how do you drink this? This is disgusting. Spitting it out, making fun of us, whatever, ordering Negronis, asking if we knew what Negronis were, asking if I knew what a Negroni was.

Louie Catizone: 7:26

It was such a light bulb moment where I was like, ah, this is a real, like. This is a part of my culture that I didn't think was ever going to become mainstream here in the US, but it seems like it's starting to. And that was like the first moment where I was like, well, if it's becoming popular here, why can't it be made here? And if it can be made here, why not me, why not us?

Louie Catizone: 7:50

And the business is me my brother, matt he's 18 months younger than me and people often have always thought we were twins and still do and our business partner, steve IndiAngelo, who's also Italian American, and by 2017, the brand was officially ours and up and running, and very no plans to launch non-op at first. We'll talk a lot about why we ended up doing that, but we originally wanted to just make Italian inspired Amari and Apple TV as close to old world traditions as possible, but with world-class quality. We just the weird part about it was we were going to do it in in Brooklyn and six and a half years later it's been a wild ride.

Christin Marvin: 8:40

I love it. Where does the name come from?

Louie Catizone: 8:42

Agrestis is Latin. It means of the earth or of the wild. So Saint Agrestis is a sort of mother nature, like face for the brand. And if you look at the logo closely you'll see that in Saint Agrestis's right hand there's an elixir, in left hand there's there's a bunch of herbs and almost in scale like balance. At the absolute core of everything we do is balancing bitterness with sweetness, herbaceousness, so sort of a depiction of the balancing act that is making herbal bittersweet spirits as well.

Christin Marvin: 9:21

I love that I actually have a tomorrow fall so in front of me. So I'm like looking at the label differently for the first time now that you just said that. I love that. It's beautiful for sure. So you had mentioned, you know, the non-alcoholic space was not in the plans originally. What, what made you change your mind and pivot?

Louie Catizone: 9:41

There were a few factors. The main one happened as a result of a trip to Berlin. I was in Germany for bar convent in Berlin in 2019. And we I was showcasing our Amaro and our bitter ebb or Tivo had a little table. It was like the smallest table at the whole convention. It was me, my then girlfriend, now wife, and my cousin Martina, who grew up on the Italy Austria border, so spoke German, italian and English. So the three of us at this little booth and hoping to find importers for Europe for our, our Amaro and our Ebb or Tivo. And the bigger takeaway then trying to find importation was actually the amount of attention and emphasis and focus that the industry was giving to non-alcoholic in Europe and it just. We had heard whispers about non-alcoholic becoming a thing or being a future trend here in the US before that, but being in Germany was so eye opening that the demand is truly already there in Europe and there in Europe it's going to come to the States. That was, that was, that was our summation of it. So we can.

Louie Catizone: 10:52

I got back from from Bart von Bent and unpacked the trip with with my business partners and we we immediately were like, well, one day we have to launch a non-alcoholic Negroni. Our whole goal with innovating around the Negroni as a very classic cocktail. We were the first to bottle a single serve ready to drink Negroni in the US. We were the first to bottle a Negroni fountain, which is a bag in box format of a Negroni, those both having 24% alcohol or 48% proof. But we felt like those are great solutions for many Negroni drinkers. But what about the Negroni drinker that no longer or is not drinking? And if we wanted to make a Negroni for everyone, we knew that there had to be serious investment in R&D to eventually launch what we already knew on day one would be called the phony Negroni. That name came my business partner, steven said it and it was like, yes, that's the name, 100%. And then it was just a matter of three years of R&D to create something that tasted as close to a Negroni as humanly possible with out the alcohol.

Christin Marvin: 12:09

And did you see the non-alcoholic trend in New York and around Brooklyn in 2019, or was it really not on the scene yet?

Louie Catizone: 12:17

Not really. It was starting. People were talking about it more than it seemed like there was actual action. The industry was talking about it, but the industry was also not featuring menus as much as you might think. Considering how much chatter there was about it, it seemed like it was something that would happen but it might not in 2019, like the actual investment, the actual innovation, the actual inclusion on menus, the carving out of stores, the dedicating shelf space to the category. It was spoken about, but it was not obvious that it was going to become what it has become for sure.

Christin Marvin: 13:06

You have four different non-alcoholic cocktails in your line. Right, you've got the espresso Negroni, the mezcal, the phony Negroni and the Amaro falso.

Louie Catizone: 13:16

Yeah, correct. The phony espresso Negroni is only available on our website, direct to consumer right now, which is more or less how we launched all of our other ones too. We test things out before we put them into full-blown distribution. But the other three, the phony Negroni, the phony mezcal and the Amarro falso are available in full distribution as far as export to Saudi Arabia and as close as the 36 US states that we distribute to.

Christin Marvin: 13:51

Now, what was your reasoning behind launching the mezcal Negroni?

Louie Catizone: 13:55

I'm obsessed with mezcal. I have been for a long time. I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Oaxaca just as mezcal was becoming popular here in the States and then subsequently visit multiple times since then. I've always loved as my favorite variation of the mezcal Negroni. When we were on Dean, the phony Negroni, I had dreamt of and even done some not overly complicated experiments to see if it was going to be possible to recreate the flavor profile of mezcal as it is imparted on a Negroni. It took until after the phony Negroni launched to really seriously dive into that R&D process. But my thought, our thought, was that we would launch something called a phony smoky Negroni If we couldn't do justice to mezcal. It had to be good enough and have more than just smoke, which was the long-term challenge is capturing earthiness and vegetal characteristics, and that grassy green note that you get from mezcal had to be present as well. It ended up landing that. The secret ingredient to do that is nopales. So cactus, I know are quite familiar with cactus.

Christin Marvin: 15:24

Yes, I live in the land of cactus now in.

Louie Catizone: 15:26

Tucson.

Christin Marvin: 15:27

I love that. I haven't tried the mezcal one yet, but I need to go seek that out or buy some from the website. We've been going down to Playa del Carmen for 10 years and I think three or four. No, maybe it's longer than three or four years ago, but anyway, there's a really cool cocktail bar classic cocktail bar. That's just right off the beaten path, surrounded by trees, all open air from all sides, and they introduced us to a mezcal Negroni. That has also become one of my favorite variations, so I love that you're doing that for sure. That's awesome. So let's talk a little bit about how it's going and what the trends are in the NA space. I was reading an article about the five trends in the non-alcoholic industry for 2024, and I was really excited that one of those trends was that consumers are looking for something outside of or in addition to non-alcoholic beer. They want the cocktails, they want the wine. So what have you seen in terms of trends? Let's talk about how bars and restaurants are responding to the product. What's going on?

Louie Catizone: 16:31

So the date we launched the Phony Negroni on January 11th 2022, and it was launched more or less on a very limited basis and that lasted until August of 2022. But our expectation was that the Phony Negroni was going to be just another item within our portfolio of AberTV and DJSTV. We were wrong and the demand from day one far exceeded our expectations. Awesome Trend is only on an upward one. The trajectory is limitless. From where I sit, we wrapped up dry January 23 days ago and January has always been our worst month in business as a distillery, but since January 2022, it has been our biggest month until the holidays. It's kind of fun that every year the brand is growing, but so is the market. So as January approaches, we blow December and November in October out of the water, but then by the following October, november and December, we blow the previous January out of the water, and that's just, to me, such a sign of organic growth and demand. It also shows that it doesn't just have to be a dry January ritual and it's much bigger and more than that at this point.

Louie Catizone: 17:59

But the response from restaurants has been incredible. We are seeing so many menu placements with the phony negroni around the country and we're very proud that it seems like it's because it's really solving an actual need for the restaurants. There's consumers who want to drink something like the phony negroni or the marrofalsa or the phony mescal negroni, and it's very difficult to create a very consistent version of those cocktails time after time. It's also very We've learned that the consumer, the guest, really enjoys if they're not drinking, seeing the bottle that it came out of, and there's no anxiety that the phony Negroni might have been mixed up with the regular Negroni when it's served, if the bottle is presented, and that has been very important for the success of the phony Negroni too it seems that the guest prefers that and the restaurants and bars that are featuring it are very happy to make the guests happy. So yeah, the trend is upward, the trend is exciting, it is certainly not going anywhere and I'm impressed by just what the phony Negroni accomplishes every single day. It's been really fun.

Christin Marvin: 19:31

I love it. I just love how innovative you guys are and how thoughtful you are and I love how rich the roots are to this product and your why behind it. And I want to talk a little bit more about the packaging because, again, like holding this, the bottle is glass versus going with a can right which you see a lot of can of cocktails out there. It's this gorgeous tall triangular shaped bottle. You can see the cocktail. The color is gorgeous. There's no sediment at the bottom, it doesn't separate. I've had this one in the fridge for over a month and the label is kind of fun and retro and funky and if I saw this on a back bar I would immediately go what is that? And I would be proud to have it sitting next to my glass right with a giant ice cube just sipping on it and hopefully have other people look at it too and go what is that? I've never seen that before. Will you talk a little bit about your choice for doing a bottle and the inspiration around the packaging?

Louie Catizone: 20:27

Absolutely so. It's a custom bottle. We own the mold to this bottle. To me, the package really. I wanted it to look like 1979, new York, when my dad showed up. He landed from Italy but also feel very Italian as well, but not look like it's made in Italy. We didn't want to fake and seem like it was an Italian produced product. So a cheeky name like Foni Negroni, I think, definitely paints the picture that it's not from Italy but it's made with much respect to its roots.

Louie Catizone: 21:08

The design of the label is actually an abstract of zeros, like no alcohol, which for this label, that's the meaning behind it. All of our labels had particular meaning. The Amaro Falso and the Phony Espresso and Mezcal Negroni have the same design because they're also non-alcoholic. But the shape was so important because we wanted it to just, exactly to your point, stand out and be noticeable on a back bar. The contents are so important for something like a Negroni because if we were in a can you wouldn't see the red color and the red color is just so synonymous with the Negroni. So us being able to display that opulent red, beautiful hue was non-negotiable.

Louie Catizone: 22:02

We would have been so much easier to put this into a can, but we invested in the equipment to fill it ourselves. We looked into co-packers and eventually decided we wanted to control the entire process. Because we are crazy, I guess, but also because we've just when you're at somebody else's mercy if they get a big contract from somebody else, all of a sudden you're out of stock. So we decided to invest in some equipment, and that equipment allows us to fill in this custom bottle. The only other thing I'd like to say about the package in particular is that we've had some folks ask us why a silver neck label next to a gold brown?

Christin Marvin: 22:47

Yeah.

Louie Catizone: 22:47

Why not bold and gold, or silver and silver? And I know that there's not going to be a video displayed on the podcast, but you can see my grandfather's wedding ring that I wear and it's gold and silver. And the meaning behind the gold and silver at the top of the bottle is because I am lucky enough to have been passed down this family heirloom and it's something that I wear every day. So that's part of the inspiration behind those two colors, as opposed to it matching gold and gold, or silver and silver.

Christin Marvin: 23:18

I love it. You guys are so thoughtful about every little component of what the brand is, what the product offerings are, how you're going to do business. That's incredible, so I love it. Thank you for sharing that. Hey there, podcast friends, I hope you're enjoying these impactful conversations and leadership insights I'm bringing you each week.

Christin Marvin: 23:44

Before we dive back into today's episode, I want to take a moment and reach out and ask a small favor. That would go a long way in supporting the show. If you've been loving the content I'm providing, please take a moment to leave a rating and review. Wherever you listen to your podcast, not only does it make my day, but it also plays a pivotal role in helping the show grow. Your reviews boost my visibility, attract new listeners and encourage exciting guests to join me on the mic. So if you want to be part of my show's growth journey, hit that review button and let me know what you think. Thanks a million for being awesome listeners. Let's talk a little bit about how restaurants and bars can really be successful with the phony Negroni and the Amaro Falso in their spaces. How do they sell it? How do they talk about it? How do they train their staff on it? What do you recommend?

Louie Catizone: 24:43

I think the most important thing is actually menus. It's really how it lives on the menu. One thing that we're seeing is that consumers aren't afraid to spend money on non-alcoholic. The prices are not on. Restaurant menus are not all that different from the alcohol prices on restaurant menus. I don't think that that shies many folks away. There's a huge revenue opportunity for the bars and restaurants who aren't already on board. You can fetch much more for something like this. It's not like they're being greedy. The costs are quite similar to the costs of alcohol. Even a non-alcoholic Negroni took a lot more investment than creating an alcoholic Negroni. For us, it's no surprise that it lives on the menu less than, but not half, the price of an alcohol containing Negroni. I think the menus are really the most important tool. Of course, staff training is amazing.

Louie Catizone: 25:48

I think we as a company, being that we're small but mighty, we wish we could be doing staff trainings at every single bar and restaurant in the country that serves the phony Negroni. We do as many of them as possible. It's extremely meaningful. It's extremely helpful.

Louie Catizone: 26:05

I think the most important part about our product in particular is that it contains all the same herbs and spices, flowers, roots, seeds and citrus that you would get if you ordered a Negroni at your favorite bar. We have just sourced those botanicals and then processed them in a totally different technique that doesn't involve the addition of alcohol to it. To us it's like oh, it tastes like a Negroni. Why? Well, it's because there's this process where we had already been sourcing those botanicals, because we make a bottle of Negroni and we make the components of it. Selling those same plants and then figuring out how to create non-alcoholic extractions of those flavors is why the phony Negroni tastes like a Negroni. I think, as far as the restaurants are concerned, the best way to sell non-alcoholic is to put it on the menu and not just have it in the fridge waiting for someone to ask what are your NA options. It's so true, those days are cool.

Christin Marvin: 27:13

They are. When Tyler and I go out to dinner, the first thing you order is a cocktail glass of wine, cocktail, beer. It's the first. I love it when a restaurant seats us and they present us with the menu with a cocktail side facing up, or put that on top of the food menu, because they know that's where we're starting our journey with them.

Christin Marvin: 27:33

We are constantly searching, looking for the NA section, and a lot of times it's iced tea, lemonade, soda or water. You just order water. We always ask do you have any NA, even if it's not on the menu, because we know sometimes that it doesn't get put on the menu, or maybe they just got something in, they haven't had time to reprint, or what have you. Sometimes we're pleasantly surprised and somebody will say yeah, I've got a bottle of Heineken Zero or a class dollar back here somewhere that's been here for two years. Let me go find it and dust off the dust and serve it to you.

Christin Marvin: 28:05

A lot of times the staff will say, no, but we could create something for you and we end up getting a ginger beer with a lime. That's not what we're looking for Again. We want a beautiful classic cocktail that's well-fed up and put together. I know that some restaurants maybe don't have the time, the energy or the resources to have their team put together a well-crafted non-alcoholic cocktail program of three or four cocktails, or they don't know which ones would sell. The thing I love about this is it's bottled, you open it, you pour it over ice and it's ready to go. You train the staff on telling the great story. You had mentioned this last time that we spoke. If somebody's got a Negroni cocktail on their menu, why not have this? In addition, it makes total sense.

Louie Catizone: 28:57

I think it's so interesting to think about the mindset of someone who's not drinking when they walk into the restaurant or the bar as well. You have no issue asking if there's other NA options or if there are NA options separate from what's listed on the menu. There's plenty of folks who don't want to necessarily be so blatantly not drinking when you put it on the menu, especially with something like the phony Negroni. If it's presented the way a Negroni is, over a big ice cube with a twist, the only thing that makes it obvious that it's a non-alcoholic Negroni would be the word phony. Aside from that, it's incognito. You don't feel like you're out of place drinking water or soda when everyone else is having a cocktail. Your drink looks as beautiful or more beautiful than what they're drinking.

Louie Catizone: 29:52

I hope that as time goes on, more and more bars and restaurants are happy to not make their guests ask about the NA options available and give them the opportunity to not have to announce that they're not drinking, especially if they're in a work setting or in any social setting at that. I think about folks who haven't announced that they're expecting. You're not drinking, and then the first assumption is you must be pregnant. That might not have necessarily needed to happen at that point, why not just put something on the menu? The nice part about the non-alcohol trend as it is today is less and less people are judging that folks are not drinking or questioning why. Because we're just having a much healthier relationship with alcohol, whether we're totally sober or having just different changes to our drinking rituals.

Christin Marvin: 30:57

Yeah, I love that you brought that up because I am really comfortable now Asking people because I've practiced it a lot. But when we first stopped drinking I wasn't. I didn't want to be in a restaurant In Denver where I knew a ton of people and have them see me sipping water and go why don't you have a shot of tequila and a glass of wine in front of you, like you always do? Because I wasn't ready and prepared to answer that question and anybody that knows me wouldn't ask the pregnancy question, but I don't want kids, but I I wasn't ready and so when we would decide to go out to eat somewhere, I would get online and I would look. I would look for people's menus and I would see what non-alcoholic options were available. So, again, if they're not listed on the menu, we wouldn't go in because we didn't want to have to have that uncomfortable conversation. So it definitely took some time.

Christin Marvin: 31:45

For sure and I think you know there are this generation, you know Gen Z is very health-conscious. They're not drinking as much. I've got friends who you know tell me that they like to start their drinking with an NA option because it helps them hydrate and slow down. Right, I know, I remember getting off shifts when I was in the restaurant business. I was dehydrated because I never drank enough water during service and I'd sit down at the bar and I'd chug my first alcoholic beverage right because I was thirsty, not because I Wanted to get a quick buzz, but which happened anyway. But um, yeah, yeah, those are all great points for sure. Well, can you talk about what's next?

Louie Catizone: 32:26

Yeah, I think our mission for 2024 is definitely to Continue to spread the good word about what we all already make. There might be another limited release on our website or more expanded distribution of our phony espresso negroni later this year, but we um, we're really much more focused right now on filling some distribution gaps, like we weren't available in the state of Pennsylvania it's right here relative to New York, and we weren't available. Sometimes it's much more complicated than I think the Non-industry Consumer might think. It is like oh hey, I saw you launched this yesterday. Where can I get it in Houston, texas? And it's like we're not even in Houston, we're not in Texas, you know.

Louie Catizone: 33:17

So it's not not available today, but it I don't know what it'll be available because our strategy is much more as far as distribution. It's much more waiting for the cool, right distribution partner to find us, because I've had so many experiences. We're trying to convince people that the phony negroni should be in their portfolio. It just feels like I'm selling them on something that they're not already on board with and if they're not on board With the phony negroni or what we make or we get on the phone, it's never a big fit. But yeah, the. The strategy for 24 is grow the distribution, make the phony negroni and a Marl Falls so, and phony Mascall negroni and perhaps the phony espresso negroni more available in more bars and restaurants and more retailers, and Just allow it to be as accessible as possible.

Christin Marvin: 34:09

I love it. I also love that you're putting together a team of, you know, cocktail aficionados and amazing bartenders like Randy layman and Denver, who just helped really put the cocktail scene on the map in Denver, which is just amazing. So kudos to you for that. Well, you talk a little bit about what states you're in and who You're using for distributors, and then, for the states that you're not in, how can people find your product?

Louie Catizone: 34:36

Yeah, so we are technically available via bare wholesale FAA IRE anywhere in the US, but we are Available, aligned with distributors in, now 38 states across the country. The instead of listing the states that we are in, the ones that we aren't would be. The biggest gaps are gonna be Texas, although we are now available in Austin via the Austin shaker, who is a retail and wholesale Outfit, and then we're not available via a traditional wholesaler in Florida. We're not available via a wholesaler in in Nevada. We just launched Pennsylvania with a company called Shangy's, which is a beer company.

Louie Catizone: 35:25

It's so interesting how, as the company Launched with spirits distributors, sometimes wine focused spirits distributors now we're in portfolios that don't have a spirits arm. We're in some food portfolios around the country, like Utah, for example. We're aligned with a priori and they don't distribute alcohol because of the restrictions on alcohol in Utah, in New York, were available direct. In a couple states we are available via momentum. That would be Illinois, wisconsin and in Randy layman's backyard in Colorado, the. The distribution is kind of amazing and also very strange. We're just with a Network of passion-driven distributors that have Become the perfect fit for us in each specific market, but they're nothing alike from one market to the next, and it's, it's, but every market is so different that it makes sense. So we're, we're with independent distributors across the country in, yeah, 30, 38 states, but the big, the big three that we're not, it would be the Texas, florida and and Nevada awesome, and then talk about direct to consumer.

Louie Catizone: 36:52

Yeah, so Matt has built. My brother and business partner, matt, has built an amazing website. In fact, I made the first version of our e-commerce website the second day the pandemic because we were allowed to do direct to consumer sales in New York. So I just figured out how to make it with a Carl or old web developer who still helps us out a lot and Matt had no experience in this and over the past Four years which wow, four years, but four years he has created this really functional, high, high, highly operating website where you can buy the Saint-Egrestus phony negroni anywhere in Canada or the United States. It's and and it's the only place where you can find limited things like our phony espresso negroni. And if there's, if there's another release like that this year, it will, without a doubt, launch exclusively on our website first, while we learn how to scale it and also make sure that our Customers are in love with the product as much as we think they will be. I love it.

Christin Marvin: 37:57

I was on there today, the website's gorgeous and I I need to buy some from the website, but I saw that little pop-up of little offering if you jump on there and buy something, so I got excited. I love it. Well, we thank you so much For being here and sharing your story and just talking about these incredible products were. I'm just so excited for you and the company and I can't wait to see you in more places in Tucson. I've found a couple of spots down here where we can purchase your product, but you know again, like can't I? Just I'm so excited and I can't wait to get back to Denver here in the next few weeks to and just find them the menus. I need to get a list from you and Randy of exactly where you're at so I can make sure I hit those spots. Okay, I love it. Well, we wish you all the best and we'll definitely stay connected.

Louie Catizone: 38:46

And yeah, what do you want to list the?

Christin Marvin: 38:48

website for for people to. Yeah, it's just sp Agrestis. com and aggressive is spelled ag r e s t I s.

Louie Catizone: 38:57

So. So Agrestis. com, and you can. You can browse. There's a non-alcohol tab right at the top where you can browse anything that doesn't contain alcohol for direct shipment. Awesome, all right, we appreciate it so much. All right, everybody, be sure to share this podcast with any leaders you know in the restaurant industry and check out my step by step guide on how to retain your employees at Christinmarvin. com.

Christin Marvin: 39:15

Thanks so much, everybody. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. Please subscribe. I'll definitely show more of the series, and so we'll click the button right here in your employees At ChristinMarvin. com. Thanks so much, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Well, we love you. Thanks for being there.