Carbliss Ranks No. 7 on fastest-growing private companies in America list

Heather Graves

Staff

September 23, 2024

PLYMOUTH – “One of top 10 fastest-growing private companies in America” – Adam Kroener, CEO and Co-Founder of Carbliss, said, has a pretty good ring to it.

The ready-to-drink cocktail brand was recently ranked No. 7 in the 2024 Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies 43rd edition national list.

Furthermore, Carbliss takes the No. 1 spot on the Inc. 5000 Regionals: Midwest list – which includes ranking of the fastest-growing Midwest private companies, based in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. 

“Fifteen years ago, I was cutting cheese – which is the most cliche job you can have in Wisconsin,” Kroener said. “I grew up in a town of like 500 people. I think (Carbliss ranking so high) puts the American dream of anyone can do it in a true perspective.”

The journey to here

Kroener said success wasn’t handed to him and his wife, Amanda, on a silver platter.

“We worked our (butts) off, made a cool product and found a bunch of other people who are willing to work their (butts) off to help this brand grow,” he said.

The idea behind the ready-to-drink brand, Kroener said, was inspired by a lifestyle change.

“If we go back to 2018 in January, my wife and I decided to do Keto, which is low sugar, high fat, moderate protein,” he said. “There are some versions of Keto that say don’t drink. That wasn’t really something we were looking to do.”

After a few months of improvising – “I was doing vodka water with a squeeze of lemon and lime in it, I think my wife was doing the same, but adding a little cranberry for flavor” – Kroener said one of his friends gave him a seltzer. 

“I took a sip and spit it back out – I was not a fan at all,” he said. “In summary, I would say it has a ton of carbonation and really no flavor. When I looked at the can, it was definitely what I was expecting.”

Kroener said it wasn’t their intention to start a ready-to-drink alcohol business.

“For some weird reason, within two or three days, I created one of our original flavors – vodka lemonade – and the intent was to have a full-flavor drink that has no carbs or sugar,” he said. “After a few weeks, I created a pink grapefruit and a strawberry kiwi – which are no longer around – and friends and family loved it. They didn’t believe I was doing Keto, because not only was it a pretty colorful liquid, it tasted great.”

As he continued to receive positive feedback, Kroener said “there is no way I created this – there has to be someone out there doing this already.”

“To prove it, I went out to – you name it – the corner liquor store, Festival Foods, Woodmans, we spent about $500 buying every brand and flavor that we possibly could,” he said. “Everything we bought was that focus of low-carb, low-sugar, low-calorie nutrition panel. We dumped out about $498 worth because it was the same concept – a lot of carbonation and not much flavor.”

Within the next month, Kroener said he started telling his wife, “somebody should put this in a can.”

Those discussions, he said, eventually turned to “we should put this in a can.”

Kroener said he started doing his own market research – asking folks at local establishments why they were drinking what they were drinking.

“I’d ask, ‘why are you drinking that?’ – pointing at their name-brand seltzer,’” he said. “The answer I would get is, ‘it’s low-carb, low-sugar, low-calorie’ – this was six years ago. I would then ask, ‘do you like the taste?’ Nine times out of 10, the best answer I would get was ‘eh, it’s okay.’”

Now that he’s in the ready-to-drink industry, Kroener said the product you are making, “you want everyone to enjoy it.”

“You know you aren’t going to please everybody, but you want to please most,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine being a chef and having somebody tell me, ‘eh, it’s okay.’”

Kroener said asking people “what if I could give you a vodka lemonade that had (the same flavor without the high-carb, high-sugar and high calorie)” without having the beverage on-hand for folks to try – is not the best way to take a bet and start a business.

“But that’s what we did,” he laughed. “We launched on store shelves just more than five years ago – which was about a year after the conversation started.”

At the beginning of 2021, Kroener said they obtained an angel investor, which allowed him to quit his job in the cold packaging industry.

“Then we started hiring people and have been growing like mad ever since,” he said. “We are now at almost 50 employees.”

Backyard-to-backyard concept

Kroener said he always thought he’d start a business focused on something he was passionate about.

“They always say ‘follow your passion,’” he said. “My passion is cars, motorcycles and watches – so I always assumed that if I had a business it would be something that correlated with one of those. I enjoy drinking socially, but could I have ever put my finger on the pulse and say ‘I’m going to start a booze business’ – absolutely not.”

Five years later, Kroener said the success Carbliss has been able to have, he credits to the company’s strategic go-to-market approach.

“My wife and I love Craig Culver (the founder of Culver’s) and his mantra of backyard to backyard,” he said.

Kroener said when Craig started Culver’s in the family’s former A&W Restaurant, “everyone knew the family, trusted the family and wanted to try their food.”

“Their second location opened three hours away where no one knew them,” he said. “It did not go well. So, they went back to the drawing board.”

That is when, Kroener said, Craig came up with the backyard-to-backyard concept – where they didn’t expand 45 minutes from their last store.

“They compounded that for so many years, that the word of mouth became large enough that now they can drop a Culver’s in Florida or Texas or Arizona and people know who they are,” he said.

Though Kroener said that was the plan originally, with no real business ownership experience under their belt, they decided to hire an outside consultant to help launch Carbliss.

“They said, ‘Adam and Amanda, you have to go to Florida, Texas, California, Chicago, New York – those places have to be your focus because that is where all the population is,’” he said. “We thought, ‘well, they are the professionals’ – so that is what we did.”

That, Kroener said, didn’t go well.

“We partnered with a new consultant, and it was the same mantra,” he said. “If you look back at some of the articles done on us in the past, we were distributing in New Jersey and Tennessee and Maryland and Nebraska and Colorado – and we pulled out (of a lot of them) because it didn’t work for a couple of reasons. One, nobody knew who we were, and two, we didn’t know how to support the brand yet at that time.” 

When those approaches didn’t work – and still confident in the brand’s potential – Kroener said they launched in five Wisconsin counties and “just saturated them for a few months.”

“Imagine drinking it (in those counties) for a few weeks and then you go down to Madison and say, ‘hey, I’ll take a Carbliss,’ because it’s normal for you,” he said. “And then the bartender asks, ‘what is that?’ That is more of the how backyard-to-backyard approach (works), it creates inherent organic growth by word of mouth.”

Flavor ideation

What started with a simple vodka lemonade flavor, Kroener said, has since grown to more than a dozen varieties – such as black raspberry, cranberry, black cherry and margarita.

“As we started growing – (recognizing) there are other brands in the space that have high carbonation and low flavor – we are firm believers that we can make those products better,” he said.

Though Kroener said they receive several requests for flavors, “at the end of the day as a business, to ensure longevity, if we know we can make it better – shouldn’t we do that?”

“We basically look at the data and say, ‘what flavors are doing really well for our competitors,” he said. “Or – Badger Liquor is our distributor in Wisconsin – we’ll ask them what they can’t get out of the cooler because it doesn’t have a competitive flavor. Two years ago, that was pineapple. This year, it was peach. So we’re looking at things that we know are selling really well in somebody else’s portfolio, and knowing we can make it better.”

As simple as that is, Kroener said, it works.

“Then there’s a separate line that we’re working on, which is that cocktail collection, and that’s more for total brand exposure and making sure that we’re allowing the product to be sold to multiple sets of customers,” he said. “Because we see this flavor and then the word cocktail – the word cocktail has a little bit more of a nuance than what the flavor does.”

‘Find your Bliss’

The brand’s name – Carbliss – Kroener said reflects directly back to the reason it exists in the first place.

“I can’t take credit for it because we get a ton of compliments,” he said. “That is 100% my wife.”

The brand originally started with the name Carbless – which Kroener said references the no carbs.

“And remember, it goes back to why we’re doing it,” he said. “We were looking for something low-carb, low-sugar that tasted good. So, (we thought about), how do we make the name indicative of its contents?”

Starting with Carbless, Kroener said they started playing around with fonts and separating the words – “like making the word carb really big and then less smaller underneath it, or in a different font, to really drive the concept.”

“It didn’t come as an epiphany, my wife just texted me one day and said, ‘what about Carbliss?’” he said. “I kind of played around with it in my head and started talking about the play on words and what that could look like.”

Kroener said Carbliss’ first campaign was “Find your Bliss.”

“When people drink our product, they often have a similar experience to what I had five, six years ago,” he said. “Their eyes light up, and they get super surprised. So we’ve been lucky to say that (the name) has correlated with the consumer experience.”

‘The data is astonishing’

Today, Kroener said Carbliss is sold in 12 states – “and not 12 full states, it’s (a total of) about 15% of the U.S. population” – and is the No. 5 cocktail in a can in the entire nation by dollar sales.

“In the State of Wisconsin, the only people that sell more spirits than us is Tito’s,” he said. “And that’s in dollars. So, if you are buying a bottle of Tito’s, that is comparable to about three or four packs of Carbliss. We are out selling Jack Daniels, Fireball, Crown Royal – these brands that have been around for 100-150 years. The data is astonishing.”

Kroener said the idea of competing with these “monstrosity businesses” and beating them, “was never in the forefront.”

“I just wanted to make a better product for the consumer,” he said. “I can’t put words to seeing the data and reactions from customers.”

That growth, Kroener said, recently got national recognition – with Carbliss’ No. 7 ranking on the Inc. 5000 list.

Carbliss got itself on the list because of its three-year growth of 27,127%.

“I met my wife when she hired me at a different job in 2014,” he said. “If it wasn’t for that job, I wouldn’t even have known what Inc. was. It was never something I thought about.”

Fast forward to launching Carbliss, Kroener said he began applying to the list in 2020.

“They told us we didn’t have the revenue rates,” he said. “In 2021, I applied again, and again they said we didn’t have the revenue rates. They kept telling us, ‘no,’ based on our revenue rate.”

Kroener said when they found out this year that they ranked No. 7 nationally and No. 1 regionally, he was honestly shocked.

“I think, had the number been in the 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000s – I’m not sure how excited I would have been,” he said. “And I don’t mean that to put anybody down. But I think the number being so high, with us only having one angel investor – we’ve never went the venture capital route where we raised a ton of funds – doing this as a family-owned business with a hard-working team, I think really solidifies the fact that anybody can do it.”

Kroener said he can honestly say that he never thought they would get to where they are now.

“My wife and I were both small-town people that just ended up making something a little bit different that we thought was great,” he said. “So seeing that number is super cool to see.”

Kroener said he also doesn’t get “too excited,” since he tries to moderate his emotions, “because when (things go bad), I don’t get too upset. When things are really great, I don’t get super excited either. I try to moderate my emotions and keep moving because that is what we have to do regardless.”