Last week, premium whiskey Uncle Nearest announced its third in a series of investments designed to create a tangible shift in the funding inequities for BIPOC-owned businesses. It comes at a time when other Black founders and business leaders are also making strides to celebrate Black people’s historical contributions to spirits and build more Black-owned legacy beverage businesses.
Black Americans represent 12% of alcohol consumers across categories, but they make up just 7.8% of the sector’s labor force, 2% of executives in the industry, and 0% of acquisitions, according to Pronghorn, an organization dedicated to cultivating the next generation of diverse founders, executive leaders and entrepreneurs in spirits. Those numbers are reflective of inequities across industries for Black entrepreneurs, a result of historical and current institutionally racist systems that have denied equal opportunities for wealth creation.
Jackie Summers was one of the first recipients of the Uncle Nearest Fund, receiving a $2 million investment that relaunched his hibiscus liqueur, Sorel Liqueur. The partnership and guidance has been instrumental for Summers’ business. Apart from capital, Uncle Nearest also offers a program to bolster Black-owned businesses.
“They’re not just providing capital, but providing guidance and instruction and connections to almost all of the Black owned businesses in our industry out there,” said Summers.
As the first Black person to hold a distiller’s license in the U.S., Summers is familiar with the bias and dearth of financial support that Black entrepreneurs face. Despite the popularity of the Caribbean-inspired liqueur, the founder ran out of money and closed the distillery. Today, Sorel Liqueur is in 14 states and national chains, and recently won the Chairman’s Trophy in the Ultimate Spirits Competition. The government of Barbados has also inquired about building a distillery to make the country the Caribbean distribution hub.
Summers is also a James Beard-nominated writer and spearheads social justice-focused conversations in hospitality spaces — he recently finished a three year term as an inaugural co-chair of the Education Committee for the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation. Summers and Uncle Nearest founder, Fawn Weaver, are among the more prominent leaders pushing for change in a white male dominated industry. Uncle Nearest is named for Nearest Green, the formerly enslaved distiller who taught Jack Daniel the craft of making whiskey.
“We are both here trying to create a legacy. We are both here trying to ensure that the story is told. We are both here obviously trying to produce a delicious liquid business but making sure people understand that we have been at this for centuries and we’re just starting to step into the light, not even for achievements present but for achievements past,” Summers said.
They’re not alone. After noticing that stories of white founders and brands dominated liquor shelves, former NBA player Alan Henderson decided to celebrate the contributions of little-known African-Americans to spirits history with Henderson Spirits Group, which launched at the start of the pandemic. The bottles in his portfolio are named for Birdie Brown, a female Black distiller who gained notoriety during prohibition for her homemade hooch, and Tom Bullock, a pre-prohibition influential bartender and cocktail book author.
“I’m a consumer. I know African-Americans are consumers. So why don’t we have an option to buy something that speaks directly to us?” he said.
He’s also since launched an additional Indian-inspired sparkling beverage company with his wife, Maxine Henderson, called Bollygood. Tom Bullock’s Old Tom Gin and Burnt Orange Bourbon are now distributed in seven states and in major chains like Sam’s Club. He’s toying with the idea of a third brand, but his primary focus is expanding the portfolio’s footprint.
“We just want to keep growing,” he said. “I’m the only owner right now and haven’t taken any investment. I think there’s going to come a time for the brand and for me to get a strategic investor to really bring the spirits experience and resume to the table.”
For other Black spirit owners, attaching a cultural story to a brand is a point of differentiation and pride – but it can present challenges, too. LS Cream Liqueur was founded in 2015 by husband and wife team Myriam Jean-Baptiste and Stevens Charles as a way to bring a family recipe and a spin on traditional Haitian cremas to a shelf-stable format that could work as a cocktail ingredient or stand on its own. When they first launched in Canada, their country of residence, they were told by a retailer that the marketing of their product was “too Black,” according to Jean-Batiste. That experience speaks to the extra educational step that some Black-owned brands have to take to cut through racial prejudice.
“Yes, this is inspired by Haitian culture and we’re both of Haitian descent and very proud of it. It was very important for us to put that forward, but at the same time let people know that this is like Italian wine or an Australian wine, you don’t have to be Australian or Italian to drink it,” she said.
The liqueur found distribution through Republic National Distributing Company (RNDC) shortly after its 2019 U.S. launch, and has since quintupled its sales. The couple also received investment from Kenny Burns, the lifestyle specialist who also invested in Black-owned brands Cîroc Vodka, DeLeón Tequila and Uncle Nearest. The couple echoes Weaver’s mission to create generational wealth through ownership— this is a legacy business for the family.
“We want to pass this on as our heritage, but also to our kids that are witnessing us working like crazy to make this brand go where we want to go. So this is really like a legacy brand that we want to build,” Jean-Baptiste said.
While the couple said the product speaks for itself, the recent proliferation of other Black-owned brands and added attention on BIPOC-owned brands has helped open doors. Henderson has also benefited from a growing community of BIPOC-owned beverage brands. He’s part of a collective put together by 1863 Ventures, a business development organization for New Majority entrepreneurs, and ReserveBar, which brings together Black entrepreneurs to share best practices.
“I think in the end when we work together, we’re going to be a lot more successful,” he said.
While Black investors and Black-led business development groups like Pronghorn are helping to scale up beverage businesses, brand owners are also holding other businesses in the beverage industry accountable for promises made in 2020, when civil rights protests sparked wider conversations around equity and representation in the beverage industry.
“Let’s see two years later, what really has been done, what efforts have really been put into place, how many black owned brands or diversity-owned brands do you have on your shelf?” said Jean-Baptiste.
For Summers, the problems in the beverage industry are still systemic, and those conversations sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement have not amounted to a change in executive appointment positions or in the ratio of BIPOC founders getting funding for projects, for instance.
“It all sounded good in 2020 and very little has changed,” he said.