Mighty Swell CEO Jeana Harrington is feeling good about the future of the hard seltzer brand under new ownership.
The July 28 acquisition of Mighty Swell Spiked Seltzer by a family-owned, global fruit and flavor company ended an admittedly “rough” period in which the company lacked funding to produce its products for the summer selling period.
The sale of Mighty Swell has seen it spun off into a new alcoholic beverage business called Lemonati, which Harrington is leading as president.
The issues for Mighty Swell began earlier this year when a round of funding expected to come through by December fell through.
“By February, it was getting a little dire in terms of being able to fund the year’s production going into the spring,” Harrington told Brewbound.
This led Mighty Swell to explore merger-and-acquisition options while it was gearing up to brew the bulk of its production for the summer selling season. Without the funding, Mighty Swell was unable to brew a follow-up batch of product in March, leading the company to allocate product in order to maintain its chain placements, Harrington said. She credited her team and Mighty Swell’s wholesalers with holding onto many of those placements.
Future production won’t be an issue with new ownership backing Mighty Swell and Lemonati, Harrington said.
“It’s gonna give us the opportunity and the resources to not have to fundraise again, which is a big plus for me and the leadership because that can take up a lot of time,” she added.
Lemonati will operate with little intervention from the family that bought Mighty Swell. Harrington said their desire is to remain private and uninvolved in the business, allowing her and her team to run the new alcoholic beverage division of the company as a siloed business.
Following the sale, Mighty Swell did the first of two “big production runs” at City Brewing’s facility in Memphis, with product beginning to ship now, Harrington said. The company is also exploring West Coast production as expansion west is under consideration.
Joining Lemonati with Harrington will be Anthony Avizenis, the brand’s sales lead who had joined the company in 2022, and Andrea Clodfelter, brewing and innovation lead, who joined Mighty Swell in 2019. In mid-September, the company will bring on John Spicer, former Lagunitas head of business development, as VP of national accounts.
Moving forward, the Mighty Swell/Lemonati team has been given free reign to innovate, extend Mighty Swell and create a portfolio of new brands, including spirits-based, ready-to-drink canned cocktails, non-alcoholic offerings and ready-to-serve spirits. Harrington said her team is working through the formulas, flavors and sourcing for its spirits-based offerings, while the non-alc play is still too early to discuss.
The goal is to build a business with offerings at a “mainstream premium price point” and reach “long-term profitability,” Harrington said.
For now, Mighty Swell is picking up where it left off in the spring with its Techniflavor variety 12-pack (Bluepeary, Cantaloupe, Dragon and Kiwidew).
“[Techniflavor] got amazing chain placements but it didn’t really get its due in terms of all the displays and merchandising and programming we wanted to do,” she said. “Now that we have stock we’re in the process of creating formal launches again.”
The company is also focused on its 24-packs: Keep It Weird (Purple Magic, Pink Colada, Rocket Pop and Tiger’s Blood), Original (Cherry Lime, Blackberry, Watermelon Mint and Peach) and Tropic (Mango Raspberry, Blood Orange, Grapefruit and Pineapple).
Mighty Swell is also in the process of a logo change and packaging refresh for its white packaging to make them more unifying across the board.
As Harrington builds Lemonati for the future, she’ll look to expand beyond the 30 U.S. markets and warm weather export countries. The key will be finding the “right partners.”
“We know the key to the right partner in this in the new seltzer world is chain placements,” she said. “So how many do we need to get? Let’s take the meetings, let’s see what we can do and then and then we find the right partner.”