TRU Colors, the craft brewery that aimed to end street violence by employing rival gang members, will cease operations on Friday, September 9.
In a lengthy Facebook post, founder and CEO George Taylor II outlined the Wilmington, North Carolina-based brewery’s struggles, which have included violence and quality control issues that led to a delayed first commercial batch.
“As an early-stage startup, TRU Colors depends on investment to fuel growth and reach profitability,” he wrote. “With unexpected delays, media problems, and more, it has been costly as we have worked through it all. With help from a few people, I have covered most of the company’s shortfalls, but I have reached the limit of what can be done. All of this, coupled with recent media issues, has created a perfect storm causing our expected investment to dry up. This has left TRU Colors without a viable path forward.”
Taylor pointed to media coverage and “narratives that drive division, drama, and clicks” as having cost the brewery necessary investment money. Last year, TRU Colors employee Koredreese “Korry” Tyson and Bri-yanna Williams were killed in a shooting at the home of George Taylor III, the elder Taylor’s son and the brewery’s former COO. The double homicide, which led to charges against three individuals, was extensively covered in local and national media, and was centered in a recent New Yorker story by Charles Bethea, who joined the Brewbound Podcast this week to discuss his months-long investigation.
The negative attention scared off investors, Taylor wrote.
“When TRU Colors is searched, news articles on some of our most personal and difficult moments appear with salacious headlines that would frighten most. This has been costly and over the past year TRU Colors has lost $5.6 million dollars in investment,” he said. “These deals were set to close but did not because even though investors understood the stories were exaggerated or untrue, they were unwilling to take on the media and the narrative.”
Due to the $5.6 million investment failing to materialize, TRU Colors’ funding dwindled to about $8,000, according to Taylor. Although the brewery had partnerships with Molson Coors, which took a minority equity stake in April 2021, and PNC Bank (“a refi of our building and equipment,” Taylor noted), neither was enough to keep TRU Colors afloat.
A Molson Coors spokesperson told Bethea it had no plans to acquire TRU Colors outright, but rather its stake in the brewery was “a piece of that puzzle to enhance our D.E.I. [diversity, equity and inclusion] efforts.”
“We take our responsibility to make difference for people and the planet seriously, and the partnership with TRU Colors was an example of that,” a Molson Coors spokesperson said in a statement to Brewbound. “While financial challenges hampered its business, as was announced today, TRU Colors’ mission of reducing violence through economic empowerment was powerful and hopefully will endure.”
TRU Colors’ flagship TRU Light (4.2% ABV, 95 calories) is sold at 1,394 retail locations in North Carolina, according to the brewery’s website. A TRU Colors investor – Charlie Banks, managing director of venture capital firm VentureSouth, who invested about $500,000 in the brewery, according to Bethea’s reporting – called the beer “drinkable” and added that it was “for the boat, the golf course, tailgating,” activities not commonly associated with the community TRU Colors sought to uplift.
Taylor’s journey to found TRU Colors began in late 2015 with the murder of a 16-year-old in Wilmington, a “horrific event” that caused him to become “obsessed with understanding the causes of street violence,” he wrote. He asked Wilmington’s district attorney for an introduction to local gang leaders in 2016 and immersed himself in their community.
“My epiphany came when I realized the core drivers of violence were lack of economic opportunity and societal exclusion,” Taylor wrote. “This critical understanding eventually led to the launch of TRU Colors — an inclusive economic opportunity with a social mission that uses reform, education, and livable wage jobs to lift communities and make them safer.”
In addition to starting employees – active members of the Bloods, Crips and Gangster Disciples (GD) – with salaries around $35,000 plus benefits, TRU Colors enrolled new workers in DISRUPT-U, an eight-week onboarding program that taught skills to help them secure resources in housing, transportation, finance and relationships.
Taylor and his son Kurt Bagby Taylor founded Next Glass, an alcohol tech start up that merged with beer check-in platform Untappd in 2016. The Taylors sold their stake and exited Next Glass in March 2020. On the Brewbound Podcast, Bethea categorized the elder Taylor as “a classic serial entrepreneur, disruptor-type guy” and underscored TRU Colors’ for-profit status as something that had the potential to cloud its mission.
“I think it’s important to point out that from the get-go, [Taylor] said that his first goal was to sell beer,” Bethea said. “It’s a for-profit business, not a nonprofit as I said, so the social justice cause, even though it’s really the entire marketing pitch, making good on that is secondary to making money.”
On his path to establishing TRU Colors, Taylor sought the counsel of Jesuit priest Greg Boyle, who founded Los Angeles-based Homeboy Industries, a non-profit organization that trains former gang members to run its bakery, cafe, catering service, grocery store and silkscreen and embroidery business. According to Bethea, Taylor “shrugged off the advice of experts” like Boyle “in favor of a strategy that would turn more heads.” Unlike Homeboy Industries, Taylor encouraged TRU Colors employees to remain active in their gangs.
“Taylor was committed at a certain point to this idea – we can talk about why but I think a lot of it had to do with marketing,” Bethea said. “The idea of doing something involving active rival gang members hadn’t been done before. It’s more bold and unprecedented and frankly, it’s gonna elicit a lot more press and attention than doing what has been done before and what’s been somewhat successful with companies like Homeboy Industries, which is employing former gang members and reinforcing that they stay out of gangs.”
According to Bethea, Taylor had long said he could see himself selling TRU Colors after several years. Critics of this potential plan had flagged that Taylor – but not employees – could have profited off a deal, which he debunked in his post about the brewery’s impending closure.
“Another misconception is that our team did not receive equity, and instead, I stood to make millions if TRU Colors sold,” Taylor wrote. “This is false on both counts. After 5 months employment, all team members received stock options, providing significant equity opportunity. Also, my agreement only allowed me to recoup my investment. Any gains I might receive were setup to go to the team.”
It remains unclear how many people TRU Colors employed. Taylor told Bethea the brewery had as many as 70 workers, but Bethea said on his two visits to the brewery he saw “maybe two dozen.” On Facebook, Taylor seemed to express remorse that TRU Colors employees will lose their jobs and that the brewery’s demise may dissuade others from engaging with underserved Wilmington communities in the future.
“Good and selfless people who have risked so much to better themselves and our city, have lost their careers — most who found TRU Colors to be their first fair opportunity at a bright future,” he wrote. “And our failure will further seed distrust in many of Wilmington’s marginalized and excluded communities and they will again question the intentions and ability of the next person who tries to help.”