Harry McKaig - How the Three-Tier System Became the Five-Tier System

On this episode, we're joined by Harry McKaig, CEO of Double Cross Vodka - the premium vodka brand distilled in the Tatras Mountains of Slovakia by an 11th-generation distilling family, and one of the few vodkas to ever score 95 points from Wine Enthusiast. 

Harry brings over 20 years of beverage industry experience spanning Anheuser-Busch, Diageo, Southern Glazer's, Pernod Ricard, and The Wine Group, where he oversaw a $250M+ business.

We get into the full arc of vodka premiumization from Smirnoff in the '50s through Absolut's legendary print campaigns, Grey Goose's dominance, and what the next wave looks like for premium spirits. 

Harry breaks down how the three-tier distribution system has consolidated into what he calls a "five-tier" reality - with brokers on one end and delivery platforms like GoPuff and DoorDash on the other - and what that means for emerging brands trying to navigate route to market.

Harry walks through his return to Double Cross after the brand was nearly wiped out during the pandemic, and the disciplined three-phase rebuild strategy he's running now across New York, New Jersey, and Florida. 

We also cover his thesis on Gen Z and the "intention-behavior gap," his take on non-alc, and why he thinks better-for-you fatigue may be on the horizon.

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Episode Highlights:

🍸 The history of vodka premiumization (Smirnoff to Grey Goose to now)
🏔️ Double Cross origin story (68 distilleries, 11th-generation Slovak family)
🏆 Scoring 95 points from Wine Enthusiast in the vodka category
🛒 How the three-tier system evolved into five tiers
🤝 What brand owners don't learn without time on the distributor side
📞 Cold-calling e-commerce customers to understand the consumer base
🎯 Going deep not wide (250 doors vs. 900 in New Jersey)
🍹 "Build brands on, sell them off" and the post-pandemic on-premise reality
📊 The intention-behavior gap and Gen Z's delayed consumption habits
🧪 Why non-alc competes with soda, not spirits
🔮 Protein fatigue and the runway for better-for-you trends

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Table of Contents:

00:00 – Intro
00:52 – Origin story and the premiumization of vodka
02:55 – How the founders found their distillery in Slovakia
04:12 – Current distribution strategy: going deep, not wide
04:54 – The state of BevAlc and why headlines are misleading
07:24 – The three-tier system and distributor consolidation
09:55 – How the three-tier became five tiers (brokers, e-comm, delivery)
11:38 – How to choose the right distributor
13:56 – Lessons from the distributor side that brand owners miss
16:22 – Harry's return to Double Cross and the rebuild plan
19:24 – Choosing focus markets and reverse-engineering consumer data
21:13 – Velocity tactics: on-premise, geofencing, paid social
23:56 – Gen Z, the intention-behavior gap, and the health paradox
27:28 – Double Cross brand positioning and consumer messaging
29:34 – The non-alc space and why it doesn't threaten spirits
31:37 – Trends: protein everywhere and better-for-you fatigue

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Links:

Double Cross Vodka – https://www.doublecrossvodka.com/
Follow Harry on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrymckaig/
Follow me on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-martin-steinberg/

For help with CPG production design - packaging and label design, product renders, POS assets, retail media assets, quick-turn sales and marketing assets and all the other work that bogs down creative teams - check out https://www.kitprint.co/

Transcript

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welcome to shelf help today we're speaking with Harry Mckegg CEO of Double Cross Vodka Harry's been a definitely a beverage industry veteran over 20 years of experience I think just spanning about every corner of the alcohol CPG world from Anheuser Busch Diageo Southern Glazers Pernod Ricard as well as I think running the The Wine Group or I oversaw 250 million plus run rate so definitely a lot of great experience in the space so excited to get into it um hey maybe just kind of like first off the listeners that maybe aren't that familiar with Double Cross I love to just kind of start off with just kind of quick lay the land just in terms of kind of the origin story why behind the brand kind of core product what makes it different and then if you want to throw out a few places that people get their hands on and maybe new places new doors you just got in and then we'll go from there just having the time I've spent um you know working on big brands like absolute and and just seeing the way the industry has evolved over the past several decades cause it's really been over decades if you look at the largest category which still remains vodka and you go back all the way to the to the 50s and 60s and you look at a brand like Smirnoff which was the first real spirits campaign in the US you know they were talking about it it leaves you breathless and it was this clean light versatile everyday drinking kind of product and it really brought a whole new wave of consumers into the vodka category as a premium product fast forward to the 70s and 80s you called the kind of the golden age of print advertising Swedish government you know which owned Absolut at the time really needed a new export market and so they thought okay let's run some ads in the United States and see if this is something that that that grows on its own and and sure enough we all know how well the print advertising campaigns did with Absolut and all of a sudden you had people spending at the time which is kind of crazy you know 12 or thirteen dollars on a bottle of of Absolut in the seven in the 70s and eighties come the 90s you start seeing the Nolet family with kettle one Sydney Frank history uh Titan at the time real character in the 2 with Grey Goose and Grey Goose kind of owned the 2 and and twenty tens and and so you've seen this trade up in this evolution in this premiumization on the vodka space and when our founders went to to go look at you know what type of spirit category they would like to build they wanted to go for the biggest and the largest and they knew that there was going to be a trade up in the vodka category and so they went to probably close to 68 different distilleries over the course of two years in search for who could make the next best product and we landed on Double Cross which really sits at the Tatras Mountains in Slovakia which is just just south of Poland and we found this wonderful distilling family who's been doing it for 11 generations and who had experience in beer wine and vodka making and stole the best of all of it and developed the Double Cross brand which if those are familiar with the badge is really a um a tribute to the Czechoslovakian coat of arms and so that that that's really how the story developed and came to market and we're one of the very few brands that I've ever gotten especially in the vodka category a 95 points from Wine Enthusiast and as you and I have both been in the in the wine business we know how hard it is to get 89 to 90s with wine you know flavorful aged you know dynamic products and so we think we really nailed it with the quality of the packaging and we're positioning ourselves for that and I think from a from a latest and greatest kind of new doors we've actually been much more disciplined over the past few months especially but primarily and just really focusing on where we have a really good consumer base where we have excellent distribution and retail partners and we are going much deeper and not wide and really trying to leverage that brand equity and drive velocity versus spread ourselves too thin and that strategy I think is starting to really take hold and and giving us a bit of a J curve on not just sales but just the number of consumers we're able to engage with and follow up and build customer loyalty and and so far so good it's funny you you mentioned absolute cause I remember like cut out the like the magazine ads of Absolut put them on the wall and they weren't even close to drinking age but they just thought they were so cool so I definitely resonate with they kind of transcended yeah no it's it's wild that that those are the days where we actually had magazines delivered and we cut out our favorite cars and our favorite TV stars and all that stuff and and litter our walls with other people's advertisement exactly well anyways there's just a lot of volatility in Bevalk in general depending on who you're talking about which category which brand like I'm just kind of curious it's just at like a high level from your perspective what is kind of like I think the headlines are a little misleading right your 30 second sound bites there's a lot of them people love to bash alcohol but the core economic data that we see in the personal consumption expenditures you know show continued growth if you look at some of the latest reporting from some of the large strategics we're starting to finally normalize a little bit and in our industry it takes a little bit longer you know I'm lucky I can produce vodka off the still put it in a boat ship it to the US South the next day if you look at the portfolios from some of the larger strategics they've got aged goods in there some things like Scotch that might need to be laid down for 12 years and so when you talk about forecasting into the future it's very hard to kind of make these predictions and the last thing you want is to not have enough product but it's it takes much longer for the larger players to adapt financially because the investment capex sometimes it's five to 10 years out and a lot of these things and so not every year looks good so I really think you need to draw a straight line much further out into the future and if you if you do that the business looks much less volatile than than the headlines would suggest yeah and listen that these products have been around since you know for thousands of years 9,000 years at this point they're core to socialization as much as you know even the rest of the sin stocks like tobacco has shifted form to zins and snooze and and vapes and some things like a lot of these things are you know are are more ingrained than we'd like to think and um I just think more resilient than a lot of the short term thinking investors really uh take note of I think that's a I think that's a great way to put it who's had a lot of years in the bevok space as well he works for a um whiskey brand and um the term that he used he described it he said the bevel and a distro space has become like the NBA just in terms of it's kind of a players league meaning like you know the big conglomerates they really kind of set the priorities for the distributors command all the attention and kind of leave like the smaller brands to kind of fend for themselves in terms of from a selling perspective and merchandising perspective and can maybe only kind of rely on them more for just the logistic standpoint is something similar compare like in terms of how you've kind of got these gatekeepers that are kind of like the Amazon with the you know or are they the Apple App Store or you know Amazon you have to give them your 30% to sell on their platform there's probably two core questions in there one is kind of how did the three tier system evolve to just be I don't like to use the term monopolize but just so so aggregator can concentrate it like many other businesses that's the first one and to answer that one quickly I think that for most of the big spirit suppliers working in the United States is incredibly complicated you know it's really tough cause it's almost like Europe every state it's like working in 50 different markets and so you need different distributors and route to market and there's different laws and compliance and so I think the smart and now very large distributors took note of that and said okay you know we wanna be that partner where we can get you in all 50 states you work with one person we handle all your inventory and pricing we pay our bills on time we can open up all the door and and then you had the retail side as well you look at like the Total Wine and more of the world and Bevmo and they thought okay you know being a one stop shop you know they they kept also expanding their footprint and so there's the larger retailers kind of took over and the larger distributors kind of took over and it created a very unified and and a more simplistic system of operations to get your brands to market and you couple that with two or three decades of low interest rates and easy money you know to make the comparison you look at like an Amazon you forget how hard it is to physically pick up a product and import it put it on a boat get in the United States get across country rail over the road it is incredibly complex and so bases was very clear about it he's like I'm gonna spend billions and billions of dollars to build out the infrastructure that we need to in order to handle the volume and once you do that it's you know you're basically the only person that can now distribute the millions of cases for these large suppliers and so the investment in infrastructure and ease of access to the total market by the expansion of these distributors has made it very easy now for the larger players to partner with them now the bad news is they probably can't go anywhere there's no one else that's investing this type of money in infrastructure and so it does really in order to attract the suppliers building the infrastructure the distributors really do lean heavily on their supplier partners because it's such a big piece of their portfolio these guys are so entrenched that that um that's really the only way you can operate uh is to have control or the much as as much sway power as possible with your distributor yeah the three tier system too also has become incredibly complex cause your your buddy in the whiskey business is right and for those that don't know or new to the space you know since prohibition me as the producer the marketer of the beverage the owner of the beverage alcohol brand I can't just go sell to the consumer any consumer every state I have to have a different distributor where I physically sell my product and then they own it and then they sell it to the retailer who then owns it uh and then they eventually you know then the consumer can go and and buy our products and that's a really difficult system to operate in because you're only getting a fraction of the gross merchandise value and then you spend millions of dollars to drive traffic to other people's retail stores and so that that makes it a very challenging environment and then you you mentioned five tier I really do believe for the smaller suppliers in the early stages like you really kind of need a broker or somebody with the contacts and connections to get you into the right distributors and really understand how to get your bra uh your market your brand to market and then from a consumer perspective you see this with Go Puff and Uber Eats and Doordash and you know the consumers are getting more adept or more adapted to purchasing alcohol online and so now you've got this front end delivery service platform you know the e commerce platform and everywhere along in that entire supply chain and that that five tier system you know it there's different uh additional costs that you incur as a brand owner and it gets more expensive and more difficult at the end of the day and I I think that's um it's an inhibitor for a lot of people that are starting out what should like the distributor search and kind of any and any red flags they should keep an eye out for yeah the the the biggest thing is I always think of like product basics right like what's the total acquirable market so if you look at the United States the top 20 markets do 80 to sometimes 90% of the business so I think everyone wants to be everywhere at once that's probably not the right way to go so be strategic first off on the the size of the market make sure you start somewhere where there's enough share to go build your business once you do that that will kind of give you a sense of um who you need to partner with and as you start looking state to state there's really three different types of distributors right you've got your franchise which is a whole another topic of conversation control in which the government actually owns sometimes the distributor and the retailer and then you've got your open markets and I would argue for a franchise or control market that's the last place you wanna go as a as a new supplier um it limits your options and and they're just not great environments to to promote and build and so then when you finally narrow an open state you know you have to be really conscious you're cold chained you know wine beer what's your shelf stability you know if I don't have a distributor that's really good at handling products that need to be temperature controlled some of my options disappear right there if I am a fast moving consumer good at 5 99 and I'm convenience focused and that's where I'm gonna win I might want to choose a beer distributor who does daily deliveries and is really good at merchandising and and is constantly doing turnover you know if you're a spirits brand are you gonna be in grocery you know do you need the national account partnerships and so so you really need to understand the size of the market kind of the space in the channels you're gonna play and then I mean talk a lot about it but I mean at that point too you also have to bring the resources that make you attractive to your distributor which generally means sales and marketing and so if you don't have enough of that you're not gonna get access to the big distributors at first and it really is a a ladder build on how you plan to enter a market anything that you felt like you Learned on the in those years that you kind of been able to bring to now the brand side that operators that have not spent time in the distributor side may just not really know or things they would never learn that can actually be helpful for them from someone like you that actually has been on both sides yeah lots the level of complexity at the distributor you know you you want to provide sales and service but your your job is to sell and account manage the truth is though for what we just talked about there's different channels and types of restaurants there's fine dining there's casual dining you're dealing with thousands of skews sometimes in these distributors and which you're trying to figure out not only consulting with a consumer with a customer what the customer wants but trying to figure out like what's in the best interest of of what to ship and uh and so I think the first lesson really learn really comes down to prioritization is that you cannot take an already complex business and make it more more complicated and even working for some of the larger suppliers you know in some cases we'd have 50 to 100 brands you know how do you touch on 50 to 100 brands in the course of even 24 months it's it's very difficult and so I I think that's where the next piece comes in is you really need to understand your consumer and the brand and your channel and once you have that you can have very specific ass for what you need certain number of accounts in a certain channel maybe even with a with a specialized team that's that lives within the distributor like a country club team or or whatever it may be and so I I think the the ass and prior the priorities need to be trimmed down to two or three things a year at most from the big ones and your ass really need to be customized for what your distributor is good at you know if they've got a specialty team and you've got the right brand just go focus on them until you win there and once you win there you can move on and I and I think people are trying to move too quickly through too many priorities and what ends up happening is I've been through so many annual meetings where we go back through our our 25 must get done every year and we haven't gotten done a single one the double cross stuff a bit more I was just I was curious cause I know you this is like your second stint there you were you were there as a VP and a GM for a few years up until like I think 2012 to 2015 uh under like the original founder then we had you know some successful runs at the Wine Group and some other um ventures and then came back I think a year or two ago as the CEO under kind of new ownership so I'm just kind of curious what um well I'll touch quickly just on Malcolm Lloyd who was the the founder and fundraiser for the brand I remember at the time I was with Pernod Ricard and I'm launching Absolute Miami at the fountain below and we spent probably 50 grand to deck out the pool and the bars and the whole nine yards and this guy's sitting there buying drinks right underneath our nose at our own party promoting his brand Double Cross and um you know met him for five minutes didn't think much about it and then started to take notice for the brand and saw it everywhere every menu and back bar and you know at the time in South Florida that's that's really hard to do that's a really tough market to enter and um he convinced me six seven months to basically quit my decent paying secure job at Perno and come to join this scrappy startup in New York and I think what made it so interesting is I'd always been with large entrenched institutional players at that point Anheuser Busch Diageo this was kind of a white dry erase board in a sense of like it was just pure growth and didn't know what team we needed didn't know what marketing spend we needed it was just kind of go go go and figure it out as you as you grow the brand and so that was really really really exciting and unfortunately we we lost the founder in an accident which is what what triggered my departure and that was a very sad time for the brand but I think every entrepreneur wonders like once you take your foot off the gas do I actually have a brand you know do I have a consumer is is are people gonna continue to come back to this is there any brand equity and so I departed and not thought much about it and I was starting to get the itch probably much like yourself has in the past where it's like ah you know wonderful job at a large wine supplier working with great people but I I genuinely was just bored and disinterested in what I was doing and I thought okay you know now is the time to go do something else right like get back into the brand building hands on scrappy environment and you think you Learned enough over these jobs like let's let's go find out let's go put it to use and so I originally went to go start something else and sure enough through fate you know and and through a couple connections the owners those that had taken over ownership of the brand said listen you know we have double cross you know we got wiped out during the pandemic you know we couldn't we couldn't import we lost our distribution we spent so much time and energy on this brand you know how do we how do we jump start it and and and bring it back to life and and that's kind of where I came in and we you know we held hands we've got a wonderful group of people on the cap table there's only a handful of us and they've known the brand for a long time and and we've got a basically a three phase plan to to build this thing back up but do it a little bit more discipline because you you brought her up earlier like one of the biggest mistakes I think we were doing in the beginning is we were going way too big way too quick with way too many employees and we basically ran out of money to to market and grow the brand every couple quarters and so you need to be practical and and have a plan for having enough working capital to grow these things New Jersey Florida what about those three markets like to really focus on versus building a new brand you don't you really don't know who your consumer is you need time to talk to them and and tease out what's working and what's not we had the opposite problem we had already been in 50 states we had done a ton of business so it's kind of reverse engineering or diagnosing it and saying okay let's look at the quality of distribution let's look at the quality of promotion let's understand what our consumer looks like yeah and I think that's one cool tool lately that we've had that we didn't have 10 or 15 years ago which is you can turn on e commerce and you can transact almost directly with with your consumers and so and then you can follow up with them you can actually pick up the phone which we did and I called a ton of people that purchased our product unsolicited and really just you know ask them why why do you like it where did you discover it and what we basically came to find out is we kind of had a core demographic of of consumers that had gravitated towards the brand so the goal after we did that was really to build our route to market and be available where our consumers are and ignore everything else right it's just be when you think about their customer journey where do they live where do they shop where is our best chance of success to continue to grow and build the brand equity that we were lucky enough to already have and that has been the core of the strategy and so that's why we've tuned up you know the markets we're in because we feel like and I see this a lot with other brands and if you can't be really really good in one market with one part of of the consumer base what makes you think you're gonna be good in 50 markets and a lot of brands make that mistake and spend a fortune before they really have developed a good velocity and turn and base and and these brands eventually go away yeah what's really having the most impact from a velocity standpoint and really maximizing velocity again both on you know either on premises off premises whichever one you kind of want to focus on if not both like what have you found or strategies tools and tactics that are having the biggest impact these days so I think the detection of the on and off premise on premise to me and you probably heard this you build brands on sell them off and that and that's the way everyone had done it for a long time and and cause you you kill two birds with one stone not only do you get a menu placement and some visibility on the back bar and but you're sampling you're it's all tastings and samplings and you're part of people's experiences and and their occasions and I still think that's a great way to do it I just think you know it's not what I think you can see it in the data is the on premise hospitality in general really took a hit during the pandemic and it is its own skill set in bartending and hospitality and serving and back of the house like and so we're in this kind of glut right now where we don't have as many restaurants as we did years ago and more importantly we don't have the enthusiasm and the workforce for the people that want to participate in hospitality like they used to and so I think from an on premise perspective that's really you know we can see it and we can feel it there's still some really incredibly dedicated people that are in the space but on premise generally I'm trying to be a net promoter for is we need to bring back the bars the nightclubs we need to get more people that are interested in bartending again and interested in spirits and wine and beer and so we need to be net promoters of that space so I I still think for all the reasons that work before we still build on and sell off but with the caveat that it's it's gonna take longer cause there's less places to do it in and then the tactics that work best I mean nothing beats a recommendation from bar staff and from store staff nothing beats liquid to lips these have limitations in scaling and so what we do find very helpful is you know paid social geofencing certain types of retail accounts and probably most importantly the same tactic that that should shouldn't always win is it goes back to what I keep saying is like know where your consumer is pick those regions and find the best stores that are most that are the best fit for your product and that and that's what we do we don't need 900 points of distribution in a state like New Jersey we need 250 and we need to be very big in a small place which means we need to show up huge where it matters and that those are the core tactics that are working and you can get more complex from there customer loyalty follow up things like that which I think play a huge part you want to stay in touch with your customer but but those are where you win about Gen Z and I think you called it something called where it's like real drivers for them are like economics social shifts and so like intention behavior gap I think is what you called it assuming I got all that right what's your kind of thesis here and what should spirits brands be doing in the context of of this yeah it's funny that I started writing and I always feel um I'm a little embarrassed about it just public thoughts on paper right but it really came down cause my wife was tired of listening to me so I needed to get it out and get it on paper so I even appreciate you're probably one of the five people that that read it so thank you for that it really comes down to this like to boil it all down it's like what people say and what they do are very different right and and it'd be hard for me to use the term net promoter again you know I I road bike I run I swim I surf like I'm a very active person but it doesn't mean I'm completely giving up alcohol to be a healthier person and at the same time too it's like I still eat pretty poorly and so like I generally I would like to be healthier but like like I my actions though don't always you know follow suit with that and and so I think I think when when you look at kind of the health paradox that's always the problem and to go back to like personal consumption and expenditures on tobacco and alcohol and fast food and and you know expenditures on supplementation and things like that you know all of this is going up and you know the nicotine and alcohol and all kind of your sin based behaviors people are still spending huge amounts of money every year and it's growing every year on these types of activities and I and I think you know more broadly I don't think that I don't think that the headlines themselves to just touch on that for a moment the headlines are more much much worse than the reality and so the health paradox is that too is like we're always trying to do better things for ourselves but at the end of the day it's not the complete and total utter sacrifice of some of the other things that we love in life like alcohol and going out and and fast food I did a succinct enough job summarizing that but but this also goes back to Gen Z as well I think Gen Z gets a really bad rap for a lot of different things but yeah it's certain it's like there's less going out for bars and restaurants you know you have matching apps to you know to find people online coffee shops are getting expensive you know it's seven eight bucks for a latte so so I think generally Gen Z is losing the third space you know that they that we we had the luxury of being in and even their education is migrating online and so it's much more time in front of a screen for much longer you're losing your third spaces and then economically every generation kind of matures a little bit later than the last one for a variety of reasons and so Gen Z will be that generation that finishes grad school and starts family and gets her first job just a little bit later and so there's a delay in their personal consumption habits and what they spend money on but generally what we're finding is like once you give somebody an opportunity to go get a job and earn some money and get ahead in life a little bit they resort back to the same travel and leisure and going out and spending that everyone else does and and so I think if we just give them a little bit of a break for a couple extra years let them catch up a little bit I think you'll find a lot of the things that we grew up loving and doing will come back into trend purely for economic reasons back to to double cross in terms of kind of where you feel like I don't know the consumer landscape has kind of you know evolved over time and the Gen Z stuff is an example like yeah you feel like the way that kind of double cross is messaging positioning and voice is kind of intentionally I don't know current factors variables into account if that makes sense it does yeah it's so funny cause I come from a world where you have 100 page brand deck you know where it's all voice archetype you know padding and spacing on the logo I mean there was not a thing you actually had any decision making over except for not screwing it up uh which is its own challenge and you know we we've done a little bit of that like we understand you're gonna win on brand you need to have an archetype and a voice and there's a way you're gonna message to different segments of your audience but we don't take ourselves too seriously at the end of the day and we're not too rigid on that where we do have challenges is exactly where I just brought it up the the the person that can afford a fifty dollar glass of scotch or a fifty dollar bottle of Double Cross is probably not gonna be 24 fresh out of college spending spending that kind of money across the bar and so we do skew a little bit older and we're conscious of that but we're also conscious of the fact that if if we're building it and getting it right right now with a little bit of an older demographic which is our consumer base you know that eventually that when that that younger generation does catch up we'll have a lot of that messaging and kind of archetype together where I think we can reach that next wave of vodka consumers and and you brought up earlier I think is something about just the cyclical cycle of trends you know things are on fad and and and some are not but we're seeing lifts in premium spirits and we're seeing people come back to vodka and gin I mean it's really hard to have a wonderful clean crisp versatile spirit you know when you're especially if you think about like the health paradox right like I'm trying to be healthier you see in the rtd's they have an iced tea vodka low calories kind of the way to go and so we see a lot of that akin style kind of behavior in the 90s resurfacing now today and so I have a funny feeling that just having a really world class premium vodka is really going to be hard to beat if things really do get better for you in the next 10 years totally what's um what's your take on kind of the non alc space and is that something you guys have all at all talked about it at Double Cross at all we do it's it depends on how you categorize it right and to continue to use my tech analogies it's just so prevalent but if you like a you look at Google search ninety percent of the of the search pie right hard to believe they don't own the whole thing but if you if you look at them as a tech and marketing company you know they're they're a much smaller player and I look at non alcohol kind of the same way I look at it as really like I don't look at non alcohols being competitive to beverage alcohol because if someone is choosing not to drink then what it actually does is it it's not competing with beverage alcohol in the first place they're just choosing to be in a different beverage category and then they're really competing with sodas and spritzers and all these other other types of non alcoholic beverages are broader CPG and so and I don't see non alcoholic really eating into that share and even now I I only the best number I've seen is almost 1% of total spending and broad alcohol share so I'm just not as worried about it but I would say it is nice for those that for whatever reason choose or cannot drink or should not be drinking to get a nice phony Negroni I'll promote that brand that tastes just like the real thing it's viscous and flavorful and complex to be able to get the experience of a Negroni I think is really really important and vice versa so I think there's a huge room for really creative complex flavorful beverages at the bar that's not alcoholic but I don't really worry about it taking away from alcohol in the real in the grand scheme of things what what does that even mean it's like point zero zero one % of the market you know that is a great analogy yeah that's been awesome Harry well I'm curious like last question for you in terms of um this could be I'll let you take it wherever you want this could be in the Bevox space or maybe it's just in other CPG verticals for whatever reason any brands in in general across all CBG or specific trends uh that you've been kind of I don't know keeping your eye on things that have been kind of peaked your interest things that you think are interesting that are happening as of late I would love to say that I'm gonna be ahead of the trend curve but I always joke around like if you just go to uh you know the the uh product expos that that it take place on both coasts and you you kind of you know you kind of see what's happening it's like protein is undeniably going to be in everything from your coffee to your waffles maybe even to your next vodka drink I don't know yeah yeah there was the Mike the situation owned a brand the guy from um Jersey Shore owned a brand called it's gonna escape me but it was a protein based vodka years and years and years ago and people thought he was crazy I'm like he was just too early I guess so yeah I know so so so funny so you never know but what I what I think is gonna eventually happen is I think you're gonna start seeing fatigue and better for you because if you look at the CPI the price to get protein and everything now is way way higher eggs with protein are gonna run you 3 x AG1 has had some interesting studies done on being a really expensive glorified multivitamin so what I worry about is that as everyone is spending share of dollar to get healthier and do better that the products themselves need to deliver on that and that is one thing that worries me but I think more broadly in the food trend that's what I'm keeping an eye on is like how much runway and protein do we need at least in the next two years and we're about to find out I think we are it's a yeah I think we're definitely we'll see hey this has been awesome I appreciate the time this has been super fun what's the best place to for people to follow along with you and some of your writings like the health paradox stuff and then what's a what's the best place for people to follow along with with double cross as well man I would say anything double cross related info at Double Cross vodka dot com we uh we live in that inbox we talk to everybody through there please reach out also very active on LinkedIn as I think most people have to be nowadays that's become an evolving platform shoot me a note I'm pretty uh pretty active there and if not I have someone keeping an eye on my inbox perfect awesome Harry appreciate the time I think that's the pod I would have friends that would like and they would like create collages with them and like a lot of UPS and downs the state of Bevalk look like today I had another guy on the podcast a while back he said something that resonated with me the big big tech monopolies yeah I think there selection process look like made you feel like they're the right fit so there's kind of lucky in that sense what you're founding as of late are there any ways in terms of on the concept of better for you