Low & no-alcohol beverage brand owner DioniLife is readying entries into the spirits and RTD categories, having last year acquired alcohol-free beer brand Mash Gang for an undisclosed sum.
DioniLife CEO Damian McKinney said the low & no drinks business – set up last year and funded by New York private equity firm the Invus Group – would this year launch incubated non-alcoholic ‘spirits’ to mimic the likes of tequila and whiskey.
“We are absolutely going to launch some spirits, and we will launch them around April time,” he said. “We’re looking at tequila, whiskey and ready to serve [products] associated with that.”
DioniLife had decided on incubating its own non-alcoholic spirits rather than pursuing further M&A after being disappointed by the quality of incumbent market brands, McKinney said.
“We were actively engaged before we closed [fundraising] with some other spirits brands and mixers,” he said. “Then we said ‘hold on a minute, let’s put a benchmark down’. We took Maker’s Mark and we compared all the non-alcoholic whiskeys against it, and none of them came anywhere near it.
“We did the same with tequila and Don Julio, and tasted all the non-alcoholic [tequilas] against it. They were all thin, weak and flavoured at the end of the day.”
DionilLife, however, was now “very close” to being able to mimic the taste of full-strength tequila, McKinney claimed.
“In order to do that, you need to go back to science, technology, the art of blending and making,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’re doing, and we believe it’s absolutely possible to do.”
What is DioniLife’s plan for Mash Gang?
In addition to incubating and launching in alcohol-free spirits and eventually wines, DioniLife planned to grow Mash Gang into an internationally recognised beer brand via contract brewing, McKinney said.
“It is absolutely our intent to build Mash Gang into a major player,” he said. “We don’t see it as a UK only or a US only. We would like to take this and make it a global brand.
“We have no plan at all to buy a brewery,” McKinney confirmed. “I don’t want to be moving bottles or cans across the world. I’d rather make it locally. That’s why we’re making it at North [Brewing] in Leeds in the UK, and we’re making it in Milwaukee in the US. We’re looking at other facilities as long as they deliver the quality in production.”
Mash Gang’s UK retail presence is currently limited to independent bottle shops and convenience outlets, but DioniLife was in discussions with larger grocers about listing its beers in their stores, McKinney said.
“We’ve been testing the consumer model using independent wholesalers and liquor stores in the US to make sure we have got a liquid that is as good as we think it is, and a brand that really sings and stands out,” he said. “And we are engaging right now with major retailers both in the US as well as in the UK.”
DioniLife’s ‘responsible drinking mission’
McKinney also revealed a visit to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was a catalyst for his decision to quit as CEO of vodka giant Stoli Group in 2023 before setting up DioniLife last year.
“I was shocked,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily the story of the individual I was listening to, which was in itself tragic, but the effect on their family, the people closest to them, and the community in which they lived that was the shocking piece. However much we [as an industry] talk about drinking responsibly and everything else, that left a real mark on me.
“I was running Stoli [Group] and I was encouraging people to enjoy the social side of having a drink, but constantly pushing back against shots and volume,” he continued. “I’d been fighting this battle in my own mind for some time, and then there was this industry meeting in the middle of 2023 where we were updated on the WHO guidelines which said there was no safe limit [of consumption].
“There was a pushback around the data, and the bias of the data. I was just about the only person in the room who said two things. Number one was ‘I assume this is what the tobacco industry did at the beginning?’. And the second was: ‘the evidence is right’. We’ve always known there’s a risk.”
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