We recently connected with Jen Morales and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Jen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
Funding for growth. Brands in the food and beverage space experience a nearly 90% failure rate within the first five years of business. The leading cause for these early exits is a lack of significant funding, leading in turn to crippling cash-flow problems and the closing of production and promotional pipelines. An additional and often associated cause is the difficulty in finding trusted co-manufacturing partners who, post pandemic, have the labor pool, production capacity, and financial solvency to consistently produce a brand’s products.
Mixicles is no different. As an emerging brand in an emerging and trending category, we experience long payment terms from our clients on the one hand, while being asked by our production partners to pay in advance or, at the latest, upon delivery of our finished goods. We’ve seen raw material, packaging, and production costs surge, while retailers reach out with ever increasing promotional demands and an unwillingness to absorb any price increases.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am President & CEO of Mixicles®. Our brand creates botanically infused ice cubes that provide cocktail lovers an innovative and convenient way to craft delicious mixed drinks. We are a certified minority-owned and woman-run business. I co-founded Mixicles in late 2018 with my longtime friend, former law partner, and favorite drinking buddy, Jason Stitt.
Jason and I share a passion for cocktails, but find frustrating the time, money, and effort required to craft bar-quality drinks at home. Most pre-made mixers are sugar laden, artificially flavored concoctions that don’t do justice to the spirits they’re mixed with, and the natural bottled mixers available have a short shelf life once opened, resulting in a lot of waste. What was missing from the market is what we set out to create: high-quality, fuss-free cocktail blends that, because they’re in ice-cube form, can be dropped into any spirit for an instant cocktail and will last 18+ months in the freezer.
Mixicles are the only all-natural, alcohol-free frozen mixer cubes on the market. They can be combined with any kind of spirit, wine, seltzer, etc. to instantly create elegant and bespoke craft cocktails or mocktails.
Our customers range from avid home bartenders who want premium mixers to pair with their top-shelf spirits to the cocktail-curious and anxious entertainers who might need a little added confidence consistently crafting their favorite beverages. The layered flavors in Mixicles add complexity to drinks without requiring fancy bar tools or mixology know-how. And because our cubes are frozen, Mixicles not only chill beverages without watering them down, they also deepen and evolve flavors as they melt.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Our business is pivoting right now! We’re moving from an always-frozen product to one that can sit at ambient temperature for the consumer to take home and freeze. Pivoting into producing a shelf-stable product allows us to reduce shipping costs, create greater merchandising opportunities at store level, and improve our eCommerce solution for those looking to shop at home.
And because it’s important to our brand that we use only natural ingredients, we’ve been exploring changes to our production process that will not require adding any artificial preservatives. We’re currently in the midst of shelf-life testing, with the goal of introducing “Mixicles 2.0” early next year.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
Today we partner with a co-packer to manufacture most of our products. When we started out, however, we weren’t sure how to — or even if we legally could — make and sell the product ourselves., So, our first step was to enroll in a course offered by a local non-profit incubator on how to take your food or beverage idea and turn into a business. We then joined a commercial kitchen and obtained a frozen food manufacturing license so we could begin producing Mixicles there. We did all our own manufacturing until we got picked up by Kroger for distribution in the Midwest. At that point, we began searching for a co-manufacturer to make the product for us. It was a daunting and confusing process for two novices and industry outsiders like Jason and me, and so we decided to bring in consultants, including a food scientist, for guidance. It took many months, and a number of changes to our product vessel, before we found a co-packer who could manufacture Mixicles for us.
My advice for anyone looking for a co-manufacturer is to give yourself as much time as possible to find one, and really do your homework. Go visit the facility where your product will be made. Do some test runs. Talk to other customers of the vendor you’re considering. It’s a critically important relationship, so vet everything thoroughly!
Contact Info:
- Website: mixicles.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/mixicles
- Facebook: facebook.com/mixicles
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/mixicles
- Twitter: twitter.com/mixicles
- Youtube: youtube.com/@mixicles
- Other: tiktok.com/@mixicles
Image Credits
Shellee Fisher, Damien Thompson, Chris Birkmeyer