A 370% Jump in Shipments: How a Family Cocktail Recipe Became a National Ready-to-Drink Brand

Meredith Mills-Merritt built The Original Southside around a cocktail recipe inspired by her mother’s gin, lemonade, and mint summer cooler, turning it into a ready-to-drink brand in 2024. She leaned on her prestige beauty background to obsess over details most RTD brands skip — a proprietary gin, and a certified organic, vegan, gluten-free formula at 10% ABV.

In under two years, the brand expanded into more than 20 markets and posted a 370% increase in shipments — the kind of growth curve most beverage founders spend five years chasing, if they get there at all.

It’s now on shelves at Whole Foods and Total Wine, with expansion into Meijer, Rouses, and more than 90 additional Whole Foods locations already underway. For a brand that’s barely two years old, that’s an aggressive trajectory in one of the most crowded categories in retail right now.

The ready-to-drink cocktail space is brutal — shelf space is limited and every big beverage company is chasing the same trend. Growing 370% in shipments inside that environment means the product and the distribution strategy both had to be right, not just one or the other. Meredith has also co-founded the Clean Alcohol Collective, pushing the entire category toward clearer ingredient labeling — a harder stance to take when you’re the one who’d benefit most from staying quiet about it.

Meredith gets into how she scaled that fast without losing the thing that made the recipe worth building a brand around in the first place, on this episode of Starting Small.

Listen to the full conversation with Meredith Mills-Merritt on Apple Podcasts