Like many a novelist before him, Marcus Sakey valued the rite and reward of savoring a cocktail while pondering plot twists, especially with his good friend and drinking buddy David Crooch. But he also knew that gin, in particular, has a bad temper, and is nobody’s friend the next day. One evening, over drinks and a chess game, the pair pondered a new business plot: gin and whiskey analogs that could deliver the experience—the ritual— of a mixed drink without the alcohol.
Laura Taylor was a corporate warrior, an engineer by training, who was marching along in a career with the likes of Rockwell, Accenture, IBM, and Tableau. She routinely mixed work and drinking until the drinking got to be a bit too routine. But trying to stop proved difficult, given there were few interesting nonalcoholic options. That’s when she decided to make one.
Molly Fedick was the creative director at Hinge, a dating app, and enjoying the club and party scene in New York City like a proper young professional when the pandemic first shelved her social life—and then her job. Relocating to Lake Tahoe, Nevada, she often gathered with the locals for après-ski beverages in the parking lot, since the bars were shut. Having given up alcohol, though, she was repeatedly chided by the ski bums for being a buzzkill. To her social media-trained brain, that began to sound more and more like a brand.
They are entrepreneurs from different walks of life, and at different ages and life stages. In seeking to adjust their individual titration levels, they each realized that adult, nonalcoholic beverages— non-alcs—were positioned to take off in a society that was looking to dry out but didn’t want the party to die out. They took different paths to market and funding. They had zero experience in the drinks business, and yet saw that as an advantage. As Sakey says, “It took people from outside the spirits world to make something that shook the spirits world up.”
For Sakey and Crooch, that something would be Ritual Zero
