Meredith Mills-Merritt: Founder & CEO of The Original Southside

Episode 822

On today’s episode, we welcome Meredith Mills-Merritt, Founder and CEO of The Original Southside — the premium gin-based ready-to-drink cocktail brand redefining what “clean” and “craft” mean in the spirits industry.
Inspired by her mom Leah’s beloved gin, lemonade, and mint summer cooler, Meredith transformed a nostalgic family recipe into a fast-growing national brand. With a background in prestige beauty, she approached beverage the way few founders do — with precision around formulation, ingredient transparency, and sensory experience. The result is a 10% ABV cocktail made with certified organic, vegan, gluten-free ingredients, sweetened with 100% sugarcane, and crafted with a proprietary gin distilled in Vermont. Since launching in 2024, The Original Southside has expanded into 20+ markets and landed at retailers like Whole Foods and Total Wine — all while building a bold, vintage-meets-modern brand identity that stands out on shelf and at major cultural events.
In this episode, Meredith shares what it takes to break into a heavily regulated, traditionally male-dominated industry, how she defines “premium” in today’s ingredient-conscious world, and the lessons she’s learned scaling quickly without compromising quality. From retail strategy to brand storytelling to mindful drinking, this conversation is a masterclass in turning personal inspiration into a polished, high-growth consumer brand.
If you’re interested in the future of mindful drinking, building mission-driven companies, or how founders successfully reinvent themselves, this episode is for you. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show today. I’m joined by Meredith Mills merit, the founder and CEO of an incredible brand called The Original Southside it is a premium gin based ready to drink cocktail brand that’s rewriting the playbook in the RTD category. Meredith’s inspiration came from something deeply personal her mom, Leah’s summer cooler. I cannot wait to hear more about this fun, fun story with a background in prestige, beauty, Meredith approached this brand with a level of precision you don’t always see in founders who are launching in the spirits category, and I would love to hear a lot more about the brand storytelling that she’s been doing since day one as well. But the result is a premium 10% ABV cocktail made with certified organic, vegan, gluten free ingredient, ingredients sweetened with sugar, sugar cane, and crafted with a proprietary gin distilled in Vermont. Love it and beyond the liquid, she’s creating a brand that truly stands out. Love, love, love, everything about the partnerships and the national retailers that she’s been able to secure, and I cannot wait to dive into how Meredith has turned this family recipe, family tradition into a fast scaling spirits brand. So Meredith, welcome to the Kara Goldin show. So nice to meet you and so excited to have you here to talk all about The Original Southside. Thank you

Meredith Mills-Merritt 2:24
so much for having me. I am so excited.

Kara Goldin 2:27
Super, super excited. So for listeners who may not know The Original Southside, how do you describe the brand?

Meredith Mills-Merritt 2:36
Okay, so a Southside, for those who are less familiar, is a cocktail that even you know the most legendary living bartenders can’t agree on its origin story or how it’s made or how it’s served. And so going back to the 1920s the storyline that we stuck with was you have Chicago, which was split between the north side and the Southside in Al Capone times. And so the north side had the good imports from Canada. The Southside had that quintessential bathtub gin that you hear about during that time, and the bartenders in the area had to disguise how bad it was with anything that they could get their hands on. So sugar, citrus, herbs, and voila, you have the Southside cocktail. So that’s actually how it came about.

Kara Goldin 3:21
I love it. And your mom’s original Southside recipe. How did she come up with this recipe? Did she just try it at one point? Or was this something that had been initiated before her? Maybe a grandmother’s recipe? Yeah, we

Meredith Mills-Merritt 3:39
I grew up in a gin family. And so on my dad’s side, he was making gin and tonics for his grandmother when he was in his teenage years. Same thing on my mom’s side. So this recipe got passed down through someone going down the, you know, family tree. And so every summer, our lake house was in a pretty rural part of Oklahoma, so you were kind of using whatever you had on hand or whatever you had brought up with you. So it was always whatever gin we had there back in the day, it was those frozen, you know, minute made canned lemonades that, you know, are so full of scary things that made it really easy and delicious, and then any of the herbs that we had. So most of the time, because it was deep in the summer, we really just had mint and so she would combine all those together. And what we didn’t realize at the time is her summertime cooler was exactly a Southside recipe. So when I was going through this process, I was like, you know, no one’s really going to care about Leah’s summertime cooler. I want to use it as an opportunity to educate on actually what this cocktail was. And so through generations of gin lovers, here we are

Kara Goldin 4:47
so fun. So you were in the beauty business before deciding to get into the spirits business. What made you think that this was. Was a not only a category that you wanted to enter, but also a scalable business that you could start.

Meredith Mills-Merritt 5:08
I fell in love with CPG and product innovation during my time in the beauty industry, and I will say that I’ve always classified myself as someone with an entrepreneurial spirit, and I knew I wanted to do something, I just didn’t know what it was. And as I moved through the beauty industry, it was so saturated, I didn’t feel like I could create a product that was would be competitive. And so I started to think about other things. This is also during covid. So I feel like everybody was drinking, but also had a passion project during that time, and mine just happened to combined to lead to where we are today, and I got my hands on some really interesting market data around gin when I was doing my master’s in consumer behavior at USC, we had had actually a class project where it was to create a ready to drink for the class. We had to have it be wine based, but we still got our hands on all this really interesting market research where gin was primed and ready for a renaissance. Here in the US and in the white spirits category, there was a lot of opportunity. And I thought to myself, well, I have a really great gin recipe that I bring everywhere with me, and people really seem to love on top of that, you also saw the rise of the ready to drinks and the canned cocktails. And so we thought to ourselves, what if we just combined the two and had this family recipe put into a can? So instead of doing the responsible thing, which would have been putting money into a 401, K or high yield savings account, we hired a company to commercialize the family recipe. It took about 13 months end to end, and the can that we had at the end, we were super excited by we had kind of watched the market trend over that time, too, and it still felt like it was the right time to go into the marketplace, even though canned cocktails are so saturated because we were a higher ABB, so with that 10% and because we were gin based, it ended up that a lot of these distributors had a gap in their portfolio and were willing to take us on because they didn’t have anything like us. So that’s kind of when we started to realize, okay, we might be on to something here.

Kara Goldin 7:19
How did you figure out manufacturing? Because this obviously is a totally different manufacturing than what you were accustomed to, and maybe even that you had contacts in. But how did you find that original manufacturer to help you get The Original Southside started? So we

Meredith Mills-Merritt 7:41
have moved we’re actually on our third contract manufacturer now, and the first one we found because we had just some very specific product guidelines. So for us, the three main things that were the most important were, number one, being certified organic. Number two, having access to tunnel pasteurization, because we don’t use any artificial preservatives, we just use citric acid. So I don’t know the magic behind citric acid, plus tunnel pasteurization, but we want it to be shelf stable, and, you know, be as good as possible for as long as possible. And then the last part was the mOqs, because we were so small, starting out with and these beverage contract manufacturers were so busy, it was kind of a fine line that we had to walk between who could take us what was available and what fit all of our kind of product needs. So when we first got started, we actually produced in Missouri, and they said that they were a certified organic facility. It turns out they were not. So when you see the product that first launched, it does not have the USDA certification seal on it. It’s the exact same recipe. Like nothing changed. We just weren’t able to have it be certified. So that’s actually when we moved to Vermont to get that organic certification and work with a partner that better understood our needs, and kind of go from there, but to kind of answer your first the first part of your question was, we used contract manufacturers at several of the beauty companies that I had worked for. And so because I had had kind of an eye on the product innovation piece, I was familiar with the process there. And so it wasn’t too dissimilar in terms of securing the raw materials, doing a check on the partnerships, being there for the production day, but the after the fact, with the bonded facilities for alcohol, the you know, federal excise tax that you pay, all of the other really fun details were things that I learned on the go. And so it was definitely trial by fire. At first, I’m a lot more confident now than I was a couple years ago. So that first production run of ours would have been in late 2023 early 2024 before we launched. And it’s like a night and day difference with what I know now versus then. But really just you know, a lot of research, a lot of due diligence and a lot of trial. Yet verify, because the tunnel pasteurization machine, for instance, is a really expensive machine that a facility will know if it has or not. And so that’s one way for us to kind of narrow down. Okay, is this going to work or not?

Kara Goldin 10:13
How many SKUs Did you launch with initially, and how has that changed today?

Meredith Mills-Merritt 10:20
So we launched with one SKU, and we are actually still only one SKU. And it was very purposeful. I had seen a couple other examples of launches with multiple SKUs, and I only really had my family recipe to get started with. It’s not like I had anything else to bring to the table. And so I had also seen, just in my beauty background, several examples of some failed multi launches, and so I really wanted to make sure that the money we were fundraising, and the time and the strategy was all focused in on this one, SKU especially because this was our first foray into an unknown industry. So we’ve stayed super focused, and we are just now kind of going through the last half of the research and development process for three potential new SKUs, but it’s taken us a while to get there.

Kara Goldin 11:16
So go to market strategy. You’re part of the three tier system, of course, and I think we’ve talked to many, many manufacturers, many brands on the show about that. But what was kind of the first place that you showed up when you were getting launched in the marketplace? And I mean, what do you think? What has been surprising, I guess about that for you, because you were not obviously in beauty dealing with that.

Meredith Mills-Merritt 11:48
You know, you pretty much have to scrap your whole I had to scrap everything that I learned from beauty in terms of how to get to your consumer. And so the earliest places that we popped up were Florida, California and New York through Park Street. We had the goal of proving the concept so making sure that it wasn’t just us that believed in the product, that we could get distributors, retailers and consumers behind us too, to upgrade that distribution network. We had a theory based on the product that the southeast would be a great place for us to start. And by that, I mean this is not a low calorie or low carb play at all. So we do have that real cane sugar we are at 10% it does have more calories than other RTDs out there. It’s also double the alcohol. But really making sure that we set ourselves up for success by finding the consumers and geographic areas that would be more receptive to more of a cocktail and a can. And I’m grateful that our hypothesis paid off so Florida is one of our leading states. It’s also where we have our partnership with the Florida Panthers, and that has been a huge piece of the puzzle for us, in terms of a scaling to other states and kind of showing how legitimate we are, but also B proving the concept and getting those cans in hand once we were in those first few states, all We did was spend all of our time just making sure that consumers could sample the product, because once they were able to try it, they were able to buy it, and that is what allowed us to expand so quickly over the last, you know, a little less than 24 months.

Kara Goldin 13:35
And how many states now are you in?

Meredith Mills-Merritt 13:40
We’re in just over 20, so we are opening up Michigan here soon, which is really exciting, because we’re also moving our production to Michigan. And yeah, so a little over

Kara Goldin 13:50
20, which is great. Was there a moment when you thought this is a lot harder than I imagined? And how did you push through when you had those

Meredith Mills-Merritt 14:02
doubts, I would say sometimes, every day, felt that way during the build phase, and I’m super open and transparent about it. And the three tier system to your point, you spend so much time taking your communications to the distributor, and then once you land the distributor to the consumer, that everything in between you still have to focus on. And so I would say that having a little bit of, you know, just delusion and faith in yourself is how I’ve made it this far. I wake up every day and I’m like, You know what? This, this will succeed, whether the day that I have actually proves that or not. But I think if you can kind of keep that mentality, it helps, because no one is going to believe in your product like you do as much as you’d like to think. If you’re kind of in the earlier stages that you’re. Friends, your family, your colleagues, will support you. It’s you out there and you alone. So you need to make sure that you have a really good understanding of you’re in it for the long haul. There are no overnight successes, and you signed up for the rodeo. So buckle up and keep your head down and keep going. That’s kind of how I operate, and it’s what’s gotten us this far.

Kara Goldin 15:20
So especially with the three tier system, I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of founders who are just getting their product out there. And you know, when you’ve got these big distributors, it’s great, but you’re still doing the work, whether it’s securing partnerships with incredible partners like blade and the Florida Panthers, or getting your product into Whole Foods and Total Wine. Do you feel like, especially as you’re growing and in a bunch of different states and and really continuing to land retailers and grow your business overall? Do you feel like your job has gotten easier, or do you feel like it just there? It just keeps piling on?

Meredith Mills-Merritt 16:10
I do feel that it does get harder and harder, but at the same time, because you go through so much and it’s such a continuous learning process, you are more and more able to deal with and understand what’s happening to you. And so I came in at a disadvantage, which I acknowledge, which was I did not have any beverage, let alone beverage alcohol experience. And so my learning curve was a little bit steeper than some of my other colleagues in the space. That being said, I think that level of naivete was a little bit of a superpower, at least, that’s how I would describe it, because it allowed me to create something that was different in the space. It had the higher ABV it is, certified organic. We do disclose all of our ingredient lists and our nutrition facts panel, and that went over so well that that did propel us into some of these partnerships and some of these additional states. With that, you hit the nail on the head. Just because you land a bigger and better distributor doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in a better spot. We kind of have a mixed network of independent distributors and larger, more multinational distributors, and you’re still doing all of the legwork. Just because you open a market doesn’t mean you can just set it and forget it. The way that I describe it is, you know, every new market is like a new kindergartner in my class. There’s always going to be a problem child and there’s always going to be a star child. And so how I split my attention amongst those states, you can’t do everything yourself. So as we’ve grown and as we’ve scaled, we’ve brought in more and more, you know, kind of part time help, boots on the ground, things of that sort, to help in those markets as well, to just kind of test and learn.

Kara Goldin 17:48
So consumers today are incredibly ingredient conscious. How do you educate the consumer without overwhelming them? I mean, you’ve created this incredible product that tastes good, and you’ve put so much effort into making sure that you’ve got a manufacturer that is organic, or could certify organic, and all of the you know, really out, really all of the points that differentiate your product, but does the consumer What do you think today the consumer really cares about and how do you educate them without overwhelming them?

Meredith Mills-Merritt 18:34
What we find is alcohol is a pretty easy category that gets cut first when consumers are economically stressed. The landscape of the spirits industry is rapidly shifting, as you’ve seen with the changes coming from breakthrough and rndc and just brands moving all over the place acquisitions. So when you kind of zoom out what I see, and what we saw was a, there was such a lack of transparency for ready to drink. Specifically, there was an there were a number of ingredient horror stories. And then you also just kind of saw, and this is, these are just my opinions and observations, but you see this uninspired innovation from these larger companies and so for the consumer, because beverage, as you know, much better than I do, is such an exploratory category, giving people something a that they could be proud of. So all the cocktail, none of the compromise, kind of, some of those key pillars we lean into on the brand side, but also using this as an opportunity to lead the conversation in terms of education on what you’re drinking, understanding that that modern consumer is drinking less but better, having the higher quality, all natural high ABV option, and really leaning into that. At and not overwhelming them. Because, you know, everyone can agree that healthy drinking is an oxymoron. There’s no amount of alcohol that’s good for your health, but the way that we approach it is that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to have the highest quality ingredients I can get my hands on understanding modern manufacturing capabilities and the fact that some people still want to take the edge off, but without the titanium dioxide red 40, karainin, you name it.

Kara Goldin 20:33
Yeah, definitely, when you think about the kind of the biggest surprises as you’ve been scaling the original the Southside. What has that been, versus maybe what you thought when you were first starting?

Meredith Mills-Merritt 20:51
It’s two fold for me, one’s on the distributor side and one’s on the consumer side. I think on the consumer side I underestimated just how little brand loyalty that there was, which I still do see as an opportunity to capture attention and kind of really build that relationship with consumers. But it’s also difficult, because there’s so many other people out there. How do you win on the shelf? You think you’ve got everything teed up to be a home run, but you’re still being compared to something that is much cheaper and much different. And so I think that was really an eye opening moment. And then on the distributor side, you hear a lot that you need to come not only with proof of concept, but also with authorizations. And so it has been shocking just how many hoops that we have needed to jump through to get even just an ounce of attention. So total wine authorization, Circle K authorization, and Whole Foods authorization, you know, additional consumer proof, additional this, that or the other. So it’s a little bit like if you give a mouse a cookie, is what it feels like on that end. But we have been able through all the conversations and things that I had mentioned to kind of make those a little bit stronger of conversations with with the distributors and distributor partners. So I would say those two kind of shine in my eyes the most is the biggest hurdles that we faced.

Kara Goldin 22:15
Your brand is vintage meets modern esthetic, and you’ve got a great little mascot, squeeze. How did you think about that? Did you? Did you actually, from day one? Did you think about this as messaging? Has that changed over the last couple of years as well,

Meredith Mills-Merritt 22:35
from day one, I actually did know that I wanted our tagline to be fresh as you know, fck, because the first thing you think when you take a drink of this cocktail is, oh my gosh, that’s so refreshing. And I knew from my consumer behavior brain that in order to kind of throw people off, you had to do something a little shocking. And I took the liquid death approach, where, you know their CEO always says, I don’t want anybody to be apathetic about my brand. I want people to have defined feelings. And so we took that, but tailored it a little bit, because my approach with this product was to be slightly more premium on shelf, given the higher abv and esthetic like you mentioned. And I always knew that I wanted to have a character of some sort. And so I’m super grateful to my graphic designer. He and I have a fabulous relationship. It is like he is able to worm himself into my brain and just bring to life everything that I want to see, whether I do a good job of describing it or not. And so he and I just sat down in the beginning phases, and went round after round after round until we figured out that this is what it was going to look like. And it was such a rewarding process, and I’m really grateful with the way that things turned out. I did a lot of research in store as well. I was going into Bevmo, pretty much anywhere that sold alcohol, taking pictures of what packaging was currently available, what stood out the most at the time. This was, you know, 2021 2022 there were a lot of muted colors, less than exciting fonts. I didn’t want this drink to also feel gendered in any way, because I do think that sometimes the ready to drink cocktails can trend to be a little bit more female focused, and so I wanted to kind of eliminate that. So that’s why you see the yellow and green, which is also our ingredients, the lemon and mint, we have the fun squeeze character, so that people can see themselves in the brand and that there’s not necessarily a face associated with it. And those were, it was really a pie in the sky moment. I told Eric his name’s Eric, I told my graphic center. I was like, I want this to feel like it is both brand new, but has also been sitting on shelf for forever, so kind of capturing that nostalgia piece, but also go crazy like we don’t work for a larger organization right now, we can kind of do whatever we want, so let’s take advantage

Kara Goldin 24:59
of that. Yeah. You’ve did such a great job. It’s awesome. So last question, when you look at The Original Southside and all you’ve accomplished so far, what are you most excited when you think about the direction for the brand in the next few years,

Meredith Mills-Merritt 25:17
when before this product had even hit the shelves. And when I was thinking about what our brand code and north star would be, it was to redefine the ready to drink cocktail experience by reviving timeless drinks with modern twists. And I am extremely proud that every single thing that we have done continues to be 100% centered around that statement, and we have really held true to that, especially as we consider the R and D process. So it is so easy to get derailed and have so many opinions thrown your way, as you know, and in the earlier days, we really didn’t know if this would work, and we really didn’t know whose advice to take or who to listen to. So the fact that we were able to kind of dig our heels in and say, Listen, we really believe in this sentiment still, and just, have you know, survived this long and scaled this fast, is is really what I am the proudest of.

Kara Goldin 26:20
I love it well. Meredith, thank you so much for joining us today, and I love how you’ve taken something so personal, a family recipe, and turned it into a brand that is really, really taking off. So all of the whiteboarding that you did around this category and around creating your own company. You’ve done it, so love it, and it tastes absolutely awesome. So for everyone listening, you can learn more at drink southsides.com and follow along at drink southsides on all over on social. And as always, please share this episode, please purchase drink southsides and Meredith. Thank you so much for sharing everything Meredith Mills merit, founder and CEO of The Original Southside. Thank you Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.

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