Launching an Avant-Garde Alcohol Brand into Foodservice: A Candid Conversation with Grace Ubawuchi, Founder of Xin & Voltaire

We loved chatting to Grace, founder and CEO of frozen cocktail brand Xin & Voltaire. Thriving in the foodservice space, the product is available in a number of high end hotels, such as The Mandarin Oriental, Hotel Amano Covent Garden and Pan Pacific London. And they only launched one year ago. This is a brand to watch!

Join us at the Foodservice Summit on March 19th where Grace will be spilling the tea on a panel about breaking into those under-the-radar foodservice channels.

It’s great to meet you Grace! Can you give me some background on Xin & Voltaire? 

We are an avant-garde alcohol brand, it’s not a traditional alcohol brand, it’s a step further in our own quirky way. We are a frozen cocktail brand and launched in January 2023. We did the groundwork in 2022 and had a full team going out there getting the product in front of on-trade businesses. 

So Foodservice was your initial focus, why was that?

Foodservice is so key for an alcohol brand. When you’re trying to create a category, it’s more strategic than anything. You need to show that there is demand, that there is a rate of sale, so that was really the key for us. When I started looking into the industry, I saw that those that came before us went straight into retail. Problem with that is, when you have a frozen product, they’re automatically going to put you in the freezers with the ice-cream and you have a narrow  buying window - summer. Essentially our plan was to show that this lived outside of just summer. Foodservice opens up new opportunities, for example, we’re on the in-room dining menu in Pan Pacific. Our product offers convenience and allows people to have a new experience. We can show how innovative our product is in Foodservice.

When did you realise Foodservice was going to be big for you? 

For me as a consumer, who dictates what cocktail I’m having? Always the bartender. I trust bartenders. It was key for me to establish relationships early on with bartenders so getting our product into The Mandarin Oriental, The Other House, Lucy Wong and Radio Me Rooftop were all big moments for us. We also won the IWSC award for two of our products so that has given us a lot of credibility in Foodservice, but also puts us in a good position to move forward in retail. 

Congrats on your awards! How have you adapted your packaging/branding etc to be foodservice friendly?

When I came up with the product, it was very consumer facing. We have two product sizes, 125ml and 2.5l. Our 125ml still sits within the on-trade, in the bars and restaurants, but we know that our top-selling SKU is the 2.5L so we launched with the bigger format. We also had to consider other challenges our customers may face, for example many bars don’t have freezers and our product is frozen. So we offered freezers to many customers to allow them to be able to adapt. You need to make the sale as easy as possible.

Do you think there’s a lot of opportunity in Foodservice for emerging challenger brands?

Oh yeah! A lot of on-trade businesses will take a chance on smaller brands, because we’re the ones bringing about the innovation and driving the growth. They’re trying to have the best offering for the customer, so how does your product add to what they’re trying to create? Don’t be afraid of the challenge, the fact is they want to work with exciting and innovative brands. It’s a landscape that is open, it isn’t easy though!

And finally, any wise words for people starting out in Foodservice?

Strap in for the ride! You will fail at points, but that’s not a bad thing. You’ll learn and grow, it’s all part of the experience.