Maddy Rotman & Taylor Lanzet @ Anytime Spritz
Drinking Our Way To Regenerative Organic Row Crops
Maddy Rotman and Taylor Lanzet are the Co-Founders of Anytime. Anytime is supporting regenerative agriculture with two inaugural product lines in the adult beverage category that are all distilled with Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC) grains.
The Brand
Anytime is making canned cocktails and bottled spirits that are crafted by women and powered by farmers. They currently sell three canned cocktails in their Anytime Spritz lineup including Herby Lime Fizz, Yuzu Ginger Punch, and Cranberry Amaro Splash.
In the next few weeks, Anytime will also launch the first-ever Regenerative Organic Certified® spirits: Anytime Farmhouse Vodka and Anytime Farmhouse Gin.
Their products are available in stores in California, New York, and New Jersey, and orders from their website can be shipped to over 30 states.
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A Better Booze
When you use better ingredients, you get better booze.
Unlike most seltzer cocktails that use additives and lack flavor, Anytime focuses on creating a delicious, mixologist-crafted beverage that’s full of real ingredients and real flavor. Similar to other seltzers, Anytime canned cocktails are 5% ABV. Unlike other seltzers that use malt alcohol (basically a residual byproduct of making beer), Anytime is made with their regenerative organic vodka.
“We’re big believers that every ingredient has to come from the ground, not the lab. Every one of our canned cocktails has real fruit juice, real botanicals. We list all of our ingredients and the farm on which they’re grown. We want that traceability…making sure the customer has an exact understanding of what they’re consuming and calling out our farmer partners.” - Maddy
The same approach applies to their spirits. Anytime Farmhouse Vodka and Anytime Farmhouse Gin will be the first-ever ROC™-certified spirits in the world. In addition, they’re distilling their spirits in copper stills which naturally remove harsh flavors by taking out the sulfur compounds from the fermentation process.
A Shared Journey to Better Food
The story of Anytime began at Brown University, where Maddy and Taylor met in an Intro to Environmental Sciences class. It didn’t take long before the two were best friends and running a CSA / student-run food hub together, forging a future friendship centered around building a better food system.
Post-college, both founders moved to New York. Maddy ran produce merchandising for FreshDirect, an online retailer in New York and then moved to Imperfect Foods to run their sustainability department. Taylor ran the supply chain for Dig Restaurant Group, building out local, mission-driven, and direct-grower sourcing models, followed by a stint with Chipotle running their regenerative beef program.
Then came COVID. Working from home, both Maddy and Taylor struggled with how to support farmers and shift the food system from rigid supply chains to more fluid, flexible value chains. Both of their worlds were being turned upside down in equal in opposite ways as retail boomed and foodservice crashed. They also, like most of us stuck at home, started imbibing more than usual. For two individuals focused on product sourcing, they soon realized they had no idea what was in the products filling their home bar.
That was also the time when regenerative began to gain traction, standing out to both Maddy and Taylor as a perfect complement to things like organic, pesticide-free, fair labor, local, and farm-direct.
The Impact of Alcohol
Exploring the concept of “better” booze, Maddy and Taylor focused on educating themselves about the grains used to distill spirits. They quickly realized that the $4 trillion alcohol market had the potential to lead regenerative transformation on significant acreage.
“[With alcohol], we can help the same types of growers or different growers and find retail products where consumers could help support the land. It was just a different aisle of the grocery store that we were talking about now. It was obvious the consumer is filling up their cart with organic products. We know the growth in the organic market. Alcohol has slowly started and when it comes to spirits and canned cocktails, there's so much room here.” – Taylor
Drinking Our Way to Better Soil
Anytime has built a customer-focused brand, recognizing that trial is a huge piece in getting consumers to convert to a new product. While launching their Spritz lineup they focused on off-premise retailers: mostly standalone liquor retailers and "independent neighborhood market type" locations with curated shops focused on discovery. With their spirits, they’re hoping to unlock more on-premise sales through bars and restaurants.
For them, differentiation starts with flavor and ends with a unique story of regeneration and climate change impact. That’s how they’re getting the support and recommendations from retailers, bartenders, and servers.
“The taste has to be incredible. We’re competing in a crowded space. People want amazing culinary experiences, whether at a restaurant or at home. Our table stakes always and forever are quality and flavor. But coolness is also important, having something on your bar cart that looks really fun and cool, so we spent a lot of time on the packaging…But we’re also keeping our ethos in it, emphasizing organic and the ROC certification to help people understand why we care so much about our products.” – Maddy
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Busting Paradigms and Creating Options
With less than 2% of venture funds allocated to female-led businesses and females accounting for less than 4% of the C-suite in alcohol, Taylor and Maddy are all too familiar with roadblocks. Rather than get frustrated, they’re forging new paths, partnering with women-run distilleries and founders to lift up and change the space.
“We really want to see this industry looking different. Building a queer and female-founded brand is what we’re doing and who we are. We want to appeal to everyone because if we can represent everyone in flavor and taste and in demographics, that changes the whole space quite drastically.” – Taylor
Also key to change is creating a business model that has plenty of fun channels for development and a different approach to product innovation.
“There's lots of ways for us to do great work that isn't always spirit-based. Everything we think about from an innovation pipeline comes from the land and comes from the crops. That’s what is so different about our thought process versus what happens at any sort of large conglomerate. For us, it's not about what's hip or trendy. It's about what can we do on the land and then how do we make it cool. So much of the problem of the degradation of land but also the saturation of markets with very similar products is that most new products are not really creating impact or change.” – Maddy
50% Market Share for Regen by 2050
For Maddy and Taylor, it all comes down to the retailer as the gatekeeper.
“Retailers hold a lot of gatekeeping to what is possible for the messaging and importance of consumers, right? You walk into a store and what you see first are on the endcap shelves. That's what consumers start thinking about. By educating the few hundred buyers in this country and getting them excited about regenerative, we can unlock that 50%. We've seen it work with diversity of ownership (like what Target has done to highlight black owners). We have a precedent of what retailers can do for a market and regen is next.” – Maddy
You can check out the full episode with Maddy Rotman & Taylor Lanzet @ Anytime Spritz HERE.
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This ReGen Recap was produced with support from Kristina Tober