During the pandemic, Amit Singh and Marcin Malyszko started mixing cocktails at home, frustrated by the overly sweet ready-to-drink options they were buying at the store.
“We looked at YouTube recipes, we bought all the ingredients from Whole Foods, and our wives hated the mess that we made in the kitchen,” Malyszko told the Business Journal.
That quarantine experiment became Mission Craft Cocktails, a Mission Viejo-based ready-to-drink cocktail brand now sold in more than 600 stores nationwide, including 240 Total Wine & More locations in 29 states.
Last year, the startup generated around $6.3 million in sales. Singh and Malyszko said they will double revenue this year, reaching between $12 million and $15 million in sales. Besides Total Wine, their cocktails are sold at Costco, Whole Foods Market, Gelsons, Pavilions and Northgate Markets.
The product line is also growing.
Five new cocktails, including a watermelon margarita and a lemon drop, were introduced in April.
“Collectively, our greatest strength has been that we didn’t come from the business, so we brought an entirely different perspective to how to create these drinks,” Singh said. “If we were from the (beverage) space, we would have just adopted the system that’s in place.”
Neighbors to Business Partners
The self-funded startup was founded in 2020 by Singh and Malyszko, a pair of executives from different industries—toys, sporting goods and software platforms.
The two were neighbors in Rancho Santa Margarita, walking their dogs, when they discovered they had attended the same food drive at the start of 2020. They quickly bonded over being Southern California “transplants” from Toronto and Chicago, and over their passion for food and cocktails.
When the pandemic hit, Singh, Malyszko and their families gathered at home and tried “about 50” ready-to-drink cocktails, canned and bottled.
“All of them just weren’t hitting our palate—they tasted too sweet, too fake, like artificial. Nothing really tasted like a real drink at a bar,” Malyszko said.
They started mixing their own elixirs, guided by internet recipes and their gut. Their first pre-made drinks included a margarita, a cosmopolitan and an old fashioned, with a bar-strength of 20% to 40% ABV (alcohol by volume).
One day at 1 a.m., driven by “bravado, naivete and some intoxication,” the duo decided to start their own cocktail company.
No Background, No Problem
With no background in the beverage industry, Singh and Malyszko spent the next two-and-a-half years developing recipes and learning how to commercialize the products.
In 2023, they launched five different drinks at small liquor stores in their hometown. A year later, they landed in 10 local Bevmo stores.
Though headquartered in Mission Viejo, Mission Craft produces its drinks in Ventura County using real juices and local ingredients. The bottled drinks also come with a real mission, which inspired the brand’s name. Since the beginning, 5% of sales have been donated to help fight food insecurity in the U.S. To date, the company has funded over 1 million meals with Feeding America.
“In three years of being on the shelf,” Singh said, “it’s been over a quarter of a million dollars that we funded of hard, real money.”
A few cocktails have won double-gold medals at the San Francisco Wine & Spirits Competition over the past three years.
