(upbeat music) - Hello, everyone. It's time to eat drink and be merry with your host, Lisa and Nancy. - Hey, everybody. Welcome to Big Blend Radio's Eat, Drink, and Be Merry Show. And that's exactly what Nancy and I did with Fabrizio's spirits and cookies, delicious cookies. We're gonna get a taste of Italy today. We're gonna talk about a family-owned spirits company and they specialize in lemon cello products and this includes canned cocktails. And this is, we got them over Memorial Weekend. So you know what we did in the sunshine, right? In the backyard with dogs and flowers and birds. That's kind of what we did. And anyway, go to Fabriziospirits.com. We're very excited to have Bill Messriani joining us. He started the company with his brother Nick. So, Bill, how are you? - Doing great, Lisa. Thanks so much for having me on today. - Hey, this is awesome. So you're actually in your production facility. I was watching a video that you guys have on it. So this is like, it's interesting to hear from like a family business that started into from a garage, right? - Yeah, by parents' garage, peeling lemons. - Yeah. - Peeling lemons. - Okay, where did the lemon idea come from? - So honestly, I was making some homemade lemons cello with, you know, as a hobby, while I was living in my parents' basement. And my uncle Joe was over and he said, "Hey, you should make this lemons cello. "It's great, and if someone called Joe, "that would never work." But I thought a little bit more about it. Went back to sleep in my parents' basement that night. And I got obsessed about the idea of making an all natural, small batch of lemons cello right here in America. And I had all started this with a lemon idea, really started with lemons cello. And then as you know, you know, we have our lemon bakery, we have lemon bocosodas, we have all these different things that we incorporate lemons and other citruses in. They all really start with the idea of making lemons cello. - So it's lemons cello, not lemon cello, as many of us mispronounce, including myself. - Well, we don't-- - Not Italian. - We don't try to be snobby about it, but yes, lemons cello is the correct way to say. - Okay, well, I like this because I already had a lesson in pronouncing your last name. I got lemons cello down. So we are getting a taste of Italy and pronouncing things correctly. But I want to say this about your products, the canned cocktails, the margaritas, all of them. The sodas, they are really sophisticated. And I mean that where a lot of times you get these kind of drinks or even, if you know when you get a margarita that has been made from the bodily thing that you don't, that bottle of stuff sometimes, and it gets you in the back of your throat and it's over-sweet and almost too acidic. And so I was very curious about your products. Yeah, and it's so it doesn't perfume me. And a lot of times lemon products get that weird faux pea perfumey taste. And you guys don't have that. So how did you do that? Oh, you gotta come back. - Well, honestly, sorry, I had to unmute because there's a compressor going off here. But the easiest way to do that is by not overthinking it. We at Probrancio, we use only natural ingredients, whole ingredients in all of our products. Our bocosodas and our Italian lemonade, which I'm standing next to a couple of talents once they're down right here. Bring them over. - Bring them over. - Yeah, I mean, we use real lemon juice. And in the case of the margarita, we use real tequila, real lemon juice. Real sugar, and that's all that goes into it. And then our lee mozzello, of course. So if you wanted to not seem artificial, if you wanted to seem not to have that, you know, eared sweet taste, then just don't put junk into it. And that's sort of the basis of everything that we do at Probrancio, you know? So if we make our blood orange bocosodas, we use real blood orange. - Oh, I love that. - But don't use a lot of orange natural flavors that are, in my opinion, I don't understand what's natural about them if they didn't come from a blood orange. I don't think they usually do. So we just use real blood orange juice. And that makes a big difference as to why our blood orange bocosodas might taste difference than a blood orange flavor. I don't know, other beverage that you find out there that doesn't use blood oranges. - Yeah, the blood orange, I love that. That was one of my favorites. And the cookies, oh my gosh, here comes these giant cookies. And listen, we travel full time. So I'm just gonna say, the cookies were breakfast for us one day, and they were delicious. - A walk in is down to the bakery while we're saying, now hold on a second, man. Here we got our brilliant lemon candy, the Mariah's been packing out. And yeah, so all of our bakery items are made right here. And those two ovens, that's Nancy rolling away, truffle balls over there. And so everything is back to me. Yup, everything is made here in house. And has the dose of lemonshell and or lemon juice. And everything. And that's what makes it 100% for Britsia, for sure. - Well, the one thing I said is it's a taste of Italy, right? And so the real thing is that the lemons are coming from Italy, right? If you have your own growth now, is that right? - Correct, oh yeah. So what we did was about six years ago, we went over to Sicily. We realized, well, what is the one thing that we could do better as a company, as a lemonshello company? And said, we said, you know what? We're making it feel fashioned way. We're making it by hand, small bats, all natural. However, which we could be using the Italian fruit, 'cause it is a little bit cut above the California fruit only in regards to the specific sort of type and specimen of the lemon that's grown is a little bit more oil-y and the oils have a little bit more of a pepperiness to them. That translates to more of a sophisticated lemonshello case. And in any case, we went over there, we met with the Sorento growers, the Amalpe growers, the Calabrian growers, settled that the Sicilians would be the best for us to work with. And we bring in three or four containers a year now of lemons from Sicily that we use for all of our lemonshello and we juice that juice and use that juice in our canned cocktails. It makes a really big difference. - Wow, and so the one thing I was watching that you were talking about how you take the zest from the lemons and you use that as like a pure product. Like it, that is like a huge deal. And it seems like that's part of that little spike to it is that you're using the zest, right? Not just the juice. So everything's getting used. - Oh yeah, everything's getting used. We use the zest to go in the lemonshello, the juice goes into the cocktails. And then we even take the smushed up, smashed up lemon pulp essentially and it gets recycled for like, I guess bioenergy or something. So really nothing goes to waste on these. - Oh wow. - On that all, yeah. - So what do you think is your cutie success? Is it simplicity as a business? Because how many years has this been now? I mean, again going from the basement and garage to now a production facility, having your own lemon grove. I mean, not only doing lemonshello, but now you've got canned cocktails, you've got baked goods, you've got truffles, you've got candy. - I wanna come work for you. - Yeah, well, hey, we have the pistachio liqueur which is our favorite and it's one of our biggest new items to hit. It's a liqueur me with real pistachio nuts that are infused in grain alcohol, add a little bit of the cream, a little bit of simple syrup, really tasty. - Hola. But actually here's a, or I answered your question, here's a bottle of it right here for a second. So the answer is, what was the original question? - What is your secret to success of being able to expand and not, you know, and keep that balance and not lose out on your flavors? - Well, I would say that a secret to our success, if we don't actually have one, here's the pistachio liqueur. - Oh. - Oh, by the way. Yeah, very very tasty. I would say we don't have a secret to success outside of really, of working hard, being willing to take risks, realizing when we've made a mistake and getting on it right away to fix those. So, you know, starting off making one batch of lemon cello that took four months to sell. Same batch size that we produced three or four in a day some days now. You will be learned a lot all the way in between, you know, and, and you know, how to make more lemon cello, how to make it faster, how to make chain cocktails, how to can them with copac, with mobile canning lines, how to buy our own canning line, how to come out with other flavors, how to sell this stuff further from home, how to manage distributors, how to get more retailers and restaurants, they want to pick it up. There's just so many things. So I think that the constants of that secret to success really are not anything profound. It's simply, it's simply, sorry, I just had to put some music. It's simply working hard, learning through observation. And then like you said, being committed to making a really good product, those would probably be like the principles that are helping us be successful. They're definitely not any secrets. - Well, you're getting a lot of celebrity feedback too in the food world, like Giada and all kinds of people. I was looking at, you know, you're getting a lot of positive press and that doesn't come if you're not doing the right thing and those flavors. - Oh, thank you. - Yeah, and that was the first thing to me. I was like, okay, let's try this. But I really, again, was like, okay, is it gonna be one of those drinks that, you know, I remember once we were in Arizona, we were actually based out of there when we were in one place and we were somewhere and they had prickly pear margaritas. And I went, oh, that's fantastic. Because prickly pears are fruit. You can cook with them and, you know, do all these, make jams, all of that. And it was this pink, fake syrup. And I was just like, you're charging me 10 bucks for that. You're not even using the prickly pear. What a scam. 'Cause that went against the state of Arizona to me. It made me mad. - Well, that's how you know, as a producer, see that's a tough one, like prickly pears fond of 'cause my grandfather used to eat them in Calabra, Italy. And that's, they're very delicious. They're very refreshing on a hot day. Not surprised Arizona has a lot of them. Southern Italy, they grow very widely, but they don't necessarily, when you congregate them, have an overwhelming amount of flavor. And so what happens when people have these ideas, like prickly pear sounds like a great idea, and I bet you you can make a really kick, but small bags version of it at home. But when you go to make a lot of it, you realize that maybe you need a bazillion prickly pears and you just don't get that flavor, you thought that consumer is gonna get, and they probably added fake flavoring, if I had to guess, once again, to whatever you're talking about, and it just ruins the whole concept, these quote unquote natural flavors, I'm just really, really against them. And we only have one item out of our entire mix. We have a blueberry flavor that has real name blueberries in it, and it also has some natural blueberry flavor, because we just couldn't get, that's another example, like crushed up a bunch of blueberries, drink them, they taste more like water than they do like blueberries. Getting that blueberry flavor can be challenging sometimes that you might get from a blueberry pie, when you add a lot of sugar to a bunch of blueberries and bacon, et cetera, so really, but that one exception out of like the seven or eight items we have, we just don't use any natural flavors that for britsian, our pistachios, our pistachio liqueur I just showed you is flavored by real pistachios, period, nothing else. - Nice, now I think you should try the prickly pear and lemon together. I'm just saying, that might really, you can help the prickly pear industry by putting lemon with it, they would be cool, but that's the thing I was saying about secretly success because getting in the food world and manufacturing, going from small to growth is probably the wineries deal with that issue all the time of how far can you go, and you've managed to create baked goods, all these different things, but really expanding is a difficult thing in any business to, you have that weird balance, plus you're dealing with alcohol, that's not easy either, you've got red tape, that would make me drink all the cocktails. - Oh you said it, I mean, and so I had to move away 'cause that can press right told you about, they were evidently working on it, they were making a ton of noise over there, but, oh yeah, I mean, so the liquor industry is regulated at the federal and the state level, you wanna sell your products in any state, you need to register with that state, the feds are involved in all aspects of it, and so there's that extra red tape, and then it's also not very easy to get distribution in the spirits industry, and these are all reasons why, even though we've been doing this for 13 years, the first four years, five years, I had other jobs too, this didn't just like, it took a while to be at a problem before we walked, walk before we ran, we're finally running now, we finally have a lot going on and exciting things happening, but it took over a decade for this to happen. In this industry, the spirits industry, really the only way you can sidetrack all of that and do a shortcut if you will, is really one of two ways, you have to have either a really amazing product that is so unconventional, it takes the world by storm, and that doesn't happen too often, but some examples of that would be like the screw ball, peanut butter whiskey, or ramchata, those are a couple that really come to my mind, or you need to have really deep resources, and be able to, you have to either be a large existing supplier, or you have to have super deep pockets and willing to buy those contacts and buy those relationships, so there is a way for somebody to come in and go from zero to 100 overnight, but you really need to have a product and a route to market for it that's so compelling that people are like, I need this right away, and they don't want it away, and that does happen once in a while, but it doesn't happen most of the time it does, most of the time you need to earn the business one at a time, so in our case one restaurant at a time, converting them to our lemon cello from another, getting a distributor, and then making that distributor know that they made a good decision to pick you up. And we think take years individual examples of these statements take years to play out, not days or months, so you have to really love it, which we do, and so that ultimately is what sustains us too. - It's wild too, 'cause you have to have drive and patience at the same time. - Yeah, exactly. - That's that in between, I know, and being independent is cool as well, and I bring all this up because of the value of what you're tasting from your products. There's a value, and it's just like wine. Everybody argues about how wine is priced out, and I'm going, if it's a small lot winery, they need to do what they need to do, and you know it could be just the husband and wife making it, you know what I mean? So it's a value to it. People can get this online from your website and the baked goods, or they can get, I saw that there's a store near us here in Iowa today, or I can get it. - For our hand cocktails and our lemon cell, our pistachio liquor, our blood arms liquor, Italian lemonade, our vodka sodas, all with the real ingredients. It's best if you live in one of the 22 states who are available in, go to our website, put it in your zip code, see if there's a local, even if it is a national chain, or if it's a local retailer, a mom and pop, that's always the best place, not only to support your local community, but also it actually is gonna get you the best price. - Right. - Because if you can buy Fabrizia Spirits online at a website that looks like ours, but it's really not ours, it's really this liquor store that sells, and the prices are higher in the lead, it can take like a week anyways to get it. So that's your best option, if there's not a liquor store near you, which you can find at findfabrizia.com, or FabriziaSphere.com. Now the bakery, the Fabrizio Lemon Baking Company, whole different follow acts, that one is a direct to consumer business, so everything we produce over here in the bakery that I just sort of walked, didn't really get into the place, I didn't have a hair net on or anything like that, but all of our Lehman's shallow cookies and all the items that come there, we send gift boxes, they all ship from here via either FedEx today or USPS priority, you get to actually pick it, check out what one you prefer, and you know, those are available in all states, ready to ship, they ship usually business day. - Now have any of your products gone to Italy, have any of them gone to Italy where your lemon grove is? - No, no, no, so the grove, we're actually trying to get the webcam live, we have a call on Thursday with the Italians, particularly a few months longer than we planned, but that is, that is a, on the list of things we'd like to do for accomplishments, I don't know what it will mean for any commercial success, but we'd love to see this go full circle and export for Britsia from New England, back to Italy, where the lemons we source come from. The even shallow is a little competitive in Italy, as you might expect, it's the number two to occur in the country after Campari and Apparel, or maybe it's number three even. But, and there's a lot of regional producers, but I think that if we eventually one day could get it into a duty-free or into a few places, that would be a major accomplishment. Just take that, yeah. - That would be cool, and you know what would be cool to have it in airports too, you know, airport bars? - Well, that might be like the real goal, because, you know, liquor distribution is very different in Italy, it essentially ships like a, it could be shipping next to hot dog buns, or anything else with everything. There's no like a specific liquor distributors, you know? - Okay. - And so, and also there's a lot of regional producers. So, and there's a lot of good auctions for Lee Mitchell. So yeah, the airport would be where it ended up, but listen, this is once again, just having fun here at this point. - That'd be cool. - So much, if anybody listens in the Northeast, that's where you're gonna find the most locations. Florida's the New Market. We picked off in California and Nevada. So you can find our Lee Mitchell and pistachio at about 24 total wines across California. - Oh, cool, cool. - The cans are available at 50 Whole Foods across California. That's brand new for us. The North East Coast, even better distribution. - That's awesome. - Actually, in Illinois, Whole Foods carries us in about 20 of their stores. So, slowly but surely we're picking away at it. - American domination, and then onto Italy. So, did the pandemic affect you guys with your growth being in Italy? - No, so, well, yes, okay. So, at that point, we had not established the actual Fabrizio Lemon Grove. And, but it did disrupt, we buy all of our lemons from one family, and that's actually where we have a portion of land that is dedicated to us. Now, at the time in 2020, we just bought our lemons from them. They have about a thousand acres of lemon groves. We were only able to bring in one container that year, because we essentially just had to cancel the rest of the orders. So, we didn't know what the rest of the year looked like and we were making so much hand sanitizer. - Oh, okay. - That's what it pulled ourselves over. - Oh, wow. But, you know, we needed the cocktails too, you know. - Sanitizer and one hand cocktails in the other to get the pandemic. - Sanitizer was essentially only for people's peace of mind. We donated like $50,000 worth of it, so we certainly were able to give people that piece of mind. - That's nice. - But, in the world and then, and people drank more than they ever did that year. - I know. - In the following. - Isn't that wild? - Yeah. - So, like you said, we were at the right place at the right time and it was a pretty crazy ride and on both those fronts. And we're glad the world's coming back to normal now. - Yeah, I think it's exciting because of summer, you know, we're looking at parties again. I mean, Memorial Day is when I was saying that we can, you know, we were like, okay, let's try this. So, let's try this one. And then we're like, we need to go to work. We can't. We're having too much fun. - Yeah, yeah, seriously. - I know, I know, back to reality. - I know, but I think, you know, everyone's going to festivals again, concerts and-- - Oh, yeah. - 100% back open. - You know, I think it'd be great to see you in like all the ballparks and stuff like that. All the stadiums. - Yeah, that's, that, that, yes. Yeah, we'd love to, and we're working on that. It can be tough 'cause a lot of times there's sponsorships that need to be involved to get into some of those stadiums. So, that's why a lot of times, but we have had some successes and, you know, actually right here at home in, I live in Massachusetts and the Gillette Stadium carries our Italian lemonade. So, thanks to Bob Craft and the Patriots. But yeah, that would be exciting too. - Awesome. - Thank you so much to you and all your listeners up and beyond today. It's been a real pleasure. - Yeah, this is exciting. And listen, best wishes moving forward. It's just so exciting to see a company grow and do it in the right way. And it's, it sounds like you guys are having so much fun and we can taste it. So, I'm gonna give out your website to everyone again. So, you gotta go to Fabrizia Spirits.com. Fabrizia, okay. You also could go to their bakery. So, go to Fabrizia Lemon Baking Company.com. What does Fabrizia mean? Since I'm in the Italian class. - Fabrizia is the female name. It's an Italian female name. That means one that works with their hands. And it also happens to be a small hilltop town, not even an hour from where our family's from in, in, in, in, sub, in Calabria. So, it just sort of seemed that, hey, look, we do it all by hand. It's either, it's a town not far from where we're from. And it's, it felt right. And you like the name. And that's what it means. - Awesome. - Awesome. - When you're done drinking those, I know you're a traveling radio woman. When you're done in that delicious product behind you, you let us know where you are in the country. And we'll send you some, we'll restock you, okay? - Oh, we want that. And we want to try the blueberries too. We haven't had that yet. - Hi, kids. I'm going to make sure Debra Lee knows. - That's all right. - And once again, from, I'm going to go back to some headache, I'm sure. But before I do, I just want to say thanks again for having me on. It was great talking to everybody. - Thanks so much, Phil. Everybody again, keep up with us at bigblendradio.com. Thanks. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
