'We Were Just Constantly Getting Made Fun Of' — How Athletic Brewing Crushed an 'Enormous Stigma' to Craft an $800 Million Business Bill Shufelt fought an uphill battle to create a non-alcoholic beer that people actually wanted to drink. Now Athletic Brewing Company is one of the top 10 brewers in the country.
By Chad Thomas
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Bill Shufelt never thought he'd start a business — much less a beer company.
"I didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body," he says. "And I had never brewed a batch of beer in my life."
Over a decade ago, Shufelt decided to give up alcohol. Almost instantly, he gained a new sense of wellbeing. But his search for an enjoyable non-alcoholic beer came up empty.
"I'd be standing in a bar at a restaurant thinking, 'If this bartender could pour a great non-alcoholic beer, I would gladly pay full price for that.'"
A financial trader at the time, Shufelt decided to conduct thousands of consumer surveys, and realized he wasn't alone.
"Fifty-five percent of adults [in the surveys] were saying they would love a great non-alcoholic beer, if only it tasted better and was less stigmatized," says Shufelt. "But the [non-alcoholic] shelf had basically no variety and no innovation. The category was marketed the same way as it had been since Prohibition. And it had this enormous stigma that if you're drinking an N. A. beer, you have a problem with alcohol. I thought, 'Maybe we have to totally reinvent how non-alcoholic beer is made and thought of here.' This was all just like going on in my head. I finally said it out loud to my wife, and she's like, "You should do that."
In 2017, Shufelt teamed up with acclaimed brewer John Walker with a mission to make non-alcoholic beers "without compromise."
"I found someone who saw the idea," he says. "We started homebrewing with Gatorade jugs in an empty warehouse. John is so talented that we actually did get to a point then where we had great non-alcoholic beer."
A year later, they launched Athletic Brewing. Today, Athletic's offerings are the top category choice, outpacing both Heineken and Budweiser's alcohol-free options in U.S. grocery stores. The company earned over $100 million in revenue in 2023, and in July, was reportedly valued at $800 million. All of this earned Shufelt a finalist spot on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of 20 innovative leaders.
These days, Athletic is everywhere. But surely it was hard to get started. What were some of your early challenges?
I quit this great finance job and went out on my own with this idea, and there was no interest at all from the industry. From finding a contract brewer, to a brewer to team up with, to fundraising, it was rock bottom across the board.
But then I met our incredible co-founder, John. He had racked up all these brewing awards at a brewpub in New Mexico he was working at. Where every other brewer I talked to said "No thanks" very quickly, John thought about the concept for a few days and came back. He was like, "I think this is brilliant." He moved his family across the country to team up.
I started going around then to retailers. Surprise, surprise, no one wanted non-alcoholic beer. The trend was at zero, so they just drew the line to zero forever. I had to go with bottles that John and I hand-bottled in his parents' garage. Everything was uphill. We were pitching the least popular segment ever and just constantly getting made fun of.
That's a lot of pushback. What made you push through?
I had committed to it. I had quit my job and I was in the deep end. I was like, I was like, "I'm going to make this work." And despite all the no's, I thought, "This person has no idea — they don't have the data." Eventually I signed up 300 retailers to take to our distributor to launch. So it was all extremely grassroots out of the gate — really fun, hard-fought battles.
Fast-forward a year, after a lot of people had tried the beer and we'd sat on-shelf for a little while, and we had outgrown our facility. All of a sudden, everyone was screaming at us that we didn't invest enough in the brewery. That's when we knew we were on to something really exciting. As painful as being totally out of stock was.
These days, how do you keep up with growing demand?
We invest out in front of it. We just completed an expansion on the East Coast. Our East Coast Brewery is now a hundred times as big as our original Stratford, Connecticut Brewery. And we just bought a West Coast Brewery that's almost double the size of the East Coast Brewery. So our capacity at the end of 2024 will be about 250 times as much as 2018. We've gone from one of the nation's smallest of the 10,000 breweries to a top 10 craft brewer over that time. We finished 2018 with six teammates, 2019 with 26 teammates, 2020 during the pandemic also. We bought our first West Coast Brewery in March 2020, and we hired 100 teammates. And through the pandemic, we really doubled down on culture.
How were you able to define such a clear culture and business objectives?
We had the benefit of a really long planning cycle. Even before I quit my old job, I had two years of business planning. And then after I teamed up with John, we had nine months where we were just in an empty warehouse homebrewing, talking about what's important to us, what we liked about our past careers, and what we wanted Athletic life to be like.
Work is forty percent of our waking hours, and very often an even bigger percentage of our mental energy. So you have the choice to either make work awesome and full of great people, a great culture and a good mission, or a brutal 9 to 5 slog.
We're really intentional about our culture and our impact and our mission at Athletic. John and I worked up an employee handbook in 2017 [the year Athletic was founded] that we still have, and has barely changed. I pull it out and talk to every new teammate at Athletic about it. We want to be a participant in the communities we do business in — and not a profit extractor. Every teammate is a shareholder from day one in the company. That grows with every anniversary with the company. So there's an ownership mindset. And then everything we do is out for positively impacting our customers, their communities and the environment as well. We're a Certified B Corp, and our Two for the Trails grant is now upwards of $6.5 million dollars since we started supporting trails and parks organizations all over the country. We're trying to have real impact — not compromising with the product, not compromising with the environment.
Where does the name "Athletic" come from?
My goal is just to be a little more active, and a little healthier. So the name "Athletic" is really just trying to be positive and aspirational. I also wanted something that was easy to order in a crowded or loud bar or restaurant. Previously, ordering a non-alcoholic beer was so hard, and felt like such a moment when you were like, "What non-alcoholic beer do you have?", and everyone at the table would turn and look at you. I just wanted it to be something that people could ask for with pride. And we were careful with our name not to tie anything to a certain geography. We wanted a concept and brand that could travel across borders.
How do you plan to continue to beat out other entrants to the N.A. market?
We are investing and investing and investing in the quality of our products. We do it in a totally different way than most of the category. Most companies try to invest and go as asset-light as possible — find someone else to make the product and outsource as much as you can. Instead, we insource and invest in everything. We want to be vertical and do everything ourselves. We're one of the only companies that has built breweries for non-alcoholic beer and continues to build out ahead of it. And we have over 175 teammates in our brewing lab. Quality and different production rules.
Today you're beating out Budweiser and Heineken's N.A. beers. Do you still see Athletic as a disruptor?
For sure. It's still the opinion of most people in the industry that non-alcoholic beer is hitting its ceiling. They see where it is and they're like, "That's an amazing growth and it's probably going to be two to three percent forever now." Whereas in my head, I'm like, "People are not drinking alcohol 99 percent of the time they're awake. So over a long enough time horizon, it's very likely non-alcoholic adult beverages will be bigger than alcoholic adult beverages." Which I think is a very out-of-consensus opinion, but makes total logical sense to me.
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