Bartesian cocktail machines will be on shelves later this year
KITCHENER — The at-home cocktail machine developed by a Kitchener startup is scheduled to be in stores in North America later this year.
Bartesian, founded four years ago by Bryan Fedorak and Ryan Close, signed a deal with Hamilton Beach Brands last month. It will see the manufacturer of small household and houseware appliances oversee the manufacturing, distribution and servicing of the machines that make different cocktails at the push of a button.
“It is Bartesian-branded,” said Close. “It is our IT. It is our designs, but they basically have the expertise in working with factories in China, servicing the products.”
Bed Bath & Beyond, with 1,050 outlets across North America, will be the first retailer to carry the Bartesian units.
It is no coincidence that Bed Bath & Beyond is the first big retailer to go with Bartesian as it was also the first to sell Keurig machines. What Keurig is to coffee, Bartesian hopes it will be to cocktails.
“They take chances, they are giving us premium space and are working with us,” Close said of Bed Bath & Beyond.
The startup remains headquartered in the Velocity Garage — the University of Waterloo’s tech accelerator in the Tannery building — and also has space in a building on Duke Street. That’s where more than 600 Bartesian cocktail machines are being assembled, and shipped to people who placed orders for the units on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform when the company was starting out.
Since Bartesian was founded, it has completed more than 25 prototypes of the machine and cocktail mix capsules. In 2016, it secured a multimillion dollar investment from Beam Santory, the third largest premium liquor company in the world.
Positive feedback from early users of prototypes led to an order for 5,000 units from a big retailer, and that’s when a partnership with an established company, such as Virginia-based Hamilton Beach, made sense.
“The cost of goods to make that is high, and then you have to manage the working capital for it,” Close said.
Bartesian could have borrowed the money, but a pre-revenue startup would pay a higher rate of interest, and they balked at the idea of taking on more investors.
“We didn’t want to raise too much more money, because then we are diluting our shares. You should never dilute your shares just to fill orders, so we decided that we would pursue that partnership,” said Close.
Bartesian has seven employees, most of whom are focused on the ingredients used in the capsules to make different cocktails. The contents of the capsules are developed in Kitchener and manufactured in Wisconsin.
Close was in Chicago last week opening a small office and lab that will oversee contract manufacturing of the cocktail capsules at the Wisconsin plant.
“The drink has to taste stellar, rival what you would expect to have at a nice cocktail lounge,” he said. “We don’t use powders or artificial flavours, chemicals or high-fructose cornstarch.”
Bartesian’s founders met while pursing different startups at Communitech.
After graduating from Grand River Collegiate in 1999, Close did a business degree at Western University. He was working in sales and marketing for a Toronto company, and was involved in a startup on the side that was working a new crowdfunding platform.
Fedorak graduated from UW with a degree in mechanical engineering and then did an MBA at Wilfrid Laurier University. He had an idea for a machine that made cocktails the way a Keurig makes coffee and was looking for someone with business experience to help out.
That’s when the two decided to pursue Bartesian together.