How four friends turned a 70-year-old Finnish drink into a $325 million exit

Nobody owned the category in the United States. So they built the brand that did.

Welcome to The Food Stack, a weekly newsletter about investing in the future of food. Written by Vincent Kuiper, founder of GOTA Ventures, an international angel syndicate investing in seed-stage European foodtech and consumer brands.

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Contents

• The Setup: a 70-year-old national drink, an empty category in the U.S., and four friends who saw the opportunity

• Why This Category / Why Now: the RTD market, where it was heading, and why the timing was right

• The Timeline: 8 years of decisions, from a New York happy hour to a $325 million exit

• The Finnish Long Drink Playbook: the three decisions that built the category

• What Went Wrong: why Hartwall and Boston Beer both underperformed in the U.S.

• The Patterns: what this story tells us about category creation in CPG

• Is There a European Long Drink? the white space and what this story means for European founders

• Takeaways: six things worth remembering from this story

The Setup

Most consumer brands start with a product. They formulate something, figure out the category it belongs to, and then try to carve out a position within it.

The Finnish Long Drink started differently. The product already existed. The category did not, at least not in America.

Long drink, or “lonkero” in Finnish, has been Finland’s national drink for 70 years. It was created for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, when the Finnish government needed a way to quickly serve the influx of tourists. Hartwall, one of Finland’s leading historical beverage companies, developed the recipe: gin, grapefruit soda, in a can. People fell in love with it and never stopped. Today long drink is one of the best-selling drink categories in Finland, available in every venue from dive bars to fine dining restaurants, drunk by every demographic, at every occasion. The Finnish equivalent of a Coca-Cola.

In 2017, four friends had a conversation that would eventually lead to a $325 million acquisition. Three of them were Finnish. One was an American entrepreneur named Evan Burns. Burns had visited Finland, been taken to every kind of venue by his Finnish friends, and noticed the same thing everywhere: long drinks.

His founding insight was not “let’s build a better gin cocktail.” It was something more specific: in America, nobody owned this story. There was a 70-year-old cultural institution with a government-commissioned origin story, universal recognition in its home market, and zero brand presence in the largest consumer market in the world. The category was completely open.

As Burns described it: just like tequila has its story of being made in Mexico, distilled from agave, or champagne in the Champagne region of France, what if we built a brand called The Finnish Long Drink and brought it to America?

That question led to a reported $325 million exit in 2026. The time from founding to signed acquisition: eight years.

I have spent this week trying to understand how a 70-year-old Finnish drink became one of the fastest-growing spirits brands in the world. What follows is what I found.

Why This Category / Why Now

The ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktail category was worth $13.9 billion in the U.S. by 2025, representing over 12% of total beverage alcohol sales. The category had been turbocharged by the pandemic, when at-home drinking surged and canned cocktails replaced bar visits for millions of Americans.

But the category was also shifting. Hard seltzer, which had dominated the RTD space from roughly 2018 to 2021 with White Claw leading on a malt base, was plateauing. Consumers were trading up. They wanted more flavor, more authenticity, and solid alcohol by volume (ABV). Spirit-based RTDs grew 53% in 2021, approximately double the growth of malt-based categories. By 2024, spirit-based RTD innovations had grown from 22% to 40% of all RTD launches, while malt-based launches fell from 75% to 59%.

The Finnish Long Drink launched in 2018, right at the beginning of the RTD boom, with a spirit base at a time when malt-based brands were still dominant. That timing, partly by design and partly fortunate, meant the brand was already established when the category rotated toward exactly what it had always been.

The U.S. also had no equivalent cultural touchstone in the gin-and-citrus format. Tequila had its Mexican heritage narrative. Bourbon had its Kentucky story. Gin had mixology culture but no casual, approachable RTD category of its own. The long drink format, refreshing, lower ABV than a straight spirit, more interesting than a hard seltzer, occupied a gap that no incumbent had claimed.

The Timeline

2017 (pre-launch). Evan Burns, an American entrepreneur who had previously founded digital media platform Odyssey, visits Finland with his Finnish friends Sakari Manninen, Mikael Taipale, and Ere Partanen. He is taken to every type of venue and observes the same thing everywhere: long drinks. The founding insight crystallises: nobody owns this category story in America. The four friends begin planning a U.S. launch.

Before a single can is sold, the most important product decision is made: the drink will use a gin base, not a malt base. However: this was not the easiest choice. Spirit-based RTDs face higher taxes and more complicated three-tier distribution in many U.S. states. The founders choose it anyway because it is the only authentic version of the product.

2018: Launch in New York. The brand soft-launches in Manhattan and the Hamptons with a deliberately simple product: four expressions of the original recipe, all gin-based, all citrus-forward. The early marketing strategy is almost entirely ground-level. Tasting events, customer education, point-of-sale materials. Because they are creating a category that Americans have never encountered, trial is the only path to purchase. You cannot explain what a long drink is through an advertisement. You have to taste it.

2019: 33,000 cases and Miles Teller. A few weeks after the Finnish Long Drink launched in a Manhattan store, actor Miles Teller walks into a tasting event hosted by the founders and tries the product for the first time. He becomes a co-owner in summer 2019. DJ Kygo joined in 2020 after tasting the drink at Teller’s wedding and also got Rickie Fowler on board. The founders are consistent on this point: they never had a celebrity strategy. These investors tried the product, loved it, and asked to invest. The brand accepted because the cultural credibility was additive. In 2019, the brand sells 33,000 cases.

2020-2021: Pandemic tailwind and lift-off. The RTD category surges during lockdowns. The Finnish Long Drink benefits disproportionately because it already has a distinctive product and a story, while most new entrants are chasing the White Claw formula with minor variations. Case sales reach over 200,000 in 2020 and 400,000-500,000 in 2021, a 6x increase in two years. In July 2021, the brand closes its largest funding round at $25 million, fueling national distribution expansion.

This is also when Hartwall, the original 1952 manufacturer, enters the U.S. market. Their soft launch begins in September 2020 across Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and DC, expanding to eleven states by July 2021. They arrive two years after the Finnish Long Drink, with the stronger historical claim but without the head start.

2022: One million cases and the fastest-growing spirits brand in the world. From 2021 to 2022, case sales more than double from 400,000-500,000 to over 1.1 million, a 114% increase. The Spirits Business names the Finnish Long Drink the world’s fastest-growing spirits brand over one million cases.

This is also the year the malt-based competitive test arrives and is settled definitively. Boston Beer, owner of Samuel Adams and Truly Hard Seltzer, launches Bevy Long Drink. The critical difference: Bevy uses a malt base. It is pulled from shelves in less than a year after failing to gain traction.

January 2023: Miles Teller increases his stake. By this point the brand is distributed in 43 U.S. markets and is the fourth most popular RTD brand in the country. Off-premise retail sales are up 92% year-over-year, outpacing better-known brands from Bacardi and Jack Daniel’s despite having less distribution. Teller’s increased investment is a public signal of conviction from someone with direct visibility into the business.

2023: 1.8 million cases. The brand sells 1.8 million cases, up 80% from 2022. It is now the 8th highest-selling RTD in the U.S. according to 3 Tier Beverages and NielsenIQ. Available in over 34,000 locations and distributed across 43 U.S. markets

May 2024: Marcy Venture Partners invests. Jay-Z’s investment firm, which had previously built and sold a stake in D’USSE Cognac to Bacardi for $750 million, makes a significant investment in the Finnish Long Drink. The investment adds cultural credibility at the premium end and signals that serious capital allocators with deep alcohol industry expertise see a significant exit ahead. Total raised to date: approximately $41 million across multiple (14+) rounds.

2024: 2.6 million cases. Named the 10th fastest-growing spirits brand globally according to The Brand Champions 2025 report.

2025: 3.3 million cases. Roughly 20% year-on-year growth. The brand is available in over 50,000 locations across the U.S. and Canada. Mark Anthony Group, owner of White Claw, is already the Finnish Long Drink’s exclusive Canadian distributor.

April 13, 2026: Mark Anthony Group acquisition announced. The reported price: $325 million. Mark Anthony has not officially confirmed the figure. The deal marks Mark Anthony’s first major spirits-based RTD acquisition, a significant signal given that its portfolio has historically been built on a malt base. Evan Burns stays on as CEO.

The Finnish Long Drink Playbook

Three decisions define this story. They are more fundamental than operational choices: a thesis, a product bet, and a cultural strategy that all turned out to be right.

Decision 1: Own the category, not just the product.

Most brands enter an existing category and try to win within it. The Finnish Long Drink did something different. Burns and his co-founders looked at a 70-year-old cultural institution and asked a specific question: why does nobody own this story in America?

The tequila analogy is the right one. Tequila is not just a spirit. It is a geography, a culture, a production method, and a set of regulations that together make the category defensible. You cannot make tequila outside of Mexico. The category ownership is structural. Long drink in Finland is the same kind of institution: a government-commissioned origin story from the 1952 Olympics, 70 years of cultural embedding across every demographic, a specific format that is distinct enough to be recognisable.

What the founders saw was that none of this heritage belonged to any single brand in the U.S. market. Calling the brand The Finnish Long Drink rather than something more creative was the right call precisely because of this: the name itself is the category claim.

Decision 2: Choose the harder product, because it was the right one.

In 2018, malt-based RTDs dominated the market. The tax and distribution logic was clear: spirit-based drinks faced higher excise taxes in 45 states, sometimes as much as 35 times the rate applied to a malt-based product with identical alcohol content, and in many states could only be sold through liquor stores rather than grocery and convenience channels. Most brands chose the malt base for exactly these reasons. The Finnish Long Drink chose gin anyway.

The reason was simple: the original recipe uses gin. A malt-based long drink is not really a long drink. It is a malt beverage with a long drink aesthetic, and consumers can eventually tell the difference.

Beyond the higher taxes, spirit-based distribution has limited shelf access through liquor-only channels, a thinner co-manufacturing infrastructure, and a retail price premium that made consumer education harder. All of which the Finnish Long Drink accepted because a malt base would have made the product inauthentic. Several market opportunities took longer to unlock, but the trade-off created the product quality and authenticity that drove word-of-mouth, the pricing power that malt-based competitors could not match, and the category defensibility that made the brand acquirable.

Decision 3: Build the category through experience, not advertising.

Because the Finnish Long Drink was creating a category rather than competing in one, the standard beverage marketing playbook did not fully apply. You cannot run a Meta campaign explaining what a long drink is to someone who has never heard of it. The message does not land without context.

The founders understood this early. The vast majority of their early marketing budget went on ground-level activities: tasting events, customer education, and point-of-sale materials. They built the brand state by state, market by market, with sales teams on the ground in each location.

The celebrity investors reinforced this strategy rather than replacing it. Miles Teller wearing a Finnish Long Drink hat, increasing his investment stake publicly, talking about the product in interviews, was not paid advertising. It was a real endorsement from someone with skin in the game. The same pattern appears in other brands we have studied this year: Grüns with Shaun White and Anna Kendrick, Olipop with the Jonas Brothers and celebrity backers. In each case the celebrity involvement was authentic because the investor came in as a fan first.

What Went Wrong

The Finnish Long Drink did not arrive in an empty market by accident. Two larger and better-resourced companies tried to bring long drinks to the U.S. and underperformed in different ways.

Boston Beer: the malt-based shortcut. Boston Beer had the distribution, the production capacity, the retail relationships, and the marketing budget. What it did not have was authenticity. Bevy was malt-based, produced in the U.S., and marketed primarily as a refreshing RTD cocktail rather than as a cultural institution. It was pulled from shelves in under a year.

Hartwall: the stronger claim that did not win the U.S. Hartwall is the more revealing competitor, and the one that raises the sharpest question. If authenticity is the moat, why did Hartwall not become the dominant U.S. brand? They invented the recipe in 1952. They hold roughly 70% of the long drink category in Finland. They have been exporting Original Long Drink internationally since 2015, with distribution across 15 countries in Europe and Asia. By any measure of historical legitimacy, their claim to the category is stronger than the Finnish Long Drink's. The funny thing is that I actually know the product. During my student years in Amsterdam, we used to drink the "Originals" often. But I completely forgot about the brand and have not seen it anywhere in years, until I was doing research to write this post. That is itself a data point.

The U.S. outcome tells an interesting story. Hartwall has never publicly disclosed U.S. sales figures, and they do not appear in any of the U.S. RTD ranking reports I could find. Their U.S. distribution footprint, which had expanded to eleven states by mid-2021, had contracted back to six states (New York, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Georgia) by early 2023. In the same period, the Finnish Long Drink scaled to 34,000+ locations across 43 U.S. markets and became the 8th highest-selling RTD in the country. Hartwall tried, expanded, and then pulled back. The Finnish Long Drink kept scaling.

Three reasons stand out for why the stronger historical claim did not translate into U.S. commercial success.

First, they were late. Hartwall soft-launched in the U.S. in September 2020, two years after the Finnish Long Drink. By that point the Finnish Long Drink already had Miles Teller, DJ Kygo, Rickie Fowler, national distribution momentum, and an emerging cultural position. In a category where consumer awareness is near zero, whoever arrives first gets to define the terms.

Second, their positioning did not translate. Hartwall’s U.S. marketing leaned on Finnish ingredients, the 1952 recipe, and partnerships with Finnish cultural figures like race car driver Kimi Räikkönen and regional assets like the Pittsburgh Penguins. Räikkönen is a global F1 star but not a mainstream U.S. celebrity. For U.S. consumers who had never heard of long drinks, the category story apparently lands harder than the ingredient story. You have to explain the what before you can sell the how.

Third, they sold a single product, not a brand platform. Hartwall’s U.S. range is essentially the original recipe. The Finnish Long Drink launched with four variants (Traditional, Zero, Cranberry, Strong) and expanded to seven, giving retailers more SKUs to merchandise and consumers more entry points into the brand.

The broader lesson is subtle but important. Historical authenticity is necessary but not sufficient. Hartwall had the better claim to the category story on paper. The Finnish Long Drink executed better on translating that category story into an American cultural context. In a category creation play, the first brand to make the story resonate with the target market captures the category position, even if a competitor has a stronger claim to the underlying heritage.

The Patterns

This story adds a different dimension to the patterns I have been building across posts this year. Where Grüns was about execution speed and DTC mechanics, this story is about how categories get created, defended, and won in new markets.

Historical authenticity is necessary but not sufficient. This is the most important lesson from the Hartwall comparison. A stronger heritage claim does not beat a better cultural translation. In category creation, the winner is whoever first makes the story resonate with the target market, not whoever has the deepest roots. This applies everywhere: European heritage brands that assume their history will carry them into new geographies tend to underinvest in local cultural translation and lose the category position to challengers who do the translation work.

Category creation requires a different go-to-market playbook than category disruption. Grüns could scale on Meta advertising because the greens supplement category was already familiar to consumers. The Finnish Long Drink had to educate before it could sell. Ground-level tasting events, state-by-state market building, and patient distribution expansion were the only paths to purchase when the category itself was unknown. Founders who apply a standard DTC growth playbook to a genuine category creation story typically underinvest in trial and education and wonder why conversion rates are low.

Authentic celebrity involvement compounds in a way that paid endorsements cannot. The Finnish Long Drink’s celebrity investors all came in as product fans before they came in as investors. A celebrity who invests because they love the product talks about it in interviews without being paid to, wears the merchandise, and increases their stakes. Over eight years, that compounding authenticity built cultural credibility that no advertising budget could replicate.

Mark Anthony’s acquisition is a signal about where the RTD category is heading. White Claw built one of the most successful beverage launches in history on a malt base. Spirit-based RTDs have been taking share consistently since. Mark Anthony buying the Finnish Long Drink is not a bet on a single brand. It is a hedge against the structural rotation in the RTD category from malt to spirits. For investors watching the beverage space, that rotation is the most important trend to track over the next five years.

Is There Room for European Founders?

The Finnish Long Drink story is directly relevant to European founders and investors, and not just as inspiration.

Long drink is already deeply embedded in Nordic culture, and the Finnish Long Drink’s success in the U.S. has validated that the format and the origin story travel internationally. Mark Anthony Group has explicit international ambitions for the brand under its ownership.

But the European opportunity for new founders is not to replicate the Finnish Long Drink directly. That category is now owned. The opportunity is to apply the same founding thesis to other underexplored cultural institutions that have not yet been exported.

There are dozens of regional European drinks with 50-plus years of cultural history, distinctive formats, and zero brand presence outside their home market. Aperitivo culture in Italy has been partially exported through brands like Aperol and Campari, but the category is far from saturated. Central European beer and cider traditions, Nordic functional drinks, and Southern European herbal liqueur categories all contain versions of the same opportunity Burns identified in Finland.

The question a founder should ask is: which cultural institution has a compelling origin story, universal recognition in its home market, and no dominant brand presence in Europe or globally? That is the white space the Finnish Long Drink playbook opens up.

I am watching this actively. The next version of this story is likely to come from a European founder with cultural access to an underexported tradition.

Takeaways

Six things worth remembering from this story.

• Category ownership beats product quality. Burns and his co-founders did not set out to build a better gin cocktail. They set out to own a cultural category that had no owner in the U.S. That is a different kind of ambition, and it produces a different kind of defensibility.

• Hartwall had the stronger claim and still did not win the U.S. Historical authenticity is necessary but not sufficient. The Finnish Long Drink translated the category story into American cultural context faster and better. In new markets, speed of cultural translation beats depth of heritage.

• Trial is the only path to purchase in an unfamiliar category. Tasting events, customer education, state-by-state market building. These are expensive and slow, but there is no shortcut when consumers have never heard of your category. Founders who apply a standard growth model here consistently underinvest in this phase.

• Fan-first celebrity investors compound over time in ways paid ambassadors cannot. The authentic sequence, fan first, investor second, produces a qualitatively different brand relationship. Eight years of Miles Teller wearing the hat is worth more than a hundred sponsored posts.

• The harder product decision was also the more defensible one. Gin over malt meant higher taxes, limited shelf access, thinner manufacturing infrastructure, and a price premium. It also meant a product that could not be credibly copied by a malt-based competitor. Boston Beer took the shortcut and failed within a year.

• Mark Anthony’s acquisition is a strategic signal about the RTD category shift. White Claw’s owner buying a spirit-based RTD tells you where the category is heading. The rotation from malt to spirits in RTDs is structural and has years left to run. Investors who position ahead of that rotation in European markets will find the best opportunities.