Drink aisles at Giant supermarkets across the state will have more options from Greater Baltimore after one Towson company completes a major expansion.
ZenJoy, a drink company based at the StarTUp at the Armory accelerator, is launching a partnership with Giant in April. The deal will put its product in 145 stores in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. ZenJoy's young trio of founders already sell their products in 385 convenience stores, restaurants, and other small retailers, but believe this deal can offer a template for expanding into supermarkets.
ZenJoy is carving out a niche in a beverage market dominated by energy drinks. Their canned tea tries to inspire relaxation with ingredients like Ashwagandha — an herb that some studies have shown reduces the stress hormone cortisol — plus lemon balm and the amino acid L-Thenanine. The company plans to eventually put ZenJoy into all 165 Giant stores by signing deals with third-party distributors to deliver products on shelves outside Greater Baltimore and Maryland, founder Mack Anderson said.
The company has started to dip into venture capital to finance its growth. ZenJoy has raised $160,000 so far, and Anderson plans to raise $100,000 more to prepare for the Giant deal within the next two months.
Anderson plans to use the outside capital to hire the first ZenJoy staff members to handle parts of the Giant contract. So far, the founding team of Anderson, Timmy Brumbraugh and Daniel Osborne has done almost everything themselves, from formulating the product to conducting tasting events and delivering cans of tea to the stores. The strategy has been successful so far, with the small team selling over 100,000 tea cans in Maryland and D.C. last year.
"It's hard not to have a week where we don't see ZenJoy out in the wild," Anderson said. "That is a cool part of it."
The high-touch approach is intended to ensure ZenJoy controls how its products are organized on a shelf to attract customers' attention.
“With a distributor, you're one of the sometimes thousands of products they carry,” Anderson said. “When that sales rep goes into a store and puts the order together with the manager, a lot of times when you're a smaller or a new brand, you don't get thought of.”
The demand for supplements that contain some of ZenJoy's ingredients is growing, with the sales of Ashwagandha products alone estimated to reach $2.5 billion across the world by 2031, according to Allied Market Research.
Despite its popularity, the drink didn't start out as an herbal supplement. The company began as Zen Hemp Infusions with CBD in the recipe. Anderson quickly realized that the regulatory hurdles of a CBD-infused drink would make it untenable since most grocery stores do not stock cannabis products. The firm then removed hemp products from its drinks to appeal to a wider audience.
Zenjoy is the latest company to come out of the Towson StarTUp incubator. The co-working space is also home to Sparen, a firm that hopes to take realtors out of real estate. Towson University’s executive director of entrepreneurship Patrick McQuown is teaming up with former Baltimore Raven Kyle Richardson to create a venture capital fund to help companies in the incubator continue to grow.
