Jay Perkins first attracted national attention in 2014 as an engineering student, cold emailing startup incubators to solicit investment for the automated mixed drink machine he’d built in his dorm room at Purdue University.
After more than 100 emails went out without response, billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban bit, providing early seed capital for the young inventor’s idea. Cuban was the only person who’d responded.
“I remember spending hours and hours drafting emails back to him, and eventually he said, ‘What can I do to help you?’” Perkins recalled. “I still remember exactly where I was when I got [Cuban’s response].”
Later that year, with one semester of college to go, he founded TendedBar, an automated bar machine company now based in Jacksonville.
What Perkins had built was a self-pour automated bar system designed for high-traffic locations where bartending is either inefficient or nonexistent, like TIAA Bank Field, where seven TendedBar machines were deployed in September for the Jaguars-Broncos game. More recently, TendedBar machines could be found at the PGA Tour's Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego, which ended late last month.
According to Nathan Kauffman, partner and CMO for TendedBar, the machines’ high efficiency — speeding up long lines by serving customers in “as little as nine seconds” per drink — solves the perennial large event problem of “having to choose between a hot dog, a bathroom and a drink.”
From dorm to stadium
Between Perkins’s auspicious first encounter with Cuban and his machine’s recent appearance on the PGA Tour were long periods of couchsurfing after college while getting the business started. He traded off taking jobs with his brother, Justin Honeysuckle, who signed on as co-founder, to pay bills. Perkins said they probably spent about three years after 2015 hauling around an early prototype in a trailer to weddings, music festivals and corporate events.
In late 2018, the team raised a few hundred thousand dollars from Indiegogo, a crowdfunding website, which they poured into the current, official iteration of their machine. This debuted at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in 2019.
Today, with $5 million in Series A funding, led by Base Capital Partners, and a labor shortage seen by some as an accelerator in the shift toward automation, TendedBar has shifted its initially broad vision of putting machines anywhere people could drink to focusing on large events. The timing has been especially canny, as the pandemic wiped out much of the workforce that made those events possible, while demand for their return came roaring back.
What high profit doesn’t show
While Perkins is confident about TendedBar’s prospects for scaling — into different regions and industries both, including hotel, back-of-house and theme parks — he said his team is focused on being patient and growing at a controlled pace. This means harnessing their presence in Jacksonville to grow existing partnerships and only putting out products and services they’re proud of.
Though they’re not yet profitable as a company, Perkins said return on investment for individual machines happens within “a matter of months as opposed to years,” adding, “we’re definitely profitable at pretty much every event."
Though TendedBar’s machines are fairly high-tech — syncing up with smartphone apps and using facial recognition software to verify the user is of drinking age before serving them — it would be reasonable to wonder why it took this long for an automated self-pour mixed drink machine to hit the market. After all, the Coca-Cola Freestyle, a touch screen self-serve soda fountain, was introduced way back in 2009.
Perkins doesn’t think technology was behind the lag, though, so much as a fear among industries that are already profitable to shake things up with new and disruptive ideas. The amount of innovation and entrepreneurship that’s come out of the forced disruption of the pandemic, he said, should be instructive for entrepreneurs.
“If you go to a restaurant right now, you’re gonna scan a QR code,” Perkins said, pointing out that the technology for that particular efficiency had been around for years before Covid. “There’s a lot of high profit in liquor, and a lot of times that high profit can hide what you’re not capturing.”
