The starting point
John Wiseman is a hospitality lifer. He worked bars from the age of 19, owned a whiskey bar and a nightclub, and did stints at Thrillist and Daily Harvest before he started tinkering with non-alcoholic cocktails at his Gowanus home, after a close friend got sober and had nothing worth drinking. He launched Curious Elixirs in 2015 and ran a Kickstarter in 2016, building one of the first real brands in a category that didn't yet have a name.
The early product was a brewed recipe that couldn't scale. Before JAI, Wiseman had worked with a formulator who wasn't geared toward production: no support on commercialization, and a cost of goods that was through the roof. The brand needed to get from an unscalable recipe to something a commercial co-packer could actually run, repeatedly, with quality.
Curious Elixirs became one of JAI's first official clients, an operations client before JAI even formally offered those services. What Wiseman needed wasn't one thing. It was scalability, precision, supply-chain redundancy, lower COGS, better flavor, new SKUs, and an operations team he could lean on instead of hiring a full-time staff. He chose JAI for the combination that's hard to find in one partner: formulation and operations under one roof, plus the personality, transparency, and communication to make a multi-year relationship work.
A note from Matt
Curious Elixirs runs on a calendar of hard deadlines: Dry January, Sober October, the holidays, summer launches, each tied to social campaigns that can't move. Over the years JAI has hit every one of them. For a seasonal category, the operational discipline to land a run on the date the marketing calendar needs it is as valuable as the formula itself.
What JAI runs, end to end
This is a full-stack engagement. JAI runs every service in the catalog for Curious Elixirs: formulation, co-packer search and onboarding, supply chain and ingredient sourcing, per-SKU COGS modeling, on-site production management, and post-production review. Every JAI tool shows up here too, from the Product Requirements Document and the Co-Packer Evaluation Scorecard to the Finished Product Specification SOP that each co-packer produces against.
The hard part was never copying a cocktail. It was building the signature Curious Elixirs character, the je ne sais quoi that makes the drinks feel like their own thing rather than an imitation of alcohol. That took hundreds of formulation iterations across the line, balancing botanicals, adaptogens, and organic juices into something unique but familiar.
Running across four co-manufacturers raises an obvious question: how do you keep quality consistent when four different facilities are making your product? The answer is a strict production SOP, the ability to make formulation calls on the fly when something shifts on the line, and years of real relationships with both the co-packers and the ingredient suppliers behind them.
The turning point: when a fire tested the supply chain
The clearest proof of what an operations partner is for shows up when something goes wrong. For Curious Elixirs, plenty has, and each time the brand kept shipping.
Crop shortages on key juices have threatened runs; JAI mitigated them with fast reformulation and supplier relationships deep enough to find an alternative quickly. Producer mishaps on the line have been solved on the day of the run, with the technical expertise to make a sound call in the moment instead of scrapping a batch.
The save
A cold-storage facility caught fire and the brand's frozen juice stock was gone. JAI pivoted fast: sourced a new supplier, reformulated every affected SKU with replacement ingredients, and used the moment to drop costs and lock in annual purchase agreements on the way through. A supply-chain disaster became a cost reduction and a more resilient sourcing plan, with no gap on shelf.
That is the difference between a vendor and an operations partner. A vendor delivers when everything goes to plan. A partner keeps your product on shelf when it doesn't.
