Vanderbilt grads' Everly drink mix hits bigger shelves

The first call from Publix came in September. The grocery chain wanted the Everly natural ingredient drink mix — created by two recent Vanderbilt University graduates — in 1,000 stores by March.

Everly founders Kyle McCollom and Chris Cole had already placed their product in 60 Whole Foods stores. While the Publix order would demand a drastic increase in production and packaging, they could make this work.

But weeks later, the Publix buyer moved the deadline up by two months. Taking into account their limited manufacturing capabilities at the time, their operations consultant, Andrew Hulsey, instructed them to tell Publix no.

McCollom and Cole found themselves in a tough spot. It would be nearly impossible to fill that order so quickly, but they didn't want to risk losing such a huge client. So the team plowed ahead, determined to supply an estimated 150,000 packages.

A week later, the buyer told them the deadline was actually November, now a month away. Hulsey put his foot down. "That cannot happen, no matter what," he told McCollom.

But then Hulsey was back at his spreadsheets, stitching together a plan. He found a 50,000 square-foot warehouse in Germantown and bought back some of Everly's packages from existing distributors. They hired 20 friends and Craigslist strangers to help them repackage, stamp, stack and ship the powder over a five-day period, and in what they describe as a nearly sleepless hustle, they met the deadline.

"At the last possible moment that we could send them off, we did," said Hulsey, now an Everly co-founder and chief operations officer. And then the next, bigger order came.

Work pays off

Nearly two years into operation, the Everly team has adjusted to the rigorous pace of packaging and production. With the founders still early in their careers, they recognize the magnitude of the opportunity that each shelf space offers. They have traveled across the U.S. showcasing their drink mix at trade shows and Whole Foods stores as they crash on friends' — and an uncle's — couches, and they have driven around town in Penske trucks filled to the brim with drink mix. Now they are seeing those efforts pay off. The product is sold in 1,100 stores in the Southeast and online through Amazon.com, generating $300,000 in sales in 2014.

Part of the demand for Everly comes from young adventurists — hikers, bikers, runners, etc. — eager to have an easy-to-carry drink mix that also adheres to their preferences for natural ingredients. Another core demographic is young or middle-aged women looking for healthy drink alternatives for their kids and for themselves. The three flavors of mixes — Pomegranate Maqui Berry, Green Tea Passion Fruit and Peach Mango — are sweetened with Stevia, have zero calories and advertise a range of vitamins.

And then there is another side to Everly. On the back of the drink packages, the label explains that for every package sold, Everly distributes a packet of oral rehydration salts to a child with a waterborne disease, such as E. coli and cholera. The founders are careful to not use the word "donate," distancing themselves from the buy-one-give-one business models that have drawn criticism for undermining developing economies with free products. They clarify that they are subsidizing production that allows those in rural areas to more easily gain access to salts and thus improve their chances of survival.

Everly works with a Zambia-based nonprofit, ColaLife, and for every box the consumer buys, the company takes part of the proceeds to subsidize the production of the rehydration salts. ColaLife uses the same networks as Coca-Cola, which allows the nonprofit to distribute salts to rural areas. So far, Everly has helped provide 128,000 oral rehydration packets.

"A caretaker in Zambia can find these lifesaving medicines in the same corner shop where she has been buying chips and Coke," Cole said. "She doesn't have to travel three days to the nearest clinic in which time her child might actually pass away."

First business failed

Everly is not the pair's first business or social enterprise. In 2010, McCollom founded a T-shirt printing company that employed former inmates residing at the Dismas House nonprofit in Nashville. He lived at Dismas House for eight months as a junior and kept hearing about the residents' difficulties in finding jobs after serving time. He saw a solution in the demand for T-shirts among campus groups and, along with Cole, developed a printing operation called Triple Thread.

The business created a revenue stream, but operating costs and training proved to be ongoing challenges and it eventually failed. The experience was a formative one, teaching them that a good cause is not enough to carry a business — and that greater things can be accomplished with strong profits.

"(Everly is) a beverage company first," McCollom said. "So many social enterprises, they want to do good in the world, which is awesome. They get distracted (by the social purpose). We've gotten distracted in the past."

McCollom describes Everly as the Clif Bar for drink mixes, inspired in part by his own frustration that such a product did not exist. As the story goes, McCollom was on a canoe trip in Minnesota as a college student and hydrated with water and drink mixes. He read the packaging that detailed aspartame and Red 40 and other ingredients he did not want to be consuming, but could not find alternatives.

Meanwhile, Cole spent a month working at a clinic in Bangladesh, where he learned about the need for oral rehydration salts, and two years later, in the early hours of the morning, the two friends put these concepts together to form Everly — a drink mix with natural ingredients that also helped address a global health problem.

"We stayed up all night crunching numbers and thinking about the impact we could create if this thing scaled," Cole said.

It is their story and their product that has gotten the attention of investors — friends, family and angel funds. A 2013 Kickstarter campaign yielded $52,000, nearly three times more than their goal, and they raised $200,000 more when they entered Whole Foods. Most recently, the team raised $500,000 from NueCura Partners, Fortnum Capital and Incrowd Capital in Nashville and Chattanooga Renaissance Fund.

McCollom said Everly's next goal is to expand sales beyond the Southeast and become a recognizable, leading brand nationally. "Our goal is to be the number one natural drink mix brand," he said.

Reach Jamie McGee at 615-259-8071 and on Twitter @JamieMcGee_.