How to use seasn with Ben Branson

Remember a time when asking for a non-alcoholic beverage meant getting a soda or an apple juice? Well, thanks to the brain behind Seedlip, there are now stores filled with No-ABV and Low-ABV spirits. It’s not often one can invent a whole new category of drinking, but our guest did, and now he is coming for bitters, watch out.

My friend and former Lush Lifer Ben Branson was on the program more than 5 years ago and since that time, he is not only the Founder of Seedlip – the first ever non-alcoholic spirit, but also the Pollen Projects, the non-profit The Hidden 20% & the host of The Hidden 20% podcast. He is also the genius behind the new drinks flavoring, seasn.

There are two seasns right now in the UK (and coming soon to the US) LIGHT and DARK – each born to make your drinks even tastier. LIGHT brightens up your lighter drinks and DARK adds a rich spicier note to your darker drinks. But I don’t want to give it all away. But I don’t want to give it all away. The story of seasn is Ben’s to tell.

---

Watch it on YouTube

Cocktail of the Week: seasn Margarita & the non-alc seasn Margarita

or try this non-alc one!

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Ben. Just remember that I own the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of Lush Life podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as my right of publicity. So if you want to use any of this, please email me!

This transcript is sponsored by:

Susan: Well, it is so good to have you on the show. Can you believe the last time we sat down to talk to each other was 2018? In fact, I actually think it was 2017, because it became live January 2018. It must have been, 2017.

Ben: Wow, I mean, Seedlip was just a baby.

Susan: I re-listened to it, and everyone who’s listening to this should go back and listen to it to hear the beginnings of a huge story. Number 1, of defining a whole new category of drinking. Okay, that’s on your shoulders. the fact that you had two of the Seedlip iterations and you were yet to try to make the third. You were making the third and you were having a tough time and you said, I shouldn’t have told anyone that I was doing it because it’s not done yet.

Ben: Yes, now there’s four. So yes, two became four. Seedlip Grove.

Susan: Yes.

Ben: Simplest flavor profile to create. Anyone could imagine different types of citruses and lemongrass and ginger being yummy. But trying to get the technical side of citrus and oils and molecule sizes and filters. Yes, real pain.

Susan: Oh, I’m sure. Just by saying molecule sizes. I’m sure that’s a pain. Well, again, the last time we sat down, you said, I had found this quote that you said you wanted to distil all of Shakespeare. I know we’re going to talk about your new bitters.

Ben: Okay!

Susan: From the time of pre Seedlip Grove to now, can you answer that question? Have you distilled all of Shakespeare, plus you have to catch us up on what you’ve been doing since then.

Ben: Yes. Thanks, Susan So I haven’t distilled all of Shakespeare, but I have moved house, and where I have moved house to is special for two reasons. One that is actually loosely connected to William Shakespeare. There was a rumor, that William Shakespeare was buried in the grounds of where we’ve bought this new house.

Probably 15 years ago they sent a team of excavators like forensic investigators, excavators in to try and see if they could find William Shakespeare’s body, which they didn’t. But there’s my only connection now to William Shakespeare. So no, I haven’t distilled the works of Shakespeare, but I know that back in 2017, actually from 2013 onwards, I was kind of interested in distilling anything.

I have distilled paper and I have distilled a book, but I haven’t made my way through the works of Shakespeare. So, we spoke in 2017. I mean, Seedlip was what two and a half years old. We were probably in, I don’t know, maybe 15 countries then we took it to about 35 countries by 2019 and August 2019, I sold the majority to Diageo.

I’m still a shareholder now in 2024, still involved, still a founder. I’m called a living founder, which is kind of a strange thing, but I guess when your other founders are Arthur Guinness and Charles Tanqueray, for example, who are dead. I am slightly more unique in that sense in that I am alive.

Susan: Yes. It’s better to be a living founder than a dead founder.

Ben: I think so! Seedlip, it feels like it’s been sort of a tale of two halves, really the half leading up to acquisition and then the half since and obviously the pandemic is as part of that. I am not carrying it all on my shoulders anymore. And that feels great.

I feel like I’ve made the right decision by bringing Diageo into it and getting an insight into how that amazing machine works and how scale works and how you manage a portfolio of loads of different brands under one business unit. So, yes, that’s happened. Then, really, I’ve been working on seasn since 2017.

By the time we will have spoken later in 2017, I would have already been in my kitchen ordering all kinds of, God knows what, herbs and spices and seaweeds, etc. Playing around and making individual glycerine extractions of lots of different flavors, really with no aim in mind other than to play and experiment.

Fast forward to now, and we’ve just launched a pair of cocktail bitters called seasn, which is only in London, UK at the moment. In June, we launch in New York and the US, which is the biggest cocktail bitters market in the world. So that’s exciting.

Susan: We’ll get to seasn.

Ben: Sorry.

Susan: No apologies.

Ben: Let me not get carried away.

Susan: No, get as carried away as you want to. But before we talk about that, and this is a big question, and I did not prepare you for this one yet. When you look back and, or you look back and think about the market today. Can you believe that?

And I do give you the credit of creating this whole non-alcoholic category of spirits. I mean, you really were the first and now there’s so many out there and young kids they’re choosing non-alcoholic beverages, I definitely choose non-alcoholic beverages when I go out. You’ve created this.

Do you go, wow, I can’t believe I did that. Or I can’t believe it opened this or of course it would have, unlocked the gate and it all it all came out. I mean, is it hard to look at it as a whole big picture?

Ben: I love looking at massive things that I can’t quite understand necessarily. I just look at it probably in three or four dimensions. And the first dimension is I didn’t set out to start a business and I didn’t set out to start a category or invent a process or create some sort of movement.

I didn’t. I was driven by wanting to just play around with herbs and spices and learn how to distil something. Nothing to do with drinks. I look at it firstly from the accidental businessperson sort of dimension. And then I fast forward right through to back then we have Beck’s Blue and O’Doul’s and that’s it.

And that was it. Right. We didn’t have a non-alc category and there were no menus and there were no products on shelves, no influencers or podcasts or awards or events or magazines or stores or bars or nothing,

Susan: Nothing.

Ben: Absolutely nothing. When I then look at the trajectory of 2015 to now nine years, and I go, well, I reckon there’s a thousand new non-alcoholic brands out there across beers, wine, spirits, and functional is the four simple dimensions that I look at it through, and this category in only 10 markets is worth north of 13 billion.

On the one hand, I’m like, wow, that’s a real thing. That’s not just me and Seedlip as it was for the first three years when there’s nothing else out there. And we were doing all the heavy lifting. That’s thinking right now that there are loads of people around the world drinking non-alc products.

There are loads of great non-alc cocktails in menus. There are loads of bottles on bars. There are loads of founders working night and day pushing this, agenda. There are range reviews happening just for non-alc. There are buyers getting job titles of buyer for non-alc now. That’s what you, that’s what you do.

Or there’s people developing liquids or building massive machines spinning cone technology and huge machines or signing off checks as AB InBev, I think, just did last week, that they’re going to spend $40, $50 million on non-alc production capability in the UK. Somebody’s signing off that kind of money and you’re like, wow, that is.

That’s crazy, but, and there is a but, because I am sort of continually dissatisfied, Susan, basically. It’s still really early days, the quality out there is very varied there’s some brilliant people doing brilliant things. But there’s also some rubbish, and there’s also some people doing things for the wrong reasons, and trying to make a quick buck, and jumping on the bandwagon.

But for a category to, and I don’t have any other reference points, maybe I should, but for a category to have gone from whatever sort of beer volume, non-alc beer volumes were back in 2015, to now, with have what we have, and to be able to accelerate at the speed that it can accelerate globally, maybe.

Not one market and 10 years later, another market happening globally. Yes, it’s both so exciting because it feels like we’re just at the beginning. Most days I’m incredibly optimistic about this space. And then you try a rubbish product, or you see someone taking shortcuts, or you’re, nah, that’s not really very helpful for the category.

But yes, for the most part, I feel like I’m just getting started. I’m 10 years into knowing about non-alc, and I reckon I’ve thought more about non-alc than anyone else in the world.

Susan: Yes, I’m sure!

Ben: I might not be the expert, but I definitely spent more time working on and thinking about non-alc and how people socialize and psychology of ordering a drink and all that good stuff. I feel like it’s only just getting started.

Susan: Now, do you feel that same passion now for bitters?

Ben: Yes, I feel a different passion for bitters. But very similar in the sense that non-alcohol wasn’t a thing and people didn’t know what it was or why it was needed or why it was interesting to people or maybe why it had just gone totally under the radar as an opportunity.

Then, people definitely didn’t know about distilled non-alcoholic spirits and the education that was needed there. There was a big job to be taken seriously there and to be credible and for me to learn about the drinks industry and how you even build a drinks business globally. So that was a big kind of paradigm.

With cocktail bitters, it’s a different challenge. The challenge with cocktail bitters is there, is a category.

Susan: Of course. I guess I wanted to re-form that. Of course you have the passion. We know that. You had said last time we spoke that you said you wanted to imagine, re-imagine things for the modern age.

Ben: Yes, and cocktail bitters is exactly that, Susan, in the sense that you’ve got 5,000 years of bitters, medicinal, history, and you have got one of the most significant monopolies in any drinks category in the world to go up against, right?

So, you could say there’s a sort of David and Goliath type storyline to non-alc versus alc, right? Like the little guys and the big incumbent. And then you’ve got the, I see the similarities with seasn being the David and Angostura being the Goliath, and not that I’m not doing this because I want to try and steal from Angostura, or I don’t want Angostura to grow. Part of the reason I’m doing this is because nobody should have 92 percent market share, right?

Susan: No, that’s kind of unfair.

Ben: I’m doing this because I feel like cocktail bitters are this incredible category and these incredibly underestimated liquids that, forget the ABV, in terms of what they can do to a drink and how they can elevate or season it or brighten it or balance it or add more complexity like they’re incredible and you can do that with this small concentrated amount of liquid.

Amazing, really easy to use, three dashes, a few dashes that’s what you’re talking about to add loads of flavor and this wonderful kind of salt and pepper functionality. They are called for in the recipes of 30% of the world’s top 50 cocktails. You look at the most popular cocktails in the world, the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, they call for bitters.

I’m interested by the fact that these magic liquids, have stayed within the bartending world. Yep.

Susan: I actually was going to say that I make some drinks at home. I’m certainly no bartender, even though I’ve been interviewing people for about almost 10 years now, I still really don’t know what to do with them. I know it calls for it.

I would say home bartenders might, or a person who’s making a drink at home who’s not into the whole home bartending thing probably has a bottle of Angostura at home and really has never used it or doesn’t really know.

You say salt and pepper but it’s like, But I’m not sure really what that is. You know what I mean? Okay, I got it. salt and pepper. How is it going to change my drink? And will I have wasted all that spirit by adding something in. So those are the questions that I would have.

Go back to a little bit of the origin, you said you’re always playing with this stuff, but why, what was it where you said OKAY, I’m going to take this bitters thing and to a different level, or I’m going to start working on it.

Ben: There are a few different observations, I guess, that I made. This took me six years maybe five years to get to, right? And it wasn’t my number one focus, but this was a gradual process of, one of questions of, about the cocktail bitters category of why does Angostura have such a big share?

Why is the repertoire so limited in terms of really in five or six classic cocktails?

Susan: Wait, wait a sec. Before that, did it just pop into your head one day?

Ben: No, we were on our own, and we wanted to make great Seedlip cocktails. So, I was like, okay, what else can we use? What other tools have we got? Okay, maybe I could make some glycerine based, so non-alcoholic one. I made some marmalade; I made a blend of different extracts of a marmalade bitters and a chai bitters.

We’d use them at events, and we’d use them in Seedlip cocktails, and we’d give bottles to bartenders, and it was just a little bit of a side experiment, as if we were kind of making syrups, or other ingredients that we could use in a Seedlip cocktail, because we couldn’t buy them, so we had to make them.

It was another way of me indulging my fascination with the fact there’s 47, 000 edible plants on this planet, and I would love to taste every single one of them, right? Cocktail bitters usually and historically are way more complex blends of ingredients, i.e. we have six to eight different ingredients in a Seedlip.

Well, in seasn, we’ve got 15, plus it’s about ramming it full of lots of flavor, and lots of dimension rather than a base spirit, for example. I made these different blends and I carried on with Seedlip and it was really only in the last few years that I then picked the project back up in my head and was, Oh, there’s still a space for this.

Why is Angostura so dominant? Why do bitters brands usually have so many different products? I didn’t understand why I needed lavender bitters and celery bitters and chocolate mole bitters. I didn’t understand why I would want so many different ones.

I was just like, oh, I can understand why now, because bartenders, when they’re just they’ve got their back bar, they can have lots of different products there. They can experiment, they can get into way more detail than the person at home can. Isolating celery, for example, is what they can do. I was, ah, but that’s not necessarily how the public thinks.

So, maybe if I think about it from a simple public perception. There’s these weird little bottles and bars, and they get dashed in, and I don’t really know what they do, and I don’t really know what they taste like, and I don’t really know how they work and there’s so many of them. How do you choose which one you need? I don’t really want to buy one product for one kind of drink. I’m not going to drink a drink all the time that needs lavender bitters. 

I was like, okay, I’m going to break the world of drinks into two. I feel like we have these lighter, brighter drinks where it might be spring or summer. That’s everything from just soda or lemonade or tonic or gin and tonic or it’s a sour or a martini or a margarita. We’ve got gin, tequila, vodka, lighter vermouth, that kind of profile, which we have in food too with salads and white fish.

Then we have this darker profile of drinks and that’s everything from your dark spirits, your bourbons, your cognacs, your rums, your Manhattans, Old fashioneds, gingers, cola, those stronger, darker, richer flavors. Also, we have in food, game or curries, and meat. I was just really simplistically going, I’m going to make a product around this lightness, and I’m going to make a product around this darkness, and it’s not going to be about needing lots of individual different flavors.

It’s going to be two blends and there’s a light one, and that’s for your lighter style drinks or food, and there’s a dark one, and that’s for your darker style drinks food, and I can make them 0. 0% because they don’t need alcohol to do that job. I can make them vegan because I’m going to intentionally do that.

They’re non-GMO. I’m not adding any sugar.  but I can, what I call approach this from first principles, so I can build something up rather than kind of taking something down, if that makes sense.

Susan: Yes!

Ben: So, we’ve ended up with seasn LIGHT and seasn DARK and they’re really, really different. But they’re great in your drinks. Whether you’re making your soda or sparkling water just more interesting and flavorful, or adding it to your whiskey highball, or adding it to those simple mixed drinks that you can make at home. It was all about trying to a give bartenders and chefs amazing tools that are just so intense and full of flavor from a modern relevant brand and trying to then show the public how easy and cool it can be when you just add a few dashes of this liquid you can make tastier drinks.

Susan: So here we have the LIGHT. We have LIGHT and DARK. If you’re having tonic or martini or margarita, say you’re using seasn LIGHT, what do you hope, I guess taste is so subjective, but what you hope that someone adding LIGHT would get from it or what flavor profile, that people could look out for?

Ben: First thing to do if you get a bottle of seasn is try them neat on a teaspoon.

Susan: Okay.

Ben: That is the best way to get under the skin. And secondly, then try it in some sparkling water to lengthen it, that’s one place to start. The second place is in seasn LIGHT we’ve got lime and grapefruit and rosemary and Sancho pepper and sea salt and kombu, which is a seaweed.

We’ve got this incredible ingredient that is a compound from the mint plants that is left over after you extract menthol. It’s called Cis 3 Hexanol. It’s the most unnatural sounding name, but it is a totally natural compound, and it is fresh cut grass all day long. It’s the most important ingredient in seasn LIGHT. So seasn LIGHT is the brightener.

A margarita with its lime and its salt is nice and bright and fresh. seasn LIGHT added to it takes it to another level. This is really spring, bright, summer’s day, green, fresh, bright. It actually foams so you make a sour with this, you don’t even need any egg white, which is pretty cool.  That was a happy accident actually, that was not designed into creating the liquids. You don’t need to use chickpea water, or you don’t need to use an egg white. All kind of helpful.

Susan: Even with just three dashes?

Ben: Even with just three dashes. Yes.

Susan: Oh, that’s cool. Now you’ve listed a lot of the things that are in it. How hard was it? We’ll get into the dark in a sec, but how hard was it to choose for both? You know, if you’ve got, 42, 000 flavors out there, how did you choose them? I mean, how long, or should I say how long was the trial and error for it?

Ben: I worked with about 80 different plants. There was no way I could get my hands on 47,000 to muddle through! I experimented with about 80 and my process was really simple. It was literally as simple as taking an A3 bit of paper and draw a line down the middle and start organizing my thoughts around taste and flavor in terms of ingredients. I started putting together basically hypothesis blends. 

With seasn LIGHT, although they’re not in there. I had everything from celery, elderflower, parsley, thyme, mint, spearmint, all those bright, really fresh, uplifting kind of flavors were all on the light side, including all of the ones, the lime and the grapefruit and all the ones that we’ve got in there.

I see flavor in color. This was the same with Seedlip Spice and Grove and Garden, they start out as colors and smells. That’s been the same with seasn LIGHT and seasn DARK. There’s a reason why this label is electric green, neon green and there’s a reason why seasn DARK has

got that really bright, vibrant red. I saw them in those dimensions. It was just about taking the time to go through the hypothesis blends, basically and see what was working and what wasn’t working.

Susan: Now, what was on the list for seasn DARK?

Ben: Yes. So seasn DARK, it was totally different, but more in the kind of Angostura aromatic kind of camp. I was an opportunity to go, if you’ll indulge my color theory, red-dy brown, those forest floor-y colors. So, we’ve got cinnamon.

Susan: That was going to be the first one that I was going to say – cinnamon, cumin, tobacco…

Ben: …star anise, black pepper, smoked cherry wood, kola nuts, red chili. We’ve got some cocoa in there, some orange, what else did I have on the list? Cascara, tonka, vanilla, cherry, I can’t even remember. Mushroom, although we have got some, yes, a bit of porcini mushroom extract in there to bring a bit of that umami chewiness through. The really fun bit actually just thinking about the flavor map and the list of ingredients to try and play around with.

Susan: Yes, since we’re on seasn DARK, if you were having ginger ale or your Old Fashioned, what do you hope would ne those adjectives that you get from it?

Ben: Yes, the opposite of bright. Ginger ale is quite neutral actually. It’s soft, it’s not a ginger beer and it’s not a cola. It’s not heavy spice. By putting seasn DARK into ginger ale, you’re lifting some of those ginger notes and carrying them and pushing them forward, which is delicious.

You’re providing this beautiful aromatic blanket over the top that actually becomes quite strong. It’s quite a strong taste. You’re turning this, what I would call quite a neutral mixer into a proper drink and it’s the same with seasn LIGHT and tonic mixers. They are mixers, right? They’re there to mix with and usually they’re potentially just half the drink. Having something else to really elevate them can really transform them into being a proper drink. seasn DARK and ginger ale are match made. It’s a wonderful combination.

Susan: And the Old Fashioneds, Manhattans, Rum Old Fashioneds, the drinks you think work best with seasn DARK?

Ben: Rum Old Fashioneds, bourbon Old Fashioneds, a whiskey highball. So literally just whiskey soda, three dashes of the seasn DARK, a nice citrus garnish. Yes, obviously I’m biased, but it’s really simple when we know the behavior of when we love hot sauce or chili sauce or chili oil at all. Those finishing touches of dashing or drizzling that we know really make and finish a dish. It’s tapping into some of that behavior, especially for foodies. Especially for people who love their food.

Susan: Absolutely. Now what’s with the three dashes?

Ben: What do you mean?

Susan: How do you know between two and four, only three?  Is it because that’s what people usually do or definitely the fourth takes it to a different place, or the two is just not enough? I know it seems like a silly question, but it’s always three dashes.

Ben: There are a few reasons.  Number one, my favorite number is three, right? I have three kids, three dogs. I’m obsessed with the number three. So, there’s one element there. Number two, in doing my research, I couldn’t find anything consistent. I had the consumer in mind here of you can go less, you can go more, but let me at least give you a guide.

Let me at least give you a starting point. We think three dashes is all you need. You want to put five, six, in there? Absolutely no problem with me, right? You’ll go through a bottle faster and that means that’s happy days for us. So, but rather than go, oh and this recipe is two and in this recipe is eight and then people are confused, I start with three dashes. And see how you go.

You want more flavor? Add more. You want less? Okay, next time make it with a little bit less. Don’t do drops. That was the only thing. Make sure they’re proper dashes. Not a little drop.

Susan: All right. Now I want to get to the design because you’re from an art background. I know that from having interviewed you before and your gorgeous, gorgeous bottles that I always point out and say, everyone, look at these bottles are so gorgeous. I love the Seedlip bottles.

Ben: Thank you.

Susan: I have to say they look like bitters bottles, not that I don’t love it, by the way, I do love it. I love your design and I love the logo. It’s beautiful. but, when you there are a billion bottles and bottle types to pick out, what was the reason for this one? And calling it seasn? Tell me about a little bit about the marketing of it. I find these stories really fascinating for

bottles and choices.

Ben: Everything was intentional. Number one, the four biggest cocktail bitters brands in the world. Guess what? All have this bottle. I believe it’s the best format for usage, for dashing, in terms of weight, in terms of ergonomics, in terms of shelf presence.

Really importantly, we didn’t want to do the droppers. We didn’t want to make fiddly. So, the pourer, the dasher in the top that delivers about a millilitre per dash, is also used by the four biggest cocktail bitters brands in the world. So that was very deliberate. Second point, we have a black sprayed bottle, sprayed bottle for three reasons. You can see, I think about this kind of stuff, Susan.

Susan: I know there’s a story in there.

Ben: Number one, it’s sprayed black for UV protection, right? There’s a really functional reason, it protects our liquids. These liquids have got a really good shelf life like two years once opened because they’re so concentrated. We want to protect that, so it provides that protection. Number two, I didn’t see any other black bitters bottles out there and thought it provided really great contrast and stood out. And number three it has nods and I don’t mind people saying this that it looks like soy sauce.

Susan: Oh?

Ben: You find quite a lot of either clear soy sauce bottles with very dark liquid. Just a nod to some of that condiment space. I thought it was quite interesting. And then obviously we’ve got the white canvas and the black canvas for LIGHT and DARK. There are 803 words written on the Angostura label, and I know that because I counted them all!

We have 153 words on our whole label and half of those are mandatory, right? Half of those is our nutritional panel information, all that stuff that you find down the sides. But I really wanted to take people on this journey of being really simple. That’s why it’s called seasn, because that’s what you do with it. That’s why it exists. That’s what we want people to do with it. And then LIGHT and DARK, really, really simple. They are cocktail bitters!

Then we’ve chosen the martini kind of coupe glass in the shape of a plant. And that leaf in green is the leaf from the shrub that is our bittering agent, the really bitter shrub that we use is called King of Bitters, which is a wonderful name. It comes from India and it’s, as the name suggests, super, super bitter. 

We wanted to just pick that out in the design. Yes, hopefully it’s a simple, to the point, piece of design because we didn’t want clutter and we didn’t want a whole load of information for people to have to wade through.

Susan: And I love these designs. I love the drawing. It’s very sweet.

Ben: Yes, the little icons and the tasting panel – how green, how zesty, how bitter, how salty. There’s my signature on there. I mean, that’s taking up way too much furniture and way too much real estate on the label there. But yes, we talk about being bold as a brand, and foodie, and helpful, and playful.  They are just drinks, and they can be fun, and dashing, and making a mess, and trying things should be fun.

We want to be helpful, and this is for foodies, and people who really care about food and flavor and spices and herbs and seasoning. and we started at the top again and seasn’s in the Fat Duck and it’s in all these Michelin star restaurants in the UK.

We’re going to do that same model, very similar to Seedlip of starting at the top and working with so many amazing people that were part of that Seedlip journey, but chefs, particularly. People who really, really understand flavor and taste and ingredients and seasoning.

I love bartenders, but I also love chefs’ palates when they can just treat something in such isolation, as an ingredient.  Yes, it’s been, it’s been a great start. I mean, we’re only a few months old. This is like back to the beginning. It’s back to being a startup. It’s back to the messy, intense, stressful. but I kind of wouldn’t have it any other way.

Susan: You talk about chefs, is there a way that you see it working with food? Because sometimes I put the other people’s stuff on ice cream. I haven’t had any ice cream lately, but the DARK on ice cream or the LIGHT on sorbet, lemon sorbet or something, do you have any guide to what you should start that with?

Ben: The very simple answer is Oh my god, you can put it in anything you want. Food, drinks, whatever. I put seasn LIGHT in my pesto. I’ve tried it in macarons. I’ve tried it in a sort of vinaigrette, salad dressing, yummy. I’ve tried seasn DARK in chili, Bolognese, and

baking with it because it’s got some of that baking spice kind of quality to it.

Susan: Maybe like brownies.

Ben: Yes, brownies, you talk about putting it on ice cream, I was like, oh yes, seasn DARK in an affogato! The big switch for me or the big difference between seasn and Seedlip was with Seedlip there was a huge education piece and there was a massive brand building piece. This needed to be a brand that was aspirational and really quality, and that people thought was cool to be seen drinking and wanted to have in their hand and wanted to proudly show off.

seasn’s an ingredient and actually we’re not the star. You know, it’s not about the seasn brand. It’s about seasn, the ingredient and the mindset of,” great. I’m going to stick this in loads of different stuff.”  Collaborations and working with other brands. We want to be in their drinks. We want to be in your events and your menus. Rather than it being, “And here’s the seasn bar, and here’s the seasn stand, here’s the seasn activation,” I’d much rather we go and be in everybody else’s stands and activations and go and be friends with everyone else rather than it all being, “hey, here’s our little bottle and we’ve got to try and do all the work.”

Susan: Do you feel that you’ve done that? You’ve done that process before and that would just be doing that process again whereas this is a completely different process as in not doing all that stuff that you just talked about getting the show…

Ben: Yes, I think if I was doing another Seedlip, then yes, I’d go, well, I’m going to do the Seedlip playbook and we’re going to do it that way. I think for seasn as a business, it needs to find its model and its growth model.

Susan: Which I think would be much more exciting for you because you’ve already done the other.

Ben: Yes, although you could kind of go, oh yes, if you’ve done it before, it’d be much easier the next time. I’m not necessarily the one takes the path of least resistance. Actually, this is also our first project, and we have another two that we’re going to launch in the next 18 months.

So, whilst doing seasn, we’re also building a production unit near where Shakespeare was meant to be buried at the Newhouse and we’re making another load of liquids that are not out there and have never been made before and have been in my brain since actually before Seedlip.

So, yes, I’m really also interested in being efficient and we’re trying to spin lots of plates and get out there and experiment and learn and test and adapt and evolve. I didn’t take Seedlip to the US for two years and we’re going in our first six months. That might be absolutely madness,

Susan: But you have, I mean, people know you, they’re like, we trust him.

Ben: Yes, of course that helps. Yes, that helps. That does.

Susan: But there’s also the flip side that if you created something that someone didn’t like, then it would be like, Oh boy. So, it’s always a dare. It’s daring.

Ben: Yes. I mean, it’s 9 out of 10 food and drink businesses fail. So, the odds are totally stacked against you anyway. It’s a deluded thing to think that you can beat the odds.

Susan: Right. But you have, and what a great way to end, but you’ve beat the odds.

Ben: I have once.

Susan: You beat the odds once. Woo! Hugely usually beat the odds.

Ben: Well, yes. I still get excited. My daughter came home from she’s been to London with her friend and her friend’s parents. I think they’ve been to see the theatre maybe in London and she came back and ‘ll be, how, yes, how’d you get on?

The first thing she told me was not about the theatre. It was, we went to a restaurant, and they had three bottles of Seedlip on the back bar. And that still makes me excited. I still am always going to walk into a bar or a restaurant or a hotel or a drink shop and do a really fast scan of whether they’ve got Seedlip there. If they have amazing, when you’re my four-and-a-half-year-old, we’re in the local farm shop, this weekend just gone, and she spies bottles of Seedlip and she says there’s daddy’s drink and that still feels great.

Susan: Well, your kids aren’t the only ones. When I’m in the States, because I’ve interviewed so many people who’ve created things, I usually take pictures and send it. I’ve done this with a few people and am like, “oh my God, this is at my local.” And they say, “Yes, I know. We’ve been in the US for two years. It’s our number one market, Susan.” I remember saying to someone, “I may not be part of your family, but you’re a part of my family because you’ve been on my show and I know your history.” and he’s like, “No, no, you’re right. I understand.”

I also look out for the things, and I go, look at that bottle. As I said, I told you, I sent bottles of Seedlip to Italy because someone said we don’t have great non-alcoholic beverages there. I was like, well, “You got to have Seedlip. Let me see if I can send it. Oh yes, I can, plus your gorgeous cocktail book for Seedlip.” Now they can make, they make it. And actually, the last time I was in Italy, we made this whole jug on Seedlip cocktails.

Ben: Yes, no excuse then!

Susan: Yes, so now I’ll tell them they need to have seasn.

Ben: Now they need seasn.

Susan: Yes, exactly so this was great. It was so great to catch up. Hopefully it won’t be another six, seven years the next time. And if it is, I know you will be creating something equally as fabulous.

Ben: It better not be that long because otherwise my next two projects have really, really gone badly wrong because they’ve taken, yes, a lot, lot, lot, lot longer. I will absolutely keep you posted, Susan, because there’s more exciting things coming down the track.

Susan: I’m sure there are. Well, thank you again. It was lovely speaking to you and spending a couple, an hour or so learning about seasn LIGHT and DARK and I’ve been using them, and they are delicious. I’m a tonic drinker and it’s just been a whole different tonic. So, thank you.

Ben: Thank you.

Download the audio file