Southern Indiana couple taking Mom Water nationwide
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA vacation in the Dominican Republic forever changed the lives of a husband and wife from the Dubois County town of Ferdinand. Jill and Bryce Morrison left their lifelong careers in healthcare to bring Jill’s new favorite drink to life with the creation of Mom Water in late 2019. The fruit-infused vodka water is now sold in a dozen states as well as in Gainbridge Fieldhouse in downtown Indianapolis, and the company continues to grow.
The Morrisons discussed the origins and future of Mom Water in an interview on Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick.
“[Mom Water] seems to address a big need in the industry where there’s no carbonation, no sweetener, no calories,” Bryce Morrison said. “Our intentions were to hopefully get it on local shelves and we can drink it and enjoy it, and just one thing led to another. I joke a lot that kind of my ignorance to this whole process is probably what got us through, because I never quite knew what was around the next corner.”
Morrison joked that the beverage industry doesn’t quite know how to categorize Mom Water.
“Officially, we are ready-to-drink,” he said. “Sometimes we’re lumped in with seltzers. Sometimes we’re lumped in with the ready-to-drink cocktails. We kind of fall somewhere in between.”
Mom Water grew from two to nine employees over the last winter, according to the company’s website, and has since grown to 13.
“We were kind of at a crossroads at the end of summer [2021] with how popular it got. We decided to take the jump and go all-in, and once we started doing that, it was a scramble to say, ‘Listen, we want to try to be first to market with this product.’ We got a national contract with our distributor, and then from there, other distributors were contacting us from other states, and we’ve just started to roll out across the U.S.”
Our partners at the IBJ report the company shipped 40,000 cases of Mom Water in 2021. But that number is set to grow exponentially with projections call for 1 million cases to be shipped by the end of this year.
Looking forward, Morrison says their first goal is to have Mom Water available in all 50 states, and they plan to be in 40 states by the end of 2023. He says international distribution is on the horizon as well.