Casey O’Neill Birthed A Beverage Revolution
Casey O’Neill Birthed A Beverage Revolution
The "Mother of Truly" hard seltzer fears stagnation more than failure.
Casey O’Neill is part of an increasingly rare group of people who join a company while in college and never leave. Her entry into Boston Beer Company originated during her senior year at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, when she accepted an internship in their Quality Assurance (QA) lab. Fast forward 12 years and she’s now the Director of Product Development for Boston Beer, specializing in their “beyond beer” category. Her already extensive purview over Truly, the second-largest national hard seltzer brand after White Claw, is on the cusp of growing even more — Boston Beer founder and chairman Jim Koch says he expects “beyond beer” will double the company’s business over the next 14 years. (A weird timeframe, but hey, way to aim high!) Big things are coming, and Casey is ready.
Casey wasn’t even supposed to be on the phone with me. She was supposed to be running the London Marathon, after months of training and extensive preparation. But, as with so many other events of the past two (two and a half? three?) years, COVID-19 had other plans.
“Of course, five days before the marathon I actually get COVID for the first time,” she says good-naturedly. “There’s some life lesson in there.”
This buoyant optimism in the face of calamity might crush (or at least dampen) others’ spirits, but not Casey. Throughout our conversation, easy laughs, genuine appreciation for her team, and a go-with-the-flow ethos painted a picture that struck me as very atypical of a director for a multi-billion dollar company, especially one some have dubbed the “Mother of Truly.”
She’s gracious about the title and quick to point to the group that made her vision for hard seltzer become Truly. “I’m proud of the work I’ve done with it, but I also have a team that has made this possible,” she says. “I’ve never worked on anything like this before.”
Relying on a large team for support is something Casey’s intimately familiar with, having grown up in what she calls a “pretty enormous” Irish family on both sides who gathered often for special events, holidays, and most weekends. “From a very young age, that taught me the value of communities and celebrating and not taking small things for granted,” she says. That upbringing also helped spur an early interest in food and drink as conversation starters: how shared meals helped spark debate and inspire discussions.
That interest eventually evolved into the scientific side of beverages, specifically, fermented beverages. Casey’s original path towards medicine began to feel “claustrophobic,” she says. “I hadn’t had the chance to explore what I could do in terms of a career.” When she happened to see a quality assurance lab internship position at Boston Beer Company, she went for it, calling it a “senior-itis decision.” Applying her scientific background and training into an industry she hadn’t considered professionally before opened up a world of possibilities she didn’t realize existed. She had dabbled in beer before, having studied abroad in Belfast, Ireland and going to Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany. “I appreciated beer the way a lot of college kids do,” she laughs. “But I didn’t know it was a thing I could do for a career.”
Turns out, she could, and she excelled quickly. During the course of the internship, she kept an eye on the brewhouse, helping brewers with creative side projects and small batch recipe development. “[That] started to become more and more of not only what I did, but what I was really excited about,” Casey explains. After officially coming on board full-time, she rose in the ranks over the next decade, moving from QA for Sam Adams to R&D product development and eventually QA for all new products under Boston Beer, including new beer releases as well as beyond beer.
If that weren’t time-consuming enough, in 2015 she also began pursuing a Masters degree from Northeastern to hone her business skills. “As part of that program, we were asked to come up with an idea or a new product or process that we thought would be impactful for your company,” she says. When she began looking at the beverage industry, she noticed a few key trends: light beer was losing market share, and in the non-alcoholic realm, value points like “health and wellness” were turning people from sugary sodas to seltzer water. “That volume was going somewhere. But where?” she asked.
A lightbulb went off. “That sparked the idea for hard seltzer,” says Casey.
Hard seltzer became her focus over the next year. By day, she experimented with recipes for what became Truly. By night, she built a business plan which, once implemented, exceeded her wildest expectations. Truly officially hit shelves in 2016 and the hard seltzer revolution was officially in full swing.
After all her success, I wondered what her family did when she told them she wasn’t going to be a doctor and had decided to work in alcohol instead. “Some people were all about it,” she laughs. “I wouldn’t say my parents were, up until Truly.”
Looking back at said success, Casey muses over the unexpected trajectory her life took. “When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a veterinarian,” she says. “In an alternate universe, I would be working with dogs everyday. Instead, I just have dogs!” But, she says, regardless of what she thought she’d be doing versus what she is doing, she always knew that she had a calling to make people’s lives better, whether it be through medicine or social beverages. She hopes others are able to find the same satisfaction she did by taking chances on unexpected paths that provide fulfillment for one’s soul rather than one’s checking account. And when those paths become difficult, that’s where she finds perspective on what success means.
“I’ve reflected a lot on success this week,” she says. “I’ve been training for this marathon for the past four months, and I’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices along that path — I’ve said no to social things and family engagements, I’ve woken up super early before the sun rose, several times a week for weeks and weeks on end. And ultimately, this week, to not be able to actually run that race at the end of it all has really put into perspective how I’ve had to fall in love with the process and not necessarily fall in love with the results, to really appreciate everything I’ve done in that amount of time.”
It’s a mindset she applies to her professional life as well. No product developer is going to make successful products every single time. But to Casey, redefining failure as a learning opportunity helps her define her own success and plan her own future. She keeps a bottle cap on her desk with a quote that (fittingly) has evolved from a text written by Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
Casey, for one, is ready for change, whatever it may bring. “We’re just getting started,” she promises.
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Do you know of a woman or non-binary person working in beverage alcohol who hasn’t seen the spotlight—and should? Nominate them for a future feature!