Damian McKinney on setting a “high bar” for low and no drinks brand DioniLife

How many entrepreneurs have fought in wars, had their first business acquired by a multinational, led a global vodka brand and started a new drinks venture with an international presence from the outset?

Not many, is the answer. However, former Royal Marine turned multi-entrepreneur Damian McKinney has.

You could say he has fit quite a lot into his twenty-six-plus years of business building and leadership; to start, there’s McKinney Rogers, the business execution consultancy he founded in 1999 which was acquired by global performance solutions provider GP Strategies in 2017, a CEO position at premium vodka brand, Stoli Vodka, not to mention strategic advisor roles to alcohol behemoths Barcardi and British multinational drinks brand Diageo, also known as the people who own Guinness, Smirnoff, Baileys. The list goes on.

There’s also a slew of awards and recognitions [The Sunday Times ‘Fast Track 100’ Award in 2010 and 2011, and an MBE for military service awarded by Queen Elizabeth II from back in 1986]. He is also the author of two books on business execution and strategy. In short, it has been a productive few decades.

It seems that McKinney has further developed his taste for the drinks industry with his latest venture, DioniLife, a low-and-no beverages portfolio with a mix of in-house developed brands and tactical acquisitions.

He co-founded it with a mission, he says, to help consumers make healthier choices without scrimping on quality, taste and fun.

DioniLife – the low and no drivers

Founded in late 2024, DioniLife, McKinney explains, was the result of both personal experiences and global consumer shifts. “I love everything associated with alcohol. In other words, I like the idea of bringing people together and having a great experience,” he admits. “But there is a negative, and there has always been a negative.”

By this, McKinney refers to the mental health impacts of alcohol abuse, not only on the drinker themselves, but on those around them. It was something that hit home for him when he attended open Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “I am listening to this for the first time,” he recollects of those raw experiences, “and realising that I didn’t really know how bad this was.”

Physical health was also a driver. McKinney, who wears a Fitbit, started to pay close attention to the impact of alcohol on his body, including his heart rate. “There’s all this kind of data there going, okay, this is not quite right.”

Changing consumer preferences following COVID-19 also played a role in the launch of DioniLife. He agrees the lockdown period saw a surge in home-based alcohol consumption, but that it also spearheaded a more moderate drinking culture, too.

The COVID years and changing tastes

“Everybody said, look, everybody’s drinking, make sure you’ve got the stock,” he recalls of drinks brands during the pandemic years. He also thinks drink brands had too much stock on the shelves by 2023.

“If I look back now,” he reflects. “I believe that in 2022, there was a tipping point. I believe the consumer had decided, I want to be healthier. I want to moderate. I don’t want all this alcohol, and I am changing. So they were already ahead of us in the industry.”

“The challenge is if you’re not careful and you do too long in one country, that’s where everybody remembers you.”

This assessment was no gut instinct for McKinney and co, but clear in the statistics. Figures from the IWSR, a global alcohol beverage data and insights platform, estimated the low and no category to be worth around 4 billion in the US by 2028. A YouGov survey released in the UK this year showed that 36% of adult alcohol drinkers now consume low and no-alcohol products too.

By June 2023, the fire was lit for DioniLife, and McKinney left his CEO position at Stoli Vodka to co-found the business because he could “see where the consumer was going”, in other words, in a more mind and body health-conscious, although moderate direction.

DioniLife’s ‘moderate’ customer and quality preference

“We stood back and said, if our target audience is a moderator, it’s not the extremes, and we could go to that moderator and say, I’m going to give you something where there is zero compromise. So, imagine if we could give them something that really helped them fit in and was a great experience, whether it’s a beer, a cocktail or otherwise.”

McKinney, like any hardworking founder, did some market research to find this no-compromise solution himself. He hot-footed it to his nearest supermarket and bought three-hundred-pounds’s worth of alternative alcohol products to test.

“I was told by people in the industry that it wouldn’t taste the same,” says McKinney of alternative alcohol products, “but not to worry because the consumer actually doesn’t want it to taste like a whiskey, for example.”

McKinney discredits that view. “It’s absolute tosh, because ultimately it was because they couldn’t produce a good enough liquid,” he says of some alternative brands. “The industry was compromising everywhere.”

We went international on day one.

The DioniLife co-founders had a strong idea of who their core customer, the moderator, is.

McKinney uses a beer drinker as an example. “They understand what a great beer is, and they enjoy a great beer,” he explains. “So when they walk into an off-license, a Waitrose or otherwise, they’re going in saying, I’m going to go to the beer aisle, I’d like a really great beer, but I’ve also moderated, so I would like a great non-alcoholic one too.”

You might be able to predict that McKinney didn’t love his supermarket-bought selection of alternative alcohol brands. “Out of all those bottles, I threw all of them away in the end.”

DioniLife’s market differentiator, according to McKinney, seems to be its “high bar,” not only in terms of taste and experience, but in its ingredients too. They have opted for health-boosting ingredients and avoided preservatives and artificial flavours. In fact, McKinney kept standards so high that he wrote off $1.2 million of liquid last year because it didn’t make the cut.

“I think as an industry we haven’t helped ourselves by producing liquid that isn’t good enough,” he says of the low-and-no drinks world.

When some entrepreneurs start a business, they opt for steady growth from one location and build from there. For the founders behind DioniLife, the strategy was less conservative. “We went international on day one,” says McKinney.

Starting out as a ‘global’ business

There’s Mash Gang, a London-founded non-alcoholic beer brand which DioniLife acquired in September 2024, which, stateside, is brewed with partners in Milwaukee and Wisconsin: “So as far as the American is concerned, it’s an American-brewed beer.”

Mash Gang is now in four US states and set to go into five. “We’re very focused on the rate at which we do that,” he says. They also produce Mash Gang in the UK. “That’s worked really well,” he comments. “So we aim to continue to build in the UK and US, and drive deep foundations in terms of rate of sale.”

This global strategy also meant they had the recipients to prove their global outlook: “So if you want to build a global business and you approach somebody, say, in Tokyo, they’re going to say, where has this done well? Then you can say, well, I’ve got this in a great bar in New York, and I’ve got it in a great bar in London where it’s doing really well. That really is very powerful.”

Within that growth strategy, there is, McKinney reminds us, a “focus point”. In the US, this meant starting in one state first, Colorado, due to its plethora of breweries. “If you want to test your beer, then go and test it with a lot of other beers.”

We had two completely different views. It was a disaster.

Although McKinney has a warning for brands that don’t expand quickly enough: “The challenge is if you’re not careful and you do too long in one country, that’s where everybody remembers you.”

Despite its global presence, DioniLife avoids having a heavy carbon footprint thanks to its localised brewery bases in the UK and the US. “We’ll never export bottles. So there’s a sustainability agenda here as well,” he explains.

Currently, DioniLife has a twenty-eight-person team, and the co-founders have learned lessons about recruiting the right type of talent for an entrepreneurial set-up. Recruiting experienced talent is one thing, he reminds us, but some aren’t ready to take the salary or bonus cut in favour of greater rewards down the line.

“They go, no, I can’t do that. Okay, well, that’s what being an entrepreneur is. So, my advice is to make sure that you are selling the dream, but they really understand what it’s going to take to roll up their sleeves.”

McKinney isn’t the only founder at DioniLife, so how do multiple founders, and quite likely, their differing personalities, manage to muddle along? The key, McKinney suggests, is alignment of goals. He learnt this from a previous venture with a former co-founder. “Both of us had a different view of what success looked like,” he explains. “I came back from California, I’d just been in a big meeting, and I walked into the office, and he had his fishing rod, he’d been fishing. And he said, I can’t believe that in eighteen months we’ve achieved what I thought would take us ten years. He was clearly having a great time. And I just said, well, we haven’t done anything yet. He said, no, I thought this is what we were doing. We had two completely different views. It was a disaster.”

McKinney doesn’t have a five-year plan for DioniLife; he has a fifteen-year one to “build the business in the right way.” Well, if you look at his healthy timeline with McKinney Rogers that led to a successful exit, clearly, steady can win a race.

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