Gorilla Lemonade Roars Into Mass Production

Brian Burkett-Thompson heard the words “4,800 boxes” and
shook his head in wonder at how his homegrown beverage
business was about to take off.
Burkett-Thompson made the remark while seated this week at
a conference room table at Unicorr Packaging Group on
Sackett Point Road in North Haven minutes before that first
run of boxes of fresh-fruit-flavored Gorilla Lemonade would
commence on the manufacturing floor one level below.
“It’s happening,” Burkett-Thompson remarked.
Along with partner Kristen Threatt, Burkett-Thompson
launched the New Haven-based lemonade line earlier this
year as part of their Eat Up Foundation. The nonprofit has as
its goal “to work with the people and organizations in our local
community to help feed those in need.”
Over six weeks this summer, Unicorr’s design team
transformed a local artist’s representation of Gorilla
Lemonade, hand-drawn in Sharpies on one side of a carton,
into a design that both cohered with Eat Up’s vision and met
Unicorr’s manufacturing parameters. Now, with boxes ready
and distribution deals in place, Gorilla Lemonade is poised to
hit stores statewide.
Since its founding earlier this year, Gorilla Lemonade has
taken New Haven by storm, with celebrities and public
officials alike singing its praises.

The plan, Threatt said, is to make Gorilla Lemonade into
a global phenomenon, with 50 percent of each bottle sold
going to the Eat Up Foundation to support its initiatives, which
have included backpack drives, Thanksgiving food drives for
people experiencing homelessness, and Christmas
toy drives. 
“We’re going to give the world a taste of New Haven and help
our city at the same time,” Threatt said.

Gorilla Lemonade arose out of repeated requests from
customers to serve drinks with the dishes from the duo’s Eat
Up Catering business, which offers Italian-inspired soul food.
“A lot of our customers told us they love lemonade,” Threatt
said. “So Brian got in his kitchen and worked his magic, and
here we are.”
They chose the gorilla as a “symbol of strength, intelligence,
and gentleness, a special combination that is all too rare in
the world. We are strong Black African-American men, but
also gentle to the needs of our people.” 
On Feb. 25, they released the Gorilla Lemonade beverage
line in lemon, pineapple, strawberry, and blueberry-flavored
bottled beverages at Andalouse Freshop on Howe Street. It
took off, with sales in the first three weeks nearing 3,000
bottles, according to Threatt.
The following month, with Andalouse owner Ammar Chekhess
donating all proceeds from lemonade sales to Eat Up, Threatt
and Burkett-Thompson used those profits to help a woman
displaced by a fire. (Click here to listen to an interview with
the pair on WNHH FM as the business took off.)

An endorsement from food critic and television personality
Daymon Patterson (Daym Drops), star of Netflix’s “Fresh,
Fried, and Crispy,” followed. At the opening of Phillys
Cheesesteak on Chapel Street in June, Mayor Justin Elicker
was pictured slaking his thirst with a bottle of Gorilla
Lemonade. Then came a letter from U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.
“Your drink might end up being the hit of the summer,”
she wrote.
In the midst of all this, Threatt and Burkett-Thompson were
working to get the lemonade out on a larger scale. 
“We weren’t missing a beat,” Threatt said. “We were pushing
for everything to drop in August, but we were also learning
that it takes time to get something right.”
In early summer, they connected with Joe Evans at Norwich
Beverage Company , a juice manufacturer in Norwich.
“Joe understood our vision right away,” said Threatt. “He told
us what we had to do to get onto the shelves of stores.”
They followed his advice. Soon after, they signed on with
Jogue, Inc. , a full-service flavor company based in
Plymouth, Michigan.
“The biggest challenge to a small operation like Gorilla
Lemonade becomes: How do you scale up in such a way that
you can bring that product from something you make in your
kitchen to something that can be on shelves of stores?” said
Jogue regional account executive Rick Gienapp. “That’s
where we come in.”
The samples of ingredients that Jogue sent back “tasted very
natural,” Threatt said. “Even more natural than when we were
doing it out of Brian’s kitchen.”
After going with Label One in Old Saybrook, per Evans’
recommendation, for bottle labels, the duo reached out to
Unicorr. “Joe plugged us in with them too,” Threatt said. 

The first meeting with Unicorr happened on Thursday, July 7,
at Maison Mathis on Elm Street.
Before then, “we knew we wanted a certain look for the box,”
Threatt recalled. “We needed to have something to
show them.”
A few days before the meeting, he and Burkett-Thompson
contacted longtime friend Tyreece Gary, a graphic artist with
New Haven’s TLG Artistry . The three have attended the same
church, United House of Prayer for All People, and played in
a band, “The Kings of Harmony,” for years. 
“Kris had a box with him,” recalled Gary, who created the Eat
Up logo and the label on the Gorilla Lemonade bottle. “He
said he was going to meet up with some people in a few days
and he needed a design. He told me to take this brown box
and go crazy.” 
Shifting between Sharpies and Prismacolor markers, “I drew
everything out on this brown box,” Gary said. “Ideas were just
flowing to me. I’m telling myself: ‘Finish the preliminary
sketches and the gorilla on the same day,’ and the next day,
I colored all the rest.”
Threatt was thrilled. “I was like ‘bro, man, what?’” he recalled.
“It was beautiful.” 
At the meeting with Unicorr later that week at Maison Mathis,
Threatt presented the box to Lindsay Mondrone, the
company’s sales account manager. 
“A work of art,” she recalled.
Mondrone took the box back to Unicorr’s design team.
“Everyone was impressed,” Mondrone said. “For them to have
a local artist give them something that they normally don’t
have to work with was great. The challenge was how to get it
onto a box within all our production parameters.”

Further meetings took place at Maison Mathis, with Mondrone
working with the Eat Up guys on fonts and colors, and
producing ever more refined versions of Gary’s design. 
“Lindsay was amazing to work with,” Threatt said. “From the
start she and her team got our vision.” 
In mid-August, Mondrone texted: Everything was ready to go.
The first run would be Monday, Aug. 29. 

Ordinarily, when Threatt and Burkett-Thompson are together,
Threatt does the talking. But Threatt had to work Monday, so
Burkett-Thompson regaled the group with stories about his
late father inspiring him to go into cooking, about his plans to
attend culinary school to learn how to train kids to cook. 
Unicorr Director of Operations Nick Perkins, who represents
the third generation of the family business, discussed
a partnership with Eat Up down the road, particularly for their
Chili Cookoff Competition and the hot meals and care
packages at Thanksgiving.
“We can get creative,” he told Burkett-Thompson. “We can
supply you with what you need to convey all that stuff
to people.”
Head designer Gary Lenkeit described the challenge of
translating artwork hand-drawn with a Sharpie in eight colors
into an image they could mass-produce on boxes.
“We photographed the box and redrew the artwork,” said art
director Mark Stetson. “We tried to pay close attention to the
art style and we made sure the original artist is credited on
the carton.” 
Threatt’s impulse to produce an eye-catching box was spot
on, according to sales manager Bernie Baszak. 
“The boxes have become a lot more of a marketing tool,” he
said. “Used to be this is how you get the product from here to

there and now people are putting these directly on the shelf at
Home Depot, Lowe’s, all over the place.” 
At that moment, Mondrone’s phone beeped. “They’re ready
for us,” she said, as she passed out ear plugs and offered
safety glasses. 

From there, it was one flight of steps down to the
manufacturing floor. 
“Speechless,” Burkett-Thompson shouted to members of the
Unicorr design team over the roar of the machines, as vertical
stacks of boxes printed with Gary’s Gorilla Lemonade design
streamed along a conveyer belt in rapid, thrumming precision.
“I feel like I won the lottery.”
Onward
Unicorr head of production Manny Dasilva, director of operations Nick Perkins,
Eat Up’s Brian Burkett-Thompson, sales account manager Lindsay Mondrone,
head of design Gary Lenkeit
The day after he watched the boxes printed at Unicorr,
Burkett-Thompson picked up the bottle labels from Label One
and dropped them off at Norwich Beverage.
The first run of production is set for Sept. 8. 
“We’ll be mixing the formula per their instructions and
pasteurizing, chilling, bottling, labeling, and putting them in
a case and giving it back to them,” Evans said. 
Meanwhile, Threatt was meeting with Robert Ellis and Reorn
James of DEJ Logistics in Hamden. The plan is to wrap their
trucks and vans with the trademark fluorescent yellow Gorilla
Lemonade graphics, fulfill their pre-orders, and then, in the
coming months, head down South. 

“What’s dope about this lemonade is that everyone who’s
involved wants to stay a part of this,” Threatt said. “Everyone
feels our passion.”