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BLDG 5 Market + Kitchen + Patio’s lemonade brand, BLDG 5 Lemonade, is now stocked in roughly 160 stores across the Gulf South and the East Coast after launching in December.
Brumby and Misti Broussard, the husband-and-wife duo behind BLDG 5, started exploring bottling their lemonades in summer 2020 after noticing customers would stop at the restaurant just to buy the beverages from the retail cooler.
After a few years of trial and error with different manufacturers, the Broussards began working with a bottler in Virginia and bottled their first batch of 84,000 bottles last October, with the first bottles hitting shelves of local stores in December.
The four flavors of lemonades were first carried by a handful of local establishments and later picked up by local heavyweights Associated Grocers and Rouses. A deal with KeHE, an organic and specialty food distributor, helped expand the lemonade’s distribution along the East Coast, as far north as New Hampshire.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” says Brumby Broussard of their expansion plans, noting they would like to grow to 225 to 300 stores by the end of the year.
In the future, he hopes to identify three to five additional bottling locations across the nation to ease distribution into new markets.
