Entrepreneurship Rarely Goes to Plan: A Cider Company's Wild Ride From College Dorm to National Distribution

Takeaways

• Entrepreneurship rarely goes according to plan. Even a brand as established as Minneapolis Cider Company nearly lost its only customer before selling its first can.
• Speed can be a real competitive advantage. Trail Magic went from concept to shelf-ready product in 19 days and became Minnesota's first THC beverage brand.
• Regulatory uncertainty is one of the biggest risks in an emerging beverage category, and the businesses that survive it are the ones that adapt fastest.
• Your personal relationships are part of your business plan. Entrepreneurs often overlook the partners and family who make growth possible.
• Momentum beats a perfect plan. Getting a product to market and adjusting as you go outperforms over-preparing before your first sale.

Jason Dayton, co-founder of Minneapolis Cider Company and its sister brand Trail Magic, joins Taylor and Kelly to talk about a business built almost entirely on reinvention. What started as a senior class project at the University of Minnesota turned into a real cider company, but only after Jason and his partners nearly lost their first and only distributor over a batch that didn't taste right, forcing a red-eye flight to Oregon to fix the recipe before it ever reached a shelf.

From there, the conversation moves through the milestones that built Minneapolis Cider Company into a national player: opening a production facility and taproom in Northeast Minneapolis, surviving a pandemic shutdown one month after turning its first profit, and then, in July 2022, launching Trail Magic, one of the first THC beverage brands in Minnesota, in just 19 days. Jason walks through how quickly the category took off, why the company deliberately kept Trail Magic separate from its cider brand, and the patchwork of state-by-state regulations that make distributing a hemp-derived THC product across 24 states so complicated.

The episode also gets into the federal landscape shaping the category's future, including a looming ban on high-potency hemp products and what it would mean for THC beverages and the breweries that have come to depend on them. Jason shares how licensing the Crispin Cider brand from Molson Coors helped build out national distribution relationships, and closes with two pieces of advice that go beyond the beverage industry: take the first step instead of overplanning, and remember that a spouse or partner is an equal stakeholder in the business, even when they aren't the one clocking in every day.

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