In 2019, childhood best friends Sean Goldsmith and Trevor Wolfe decided to stop drinking for two separate reasons: one had had a particularly rough weekend he didn’t want to repeat, and the other had completed a Whole30 challenge and noticed a marked improvement in his well-being. Goldsmith, who worked in financial newsletters, and Wolfe, who worked in tech for companies like Mailchimp and WPP, began The Zero Proof blog to showcase their favorite non-alcoholic brands, bartenders and more.
“We both love good food, wine and good drinks, and we talked about the cool stuff we were seeing,” says Wolfe, who likened the blog to the “Eater of the non-alcoholic world.” He says it wasn’t preachy about the ills of alcohol, but rather a celebration of innovation and what the duo was seeing in the space. “We came to it from a spiritually positive angle,” says Wolfe.
The blog quickly gained thousands of readers. While they appreciated the content, Wolfe says the majority of the correspondence they received was about buying the products they were featuring. So they decided to expand and sell non-alcoholic and zero-proof beverages in 2021. The first order was for a bottle of Ritual’s zero-proof tequila. “I got a shoe box from my wife’s closet and some duct tape and took it to the UPS store,” he laughs.
Today, the operation is much more streamlined and doing volume that many companies could only dream of. After receiving a seed round of investment from Atlanta-based VC company Overline and a Series A from Asahi Group Beverages & Innovation and others, The Zero Proof now has 20 employees. Goldsmith, who has since moved to California, serves as CEO, and Wolfe, who is based in Atlanta, serves as Chief Commercial Officer, out of a Collier Road office.
The Zero Proof ships hundreds of orders daily out of its 500,000-square-foot warehouse, one of three across the country. There are approximately 400 items on the website, mostly from independent labels, and Wolfe says they’ve served over 10 million drinks to date. Hundreds of thousands of customers visit the site every year; the company has doubled its yearly revenue for five consecutive years.
Beyond the retail operation, Wolfe and Goldsmith wholesale zero-proof brands like Oddbird and Ish to thousands of restaurant and retail accounts. They have also developed two lines. The first is Lapo’s, a collection of zero-fermentation bitter N/A canned cocktails, aperitivos and amaros they brought to market in 2024. The name comes from a bartender named Lapo at Harry’s Bar in Florence, with whom Goldsmith had become friendly while on business trips. “He makes the perfect Negroni,” says Wolfe. The line has an aperitivo, amaro and eight N/A canned cocktails, including a Mandarino G&T, an Amaro Cola, and, of course, a Negroni. (There’s even a Sparkling Negroni Water for a lighter sip.) Lapo is a shareholder in his namesake brand, and the Negroni won BevNet’s Best New Beverage 2024 award.
On the back of the 750ml bottles of amaro and apertivo, there is a recipe to make sure customers get it right every time. It’s a throughline of education that Wolfe says they started during the blog days. “We had to do a lot of education on the blog for first timers on how to use these products because their expectations were different,” he says. For example, non-alcoholic spirits are not meant to be consumed neat, and N/A red wines will not taste like an alcoholic red. “It won’t be a one-to-one replica,” he says. That education continues on The Zero Proof’s site and extends to the bartenders and restaurants they supply, as the proportions for N/A cocktails are not the same as alcoholic ones.
The second brand is Saint Viviana, a wine company named after the Catholic patron saint of hangovers. It’s made in Napa by a third-generation vintner family that produces top-of-the-line wines. “They work with us to grow grapes from the ground up,” says Wolfe. People often think that non-alcoholic wines are lesser products, but Saint Viviana is a premium line, with a lot of care and thought put into it. “They don’t use leftover grapes; they use $400 bottle grapes,” explains Wolfe. Saint Viviana currently offers a Cabernet Sauvignon, a sparkling Chardonnay and a Sauvignon Blanc that Wolfe says drinks like a crisp, acidic New Zealand version.
The newest retail category for The Zero Proof is functional beverages, such as those with ingredients to promote collagen, sleep hygiene, energy, and fitness performance. A nationwide partnership to distribute The Zero Proof’s functional beverage selection kicked off at SoulCycle’s Buckhead location. The company is also part of the James Beard Taste America tour, serving as the exclusive zero-proof and non-alcoholic drink provider for 2025 and 2026.
Despite running a huge operation now, Wolfe says that the company was born purely out of their passion to share the category with others and that that spirit will continue on. “Our business thesis was always that people drink because other people drink,” he says. “And people may stop needing to drink so much if other people stop drinking so much. We built something that we needed in the world for ourselves.”
