Box office megastar and budding beverage entrepreneur Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is celebrating a major milestone for his Teremana Tequila label, selling over one million cases within a 12-month period.
Since launching in 2020, Teremana has sold over two million nine-liter cases, including 915,000 cases in 2022, according to Impact Databank data. The demand has led the brand to expand its distillery, which will begin production at the end of the year.
“A little over seven years ago, I had the idea to create a tequila that was a high quality, great tasting, handcrafted liquid that could hopefully disrupt the marketplace with a strategic and bold accessible-for-everyone price point, and most importantly, satisfy the consumer,” the actor and entrepreneur tweeted yesterday. “I went to work.”
The Mast-Jägermeister-backed business has already made its mark as one of the fastest growing spirit launches in history. After less than one year in business, the brand sold over 230,000 nine-liter cases, according to Impact Databank data. To compare, George Clooney’s Casamigos sold to Diageo for $1 billion at 170,000 cases. Teremana reached $330 to $350 million in retail sales value in the U.S. in 2022, according to the company.
Debuting in March 2020, Johnson partnered with longtime business partner Dany Garcia, and brought in Jenna Fagnan and Ken Austin, spirit industry veterans who helped develop Tequila Avión, which was acquired by Pernod Ricard in 2018. (Garcia and Johnson also partnered with Molson Coors to launch Zoa Energy). Mast-Jägermeister inked a distribution deal with the tequila company before it came to market, and then invested as a strategic partner in February 2022.
The company brought in Richard Black as CEO last December, who spent over a decade with Gruppo Campari, and previously worked with Distill Ventures-backed Westward Whisky. In an interview earlier this year, the new CEO said the distillery plans to double its capacity.
Teremana is partnered with the Lopez Family, third-generation agave growers and second-generation distillers in Jalisco. The expanded distillery will house additional small brick ovens (half of the size of the industry average) and small handmade copper pot stills, so the same traditional method can be maintained while meeting demand, according to the company.
The new area has also been designed to meet the criteria of the LEED certification – the most widely used green building rating system in the U.S., created to promote sustainability-focused practices in design, construction, and operations standards.
Despite the saturation of celebrity-backed tequila brands that have followed Teremana, consumers are still chasing brands boasting entertainment names. Within a group of 26 leading celebrity tequila brands that NIQ is tracking, growth is up 22% in off-premise dollar sales from last year, rivaling numbers of the overall category.