Lindsay Marie Morris

Growing up with a father in the restaurant business, Joe Fresta, Jr., was naturally drawn to the epicurean world. From his vantage point as a Sicilian American on St. Louis's The Hill, a predominantly Italian community, he spotted an opportunity to fill a niche with Fresta Limoncello.

This hand-crafted, small-batch citrus liqueur currently sells in Missouri, but expanding its reach is part of Joe's plans. He shared that vision, his background, how he got started, wins and challenges, advice for other entrepreneurs, and more.

 

 

What is your background and connection to Sicily?

My great-grandparents on my father's side came from the Taormina/Catania area. They arrived through the Gulf of Mexico and into Louisiana. They had an extremely hard time being Sicilians in the South back then. So they fled north up the Mississippi River and eventually settled in the Italian section of St. Louis known as The Hill.

 

My father is in the restaurant business, so I grew up in and around the restaurant industry all my life. Out of college, I went to work for the Coca-Cola Company for about eight years. I learned a lot about the grocery store and on-premise beverage side of things. That experience has served me well in this endeavor.

 

Several years ago, I started a Facebook page called Fasebook Food Critic (with an "s" instead of a "c" because Facebook doesn't let you use their brand in page names). And I would post a lot of very enticing food picks from different restaurants around town and wherever I traveled. People loved it and would soon start calling my photos "food porn." From there, I ended up co-hosting a radio show with another Italian gentleman, Frank Cusumano, on a local sports talk radio station.

 

It was called The Weekly Special, where we would bring in restaurant owners and their chefs and interview them. They'd bring food into the studio, and we'd talk about the food, the industry, the history of their restaurant, and how it all got started. Listeners loved it, and it gave them ideas on where to dine that weekend. From there, the limoncello opportunity came about.

 

Fresta Limoncello Founder Joe Fresta, Jr.

What inspired you to create Fresta Limoncello?

I kicked around doing a beverage. I realized I didn't want to do bourbon, vodka, tequila, wine, or beer because everybody—from movie stars to professional athletes—was slapping their name on those types of spirits. Instead, given my Italian heritage, I thought I would do a limoncello. It was unique and a road less traveled.

 

I sat down with a distiller, and we worked out a recipe, tasting different versions. First and foremost, I wanted it to be all-natural, with no artificial color and low sugar.

 

If you look at Fresta Limoncello next to all the others out on the market, many of them are almost neon yellow in color. Mine is very clear. I believe Fresta is the only one that really looks like that. So people appreciate that along with the packaging, the graphics on the bottle, and the frosted bottle itself. It's definitely drawn to the eye of the consumer, enticing people to buy and try it.

 

I didn't want it to be overly sweet. A lot of limoncellos are, and wouldn't you know it, that's the first comment I would get from people when they first tried it: "Wow, it's not overly sweet!"

 

That was paramount in how I wanted the product to be. I've drunk a lot of different limoncellos, both domestically and in Italy. They're good but just too sweet, in my opinion. So people really appreciate that, and they continue to buy it.

 

We're going on nearly two years with this now, and it's been very successful around the St. Louis area and throughout Missouri.

 

A message on a bottle.

How do you account for your success?

I do a lot of social media with photo shoots that I conduct personally. I'm very hands-on. Everything from the taste, the graphics on the bottle, and how it's marketed. Social media is a very powerful medium if you know how to use it properly, so I've really capitalized on its power. My distributor has done a pretty good job with market penetration as well.

 

I also get out in the marketplace. I go to restaurants to visit with owners and their customers. I have them try the limoncello and tell them where they can purchase it. That's led to us getting into all three major grocery store chains in St. Louis and around Missouri. I'll also go into the grocery stores to check shelves and front up the bottles. There are a lot of mom-and-pop Italian grocery markets and restaurants around town as well.
 

What challenges have you faced?

The challenge is distribution because you have to keep up with the demand. It's a good problem to have, actually. But, if there aren't enough bottles behind the bar or on grocery store shelves, I'm not going to sell product or add and keep customers.

 

It's been a labor of love because I've grown up in and around the business, and I've been blessed to know a lot of people in the restaurant industry. It really has been a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to keeping the momentum going, saturating the Missouri market, and then eventually moving out exponentially from the St. Louis and Missouri epicenter, getting into neighboring states, especially in cities with predominantly Italian communities and restaurants. 

 

What feedback have you received from Missouri bars and restaurants?

They like it. How do I know that? They keep ordering it. And there are restaurants and grocery stores that just blow through it, especially during the holidays.

There's one particular Italian grocery store here on The Hill called DiGregorio's. They went through several cases of it within four hours on Christmas Eve.

 

A lot of companies or business owners bought Fresta Limoncello as Christmas gifts for clients and family members. They would even give me feedback on the reaction of the people they would give it to. People just loved it! Being handed that bottle and, most notably, the story behind it, and it being something local, too.

 

Your limoncello is award-winning. What does that mean to you and your brand?

My distiller entered the 2023 New Orleans Spirits Competition on a whim before we even hit the marketplace. It won the silver medal in the Liqueur Category. Getting that kind of an award or recognition early on meant a lot. It provided a lot of confidence in the brand and, more importantly, the actual product itself. It certainly gave me an initial selling point when I first started going around and trying to introduce people to the product. It provided a solid platform to walk into an establishment and say, "Hey, look, we won this award," and I incorporated that into a lot of the social media as well. It was a major positive.

 

Fresta Limoncello is sold throughout Missouri.

What are your future plans?

The next step would be to do a pre-packaged Fresta Spritz, which would be pre-made with a Prosecco in four-pack glass bottles.

 

We may also do a Fresta Limoncello La Crema. One of those two things will likely be the next step from the flagship.

 

What impact do you hope to have on the St. Louis community?

I do a lot of charity work. I am a two-time cancer survivor and the Board Chair of the Cancer Care Foundation I founded. It's about 13 years old now, and I've raised over $2 million for families who are fighting cancer. So, at some point down the road, when the brand becomes more successful, I would like to incorporate that into my cancer foundation and help raise more funding to help cancer patients pay their bills and whatnot.

 

What advice would you give someone looking to start a spirits brand?

Find a niche market like I did. Take an avenue that's less traveled and where you can be the father of that, and just go for it. Surround yourself with the right people. Don't let anybody tell you "No" or "You're crazy for doing it." Just go ahead and get in there!

 

After the demise of Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, when the Busch family sold out, a lot of microbreweries started to pop up all over the place, and those guys did a pretty good job of filling a void and being pretty successful in their own right. 

 

What experience do you hope to share?

I would just share with people the importance of great customer service. I think it's a dying component in the service industry today. I want my customers to know we're there for them when they need something. It all comes down to service. You've got to take care of the customer.  

 

 

 

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On my first trip to Sicily, one of my cousins handed us a bottle of limoncello. I had never tried the beverage before, but I was grateful for the opportunity to taste a traditional Southern Italian liqueur. We packed the bottle with us when we left to visit my other cousins in Milan.

I did not anticipate that we would receive a second bottle from my Northern relatives, who shared a similar pride in the beverage. By the end of our trip, we had so much limoncello that I had to give it away before we flew back to the U.S. But the sweet lemon liqueur will always remind me of family.

The same holds for Phil Mastroianni, co-founder of Fabrizia Spirits, who remembers his Calabrese grandmother sipping limoncello. After a trip to Italy, where he enjoyed a glass with his cousin, he began making his own. His uncle tasted it and encouraged him to transform his hobby into a business. He's since branched out to sell blood orange and pistachio cream liqueurs and canned cocktails. 

Phil shared Fabrizia's signature natural ingredients, why they use Sicilian lemons, challenges he's faced, advice he'd share, and more.

 

 

What exactly is limoncello?

Limoncello is a lemony liqueur made from the zest of lemons, flavored and colored by the essential oils that are inside the zest. It's a four-ingredient recipe with zest that contains the natural oils added to alcohol, sugar, and water. 

 

Fabrizia's Syracuse lemon grove

Why do you use Sicilian lemons?

Our limoncello uses Sicilian lemons for two reasons. One, they make limoncello as tasty as any lemon you'll get from anywhere in Italy. But there's more transparency. Sicily grows 70% to 80% of the Italian domestic production of lemons. 

Arabs brought citrus to Sicily between 900 and 1000 A.D. They also brought the ideal irrigation system for lemons, and they just grow well. They don't need nets. The temperature rarely goes to freezing, where the tree could get damaged, versus if you go north to Campana, that subtle five additional degrees average temperature makes a difference.

Not only do the lemons grow in abundance, but they're also less expensive for all the reasons I just said, and the land is flatter. Mount Etna has that wonderful volcanic soil on the island's eastern side that really helps them. So because they are easier to grow in Sicily compared to the hilly slopes of the Piano de Sorrento or anywhere else in Amalfi, you end up having more access to the fruit.

 

We visited the other lemon-growing regions—Amalfi, Sorento, and even a town called Rocca Imperiale, which is in Northern Calabria on the Ionian Coast. Rocca Imperiale actually just received an IGP status from the European Union. They sell to the Amalfi Association because the Amalfi Association changed its bylaws to allow lemons from this town in Calabria simply because Amalfi cannot keep up with its own demand given the natural environment of where Amalfi is.

Sicily doesn't have those issues. What we found is even when we visited the Sorento Association in Fondi, where a lot of the Sorrento lemons come from, there have been multiple instances where authorities have had to come in and say, "Nope, these are not Sorrento lemons. These are not Amalfi lemons. They really grew in Tunisia or Spain." I don't believe I've ever heard of that ever happening in Sicily. They're able to grow them in abundance there on their own.

 

So, it is part pricing and part knowing we're getting what we're paying for and using Italian fruit. Ultimately, there's no real difference in the quality. 

 

Nick Mastroianni picks lemons for their flagship product.

 

Why did you choose New Hampshire as your base?

I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. All my grandparents immigrated from southern Italy to Boston. It is $10,000 a year to have a liquor license in Massachusetts as a manufacturer. In New Hampshire, it was $1,700 and still is. And this was 15 years ago. Even to do it the "right way," you need federal and state licenses.

 

I was 25 when we found a place to rent, and I remember doing the math. Even up here in New Hampshire, we would have to sell almost 6,000 bottles a year without a salary, without anything, just to pay all the licensing fees and the rent where we were going to produce it. At that point in my life, I had only made about 50 bottles of limoncello.

 

It seemed like an absurd number: Who was going to buy 6,000 bottles of limoncello? I'm proud to say that this past year, we have hit almost 300,000 bottles in annual production, and our biggest customer is the Epcot Pavilion in Disney World. They buy over 6,000 bottles a year in just that one location. So it shows that sometimes you need to make sure that you dream big enough.

 

When starting, you need to take one step at a time. Had we got the licensing in Massachusetts, we would have had to sell 9,000 bottles. And that was an even more inconceivable number at the time—just to break even. New Hampshire is a small state that treats businesses very fairly and entices them to come here. 

Had we been in California, for instance, we would've felt the need to stay California fruit forever because that's simply what they do. At first, we were all-California fruit, and then it was fruit from wherever we could get it from—Mexico, you name it—and then we went to a blend of Italian fruits. A year and a half ago, we said, "Okay, we're going to go 100% Sicilian," and we have a camera on the grove we buy the lemons from.

 

We are producing limoncello in an authentic way. We could make a limoncello that is an 8 out of 10 just by cutting out the fake coloring and having a good recipe. Now that we're able to get the fruit from Sicily, and we still make it the old-fashioned way, the same way they make it in Italy, we can make it a 10 out of 10, and we can do it at a better cost than the brands that are trying to produce it the right way in Italy and sending it over here. 

 

What challenges have you faced?

We can produce Fabrizio limoncello for less because we just bring the lemons over, not the finished product with the glass and the bottles, et cetera. On the other hand, we import almost a million lemons a year from Sicily. So that has its own challenges.

 

The biggest challenge in the space is—hands down—getting distribution. That's something I wasn't planning on when I started this business. It's taken a lot of time, but I got good at it. And we get to work with some really large liquor wholesalers. But those relationships don't happen overnight. 

 

Fabrizia Spirits now sells a whole line of bottled and canned beverages.

 

Tell us about your blood orange liqueur and pistachio cream liqueurs.

The blood orange came naturally since its production is the same as that of limoncello but with blood oranges. One day, I was walking through Boston's Little Italy (the North End), and a customer said, "Hey Phil, why don't you make blood orange cello? I would buy it from you." We started making it right after that.

 

The pistachio was a lot more work. We noticed an uptick in places making pistachio martinis, and especially since pistachio is popular in Sicily, where we get our lemons, it was a natural extension. With that said, creating the liqueur took a lot of formulation as there is no one set recipe.

 

What led to the creation of your canned cocktails?

All of the left-over lemons! When we launched our ready-to-drink canned Italian Margarita in 2018, we were throwing away about 400,000 zested lemons per year at the time. We started juicing them and used that as the base for the cocktails. Being part of the rising popularity of ready-to-drink cocktails has certainly increased the visibility of the Fabrizia brand. 

 

How has listening to your customers influenced the evolution of Fabrizia Spirits?

Always so important to do. We are constantly listening to feedback on sweetness and taste profiles. With that said, the number one thing we hear is something we always promise to do: Be a brand you can count on to make natural limoncello and other alcoholic beverages with no fake colors or flavors ever. 

 

Ready-to-serve Fabrizia Limoncello Spritz

 

What new products or ventures excite you?

We're looking into producing Fabrizia in Italy for the Italian market in the years to come, which would be a big achievement for the brand. We're also diving into the deep end with a bunch of versions of bottled and canned Limoncello Spritz, made with imported Italian wine.

 

What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs?

If you're going to get involved in the spirits business or start your own business, you have to really size up how big your excitement and passion are for what you're going to do. I am more excited today than I was 17 years ago to be making limoncello.

But there's been so much time over the last 17 years where things have not gone right, and progress has not happened as fast as we had hoped. There were disappointments of many varieties, from business relationships to the product not doing as well as we'd like to in certain places.

 

If you really love the idea and believe in it, and it makes you happy, well, you can sustain all those challenges. And if you don't have the excitement or the true passion, you'll likely find that at one of those challenges, you'll find something else you'd rather do. Fortunately for me, that didn't happen because I believed in the idea so much and wanted it to work, not just so I could make money but also because I really wanted it to work for its own reasons.

 

What do you hope to share?

When it comes to the limoncello, we always love it when it is enjoyed by friends and family together on memorable special occasions. For me, it was about my grandmother. She would have a little bit of limoncello on Christmas Eve. She didn't drink that often, and I always found it to be a spirit that was approachable to the group. It wasn't about drinking; it was about bringing people together. 

We really hope that the experience is better for you if you are going to have an alcoholic beverage. You shouldn't have to say, "Okay, well, on top of having a drink, I'm going to have a bunch of Yellow Number 5," as in the case of our imported competitors, or "I'm going to have a bunch of preservatives in my vodka soda canned cocktail." We use fresh juice in our canned cocktails.

 

We really want the experience to be one of enjoying all-natural ingredients. That's what we're hoping to bring to people.

 

 

 

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