One of Maria Gallo's fondest memories is of her grandmother asking her to fetch a handful of mint so they could make iced tea to serve with supper. Today, Maria, an entrepreneur from Albany, New York, is happy to share Nani's Iced Tea, which is sold in a mason jar bearing a photo of her kissing Nani, who came to the U.S. from Castiglione di Sicilia.
"It's thrilling to me to be doing this in her name and her honor," Maria says. "And I feel like she's been with me the entire time before it even started. Obviously, she gave me this, right? She always took care of me, and I feel like this is her way of still taking care of me."
Nani must have been watching over Maria as, after a challenging start, the brand has become a favorite in Upstate New York stores where it is sold. Expanding that reach is part of the plan, which Maria shared with me, along with how she got started and how she chooses to stand out in the crowded beverage market.
Tell us about Nani and how she inspired you.
We were always very close. When I was in my early 20s, I lived with her, and later, I lived next door to her. And so, just as I had been in my childhood, I was always in her kitchen.
The iced tea was something that I loved to do with her because she had a routine. My grandmother's house was immaculate. She would get up in the morning and have breakfast, and then she would begin her housework. After her housework was done, she would shower, and then in the afternoon, she would read, say her rosary, and then start to prepare for dinner.
Before she started cooking dinner, she would steep the tea in a pan on the stove. As we got closer to prepping dinner and setting the table, she would ask me to run outside and grab mint. Then, I watched her make it.
Those smells and those memories just always stayed with me. And also it was delicious, which doesn't hurt. She made one pitcher every night when it was warm in the summer months.
I started making it when my kids were little. I would have friends who would say, "I'm coming tomorrow to visit. Make the iced tea." So luckily—I mean, it's not luck by any stretch; it's her hand—I was able to recreate the taste of her tea.
It was something that I loved to do, and I was thrilled to be able to replicate it and make it for my friends and people that I was close to. That led eventually to me bottling the tea.
We have five flavors now. When I first began this, I just had her original iced tea, which was just sugar, lemons, mint, tea, and water. But then, when I was out, people requested it unsweetened, so I added a few more flavors.
On the side of every jar, I always tell the story of my Sicilian grandmother. The tea was part of everything that she was, and that's now ingrained in me.
Share your start and the challenges you faced.
I was teaching at the time. I would bring it to school. In the summer and on weekends up in Saratoga, I would waitress and bring it in for staff. I would bring it in a five-gallon drum, and everybody loved it, which made me feel great. It was fun. It was a good couple of summers.
The restaurant owner and I had been friends for some time, and he came to me and said, "Let's get this going. I know a bottler, and let's talk about bottling it. The guy I want you to talk to is bottling some things for me. I spoke to him this morning, and we were talking about doing the tea in a plastic pinky jug."
I kind of paused and didn't say anything. And he said, "What?"
I said, "Well, I don't want to do plastic. I just always pictured a glass mason jar with her picture on the front, maybe black and white."
Instantaneously, I was thinking, "Oh my God, Maria! Here's somebody you love and respect who is calling you and saying, 'I'm going to get this going for you.'"
He said, "This is your story, and don't compromise for anybody."
I began working with the bottler, and when we met and sat down, he just said, "This is amazing, and you'll be bought out in five years. There's nothing like it on the market packaging-wise or taste-wise."
I asked him whether his R&D team could replicate the tea without chemicals or artificial preservatives. He said, "Oh, yeah."
But they just couldn't nail it. We tried everything, and chef friends of mine tried to help. We tried cheesecloth and simple syrup. The problem was that every time we heated it up, it tasted like Sleepy Time tea. We couldn't get it to be where it needed to be to be shelf-life stable in stores without affecting the integrity of the taste, so we parted ways.
I have a lot of friends in the restaurant business in Albany, and someone had given me the name of a second bottler. I went up to see her. She was about two hours away, and she was amazing. Within three weeks, she nailed it.
You know how when you make sauce or sausage and peppers, it's always better the next day? It's the same thing with my grandmother's iced tea. So I put a pitcher in the refrigerator, and then the next day, I took that tea to her and said, "This is what I want it to taste like."
She was wonderful. She found an extract company, and everything was all-natural. It was amazing. We started bottling together.
I was teaching then and got a notification on my Facebook page: "Hi. We were just in the shop in Delmar. My name is blah, blah, blah. I work for Whole Foods. We're coming to Albany. Would you like to meet at Whole Foods?"
All my little local guys who had been with me from the beginning were like, "Girl, this is it. This is so great!"
Five minutes later, my bottler shut down. New owners came in. They decided they didn't want a co-packing plant's liability, so they took the production facility in a different direction. So, I was back to square one.
In the interim, the restaurateur I'd mentioned got me a sit-down with a distributor, the biggest distributor in our area at the time. So, in about 2015, I met with this guy, and he just said, "Look, I love the product. I love the story. I love your tenacity. I'll put the money up. When you find a bottler, let's do this. This is going to be great. It's going to be such a great story."
It took me a year to find a bottler. I went to a bottler downstate in New York, and the bottler botched the whole run that we did: 1,200 cases.
My distributor took off and was not happy. That was a brutal summer. We were renting a house that I thought I was about to buy. We lost the house, and my car got repossessed. It was a pretty ugly time.
In the interim (after the bottler debacle downstate), I had reached out to a few bottlers, but besides being very costly, I would have been at their mercy as far as a production schedule goes. Eventually, I decided it was time, so I took my last few thousand dollars and secured the space for Nani's.
So many people loved the story, but no one wanted to cut a check. Every time they would tell me no but that they loved my story, etc., I would say, "No worries; thanks so much." Then, I would tell them that someday I was going to have a ribbon cutting at that space, and I'd wear a lemon dress. I felt like they were probably thinking, "Okay, crazy girl. You have no money, no credit, no house, no job, and no machinery."
Eventually, I found capital. This group around here works with entrepreneurs, and I got capital for the machinery in the summer of 2022. I started bottling shortly after my ribbon cutting last winter. And I wore that lemon dress!
Maria Gallo wore her lemon dress to her ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Tell us why avoiding plastic is so important to you.
When I first started, all the numbers guys I met with said, "You can't use glass if you want to do a mason jar. You have to use plastic."
I never compromised on that. As soon as I was out doing demos at Whole Foods and even smaller places, everybody loved and appreciated the glass. And now, over the last five or six or seven years, everybody's back to realizing how bad plastic is and how good glass is.
The thing for me about glass is that, like so many people, I drank Snapple when I was at work or out to lunch, and I did not like the transition to plastic. It didn't taste the same. I wanted a tea that, if you left it in your car overnight, whether it was 10 degrees out or 95 degrees out, it would never change the integrity of the tea. That glass jar and not adding chemicals were just two things that I wouldn't compromise on.
What else sets you apart from other teas on the market?
I haven't found anything comparable since I started this tea company in 2011. I don't taste every iced tea out there, but it's still basically the staples: PepsiCo makes Pure Leaf iced tea, and Coke makes Gold Peak. I don't find either comparable.
It's because of the ingredients in the tea, the extracts that we source, and also the way I make the tea. At some point, I may have to move to a concentrate, but right now, I make the tea on a grander scale, the same way my grandmother made it. That's how my scheduled process was made through my first bottler.
I still soak tea bags in drums overnight in the refrigerator, pull everything out that morning, pull the tea bags out, strain it over and over and over, and throw it into the kettle of hot water. The kettle takes about two hours and 15 minutes to get up to temp. And I bottle at 190 or 191, so it's a shelf-stable product. When I bring it to places, I can say, "It can sit in your back room for a couple of weeks because it's safe to be out of the refrigerator."
What are your plans for the future?
I'm hoping we can eventually get the tea on a national scale. I'm about 40 minutes from Saratoga Springs. A lot of people come here in the summer for the track and the baths; it's a beautiful area.
Every summer, people tell me, "I had your tea this summer in Saratoga." Or, "I had your tea this summer in Albany." They ask, "Do you ship? When are you going to be here?" When I was in Whole Foods, I had someone who worked at that store who then moved to the Boston store say, "Oh my God, I miss your tea so much. Can you get it here?"
National distribution obviously is quite a challenge both financially and logistically, but it can be done. We're talking about getting into some places in New York City with my distributor. And for me, that's as thrilling as having Nani's available on a national level. We're talking about meeting with Italian wholesale grocers down there and getting into the Italian delis in the Bronx and Brooklyn. My dad was from the Bronx. Nani had cousins in Brooklyn. So, for me, that would be so thrilling. I would be so honored because I know that those people are paying homage every day to their aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
What do you hope your customers take away?
When I get out, dressed up and in front of people, and talk about the teas and my grandmother, that rejuvenates me.
It goes a long way; it validates everything for me. Whenever I do a demo, people tell me, "This is the best iced tea I've ever had. I love this story so much." They hold the jar, and they look at my grandmother. And I love it, and they love it. It validates for me that there's a reason why I wanted the jar and her face on it and not just another iced tea in plastic.
Besides physically making the tea, my favorite part of doing this is hearing people respond to it. I mean, people will message me and text me, and they'll tag me on Instagram and say, "Oh my God, I love this tea so much," but really, being out and pouring tea for two or three hours at an event and hearing the feedback is wonderful. That really goes a long way for me.
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