Inventor Maurice Kanbar Seeks another Shot of Vodka Fame
By Mike Drummond
When I first encounter Maurice Kanbar at his palatial apartment in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, he’s distracted and a little annoyed.
A previous guest had smoked a few cigarettes and the room now bears the unmistakable odor of an ashtray.
I’m seated as Kanbar hovers near, counting the butts aloud (six Marlboro Lights smoked to the filter). He discards the offenders and settles into a white sofa, eager to discuss his latest innovation.
He won’t be distracted by inquiries about his age. A Wikipedia entry once listed him born in 1918. I let him know he looks great for 92. He blames a bitter ex-girlfriend for sabotaging the entry. “I’m not that old!” he says, in a thick Brooklyn accent. “I want a date!”
Kanbar is the creator of SKYY vodka. Unveiled in 1993 with its iconic cobalt blue bottle and then-novel multi-part distillation process, SKYY boasted it didn’t leave drinkers with a hangover. That claim remains in doubt. What isn’t in question, however, is the success Kanbar enjoyed with SKYY – not to mention his many other inventions.
Kanbar sold a 50 percent stake of SKYY to beverage conglomerate Campari International in 2001 for a reported $207.5 million. Campari bought him out in 2005. The deal included a three-year non-compete clause.
Now Kanbar, who bears a slight resemblance to Picasso in his bronzed skin/white hair era, is on a mission to up the bar on premium vodka.
Last year he launched Blue Angel. Promotional materials say, “Blue Angel is the world’s second best vodka (we’re still looking for the world’s best),” a clear jab at Grey Goose, the French premium spirit that bills itself as the “world best tasting vodka.”
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Unlike when he unleashed SKYY in the early 1990s, the U.S. market is now flooded with some 350 vodka brands. Instead of a resurgent economy brimming with the promise of the then-nascent Internet, today one out of 10 Americans are unemployed. And rather than flush with crazy dot-com dough, today’s cash-strapped consumers may be hesitant to pay $30 a bottle for vodka – the easiest, cheapest spirit to make.
So, will Kanbar’s new vodka take flight?
Father of Invention
The Brooklyn-born Kanbar began to build his fortune in 1960, after he invented and received his first patent for the D-Fuzz-It Sweater Comb. It removed the balls or “pills” of fabric that form on certain types of sweaters.
His inventive range spans from lint-removing devices and textile apparatus, to medical implements and, of course, booze.
He’s the author of Secrets from an Inventor’s Notebook, self-published in 2001, and since released through Penguin in paperback and on the Kindle. His book takes a decidedly no-nonsense approach to commercializing inventions. Consider this bit of wisdom: “Thou Shalt Not Bullshit Thyself.” Good advice, no matter who you are.
His non-inventing interests are just as eclectic. He produced the 2005 animated feature Hoodwinked, a spoof of the Little Red Riding Hood fable and an extension of his longtime love of movies. He sponsored the surprise hit of summer 1999, The Blair Witch Project. And he launched the first East Coast multi-screen movie theater, the Quad Cinema in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1970s.
A small flier for Blue Angel notes that Kanbar is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, movie producer, organic chemist and master distiller.
It doesn’t list that he’s also one of San Francisco’s more prolific philanthropists. He recently developed low-cost reading glasses he’s giving away to developing nations. He also helped fund the Kanbar Cardiac Center at the California Pacific Medical Center, the Kanbar Hall theatre at the Jewish Community Center, the San Francisco Girls Chorus, the San Francisco International Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Society.
His proudest invention: the safety hypodermic needle that protects medical workers from accidentally pricking themselves.
“You know about Murphy’s Law?” he says. “Well, I believe in Schultz’s Law. You know Shultz’s Law? It says that Murphy’s Law was optimistic.
“If only 10 people don’t get AIDS or hepatitis from this, I’d be very happy about that,” he adds. “We have an expression in Judaism: ‘He who saves one life, saves the world.’”
And yet he’s now – again – evangelizing his own brand of alcohol, a breed of product that killed at least 22,073 people in 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The numbers exclude deaths resulting from unintentional injuries (like walking into oncoming trains), homicides and fetal alcohol syndrome.
“I like the buzz,” he says of drinking, “but I’m not an alcoholic. To me alcohol was the first tranquilizer that man discovered. The first Valium. Unfortunately, some people get addicted to it.
“But if you’re not addicted to it, it’s a great stress reliever,” he adds. “And it’s a great benefit.”
Kanbar enjoys retelling the story of SKYY, which began with his quest to find a liquor he could drink without suffering from headaches and hangovers.
A doctor friend told him about congeners, the impurities in alcohol many believe are responsible for hangovers. Kanbar, an inveterate experimenter, used multiple distillations to filter out congeners from vodka.
“I am an engineer with a chemical background,” he says. “You cannot filter out the congeners. You must distill them out. They boil at different temperatures so you need at least four distillations to remove all of them.”
He struggled to find a distiller to commercially produce his vodka. He finally found one, who agreed to perform the multiple distillations, provided Kanbar pay for the full run upfront.
And, as the SKYY story goes, Kanbar was gazing at the azure Bay Area sky when he hit on the idea of the brand name that would become synonymous with imbibe-chic. He later married the idea with the cobalt blue bottle.
“If you’re calling your product SKYY,” he says, “you don’t want to be putting it in a green bottle.”
BAM!
Like SKYY, Kanbar is positioning Blue Angel as an ultra-pure spirit – a drink less likely to leave you with a hangover. Industry experts say such a story has limited appeal these days. It’s been done before (with SKYY) and some studies show that younger drinkers wear hangovers as badges of glory – the price one pays for a glorious night out.
That said, Kanbar is one of those seemingly rare inventors who also happens to be a gifted marketer. He also has been blessed with a great sense of timing – at least in the past.
When SKYY hit the market in 1993, the economy was on an upswing, younger people were rediscovering the cocktail, and spritzers and wine coolers were falling out of favor.
Despite today’s crowded vodka space, dour economic conditions and nearly impenetrable distribution systems that makes it extremely difficult for independent distillers to crack the national scene, Blue Angel has some things going for it.
For starters, Kanbar seems to have a Midas touch. He’s enjoyed success with many, if not most, of the various products he’s invented.
And then there’s the nature of vodka, which represents some 40 percent of the U.S. spirits market. It’s mixable and accessible to coming-of-age palates.
“About 15 to 20 years ago, the generation raised drinking brown spirits aged out,” explains Mike Mitchell, president of Mitchell Innovation + Research in Chicago. “Those new consumers were coming in and saying, ‘I don’t have to learn to like anything. I want something I like.’
“Vodka,” Mitchell adds, “is the most tasteless spirit of all and highly mixable. Newer drinkers were raised on a philosophy of the less (liquor) I taste, the better.”
Vodka also is relatively simple to make; doesn’t require casks or aging like some brown liquors; and it lends itself to reinvention.
“Vodka,” says Mark Payne, president and head of idea development at New York consultancy Fahrenheit 212, “has been the poster child of innovation.”
From flavors and colors, to unconventional bottles – Actor Dan Aykroyd is shilling Crystal Skull vodka, a quadruple-distilled booze bottled in a glass human skull – vodka has fewer “shackles” than other types of spirits, Payne adds.
Indeed, vodka also has been particularly open to edgy advertising.
SKYY at one time ran print ads featuring a young man in a red leather chair straddled by a red-headed dominatrix. On a side table was a bottle of SKYY and a pair of empty martini glasses.
Kanbar was quoted in Forbes in 1998 that he didn’t “get” the ad, but begrudgingly agreed to let it run.
Blue Angel’s marketing, so far, has been tame compared to others in the space.
There’s Svedka’s robot-themed campaign, where robo-drinkers vote Svedka the “No. 1 vodka of 2033,” evidently targeting the in utero demographic.
There also was New Zealand vodka brand 42 Below’s 2006 ad that offered a trip to Russia to find a bride as a prize in a competition. It praised Russian women because, “they don’t care if you watch cricket on Valentine’s Day, hell they don’t even care if you’re short and fat.” The ad showed a blonde woman scrubbing a floor.
Vodka also is benefitting from the emergence and growing embrace of craft distilleries, which now number some 200, from Dry Fly Distilling in Spokane, Wash., to Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka in Wadmalaw Island, S.C.
Gregg Mineo runs Beviamo Consulting in the Richmond, Va., area. He’s a spirits industry veteran who used to sell Absolut and recalls the fierce competition with SKYY. He likens the growth of craft distilleries to the popularity of microbreweries – but with a twist.
“It’s easier to experiment with new beer than, say, new gin,” he says. “Beer will be in distribution more readily than a new gin. You have to go buy a cocktail somewhere or invest 20-30 bucks to buy a bottle. So there’s a little higher hurdle for a craft distillery.”
Firefly co-founder Scott Newitt launched the company’s sweet tea vodka on April 15, 2008. Sweet tea is ubiquitous in the South. If the story behind a spirit is a key ingredient to its success, then Firefly has a graceful, antebellum narrative – the tea in its vodka is grown on a nearby farm.
Bars in Charleston, Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach tend to mix Firefly with lemonade, and dub the drinks the “John Daly,” or the “drunken Arnold Palmer.”
“Our original goal was to be the vodka of the South,” Newitt says. “But people in New York City and the Pacific Northwest are buying a lot of Firefly.”
Kanbar hopes Blue Angel creates similar word-of-mouth buzz, and he’s on a mission to work BAM into the drinking lexicon. BAM stands for Blue Angel martini. He has variations, including the blue BAM – Blue Angel mixed with curacao.
“If I gave you a choice: do you want a Goose martini or an Angel martini, which would you choose?” he says.
The folks at Grey Goose are unconcerned.
“Grey Goose has its own Maître de Chai, François Thibault, whose sole purpose it is to ensure that Grey Goose Vodka stands alone as the ‘World’s Best Tasting Vodka,’” a spokeswoman e-mailed me, in response for comment.
She noted a “proprietary” five-step distillation process, pure spring water filtered through “grand champagne limestone” unique to the Cognac region of France, and that, since Bacardi acquired the brand in 2004, it “vaulted from an unknown to a premier brand in five years, passing entrenched leaders in the process.”
And, just for good measure, she added: “There have been countless attempts to duplicate the success that Grey Goose has enjoyed in the super premium vodka segment – none have been able to.”
Take that! Clearly, Grey Goose doesn’t believe it has anything to fear from Kanbar’s upstart Blue Angel.
Or does it?
“You would have thought Absolut had a lock on” high-end vodka back in the 90s, says Payne, the innovative consultant at Fahrenheit 212. “And then Grey Goose came along.
“Could another vodka come along and challenge Grey Goose? I don’t think anyone is bullet proof. You have a category that’s said ‘Yes’ to the right strategy before. There’s no reason to think that couldn’t be the case again.”
