Liquid Death

Liquid Death sells canned water and other non-alcoholic drinks under the legal entity Supplying Demand, Inc., a Delaware corporation. The company was founded on 18 December 2018 by Mike Cessario, a graphic designer, and began selling 16.9oz aluminium tallboy cans through its own website in January 2019. The proposition is deliberately inverted: the liquid is a commodity, so the asset being built is a brand, and the brand borrows the visual language of beer and energy drinks rather than that of bottled water.

The portfolio has been widened roughly once every two to three years, each time into a category with a better gross margin than the last. Still mountain water was joined by sparkling water in 2020, three canned iced teas in March 2023, an electrolyte powder called Death Dust, and in January 2026 a zero-sugar Sparkling Energy line with 100mg of caffeine per can in four flavours - Tropical Terror, Scary Strawberry, Orange Horror and Murder Mystery. Energy is the company's fourth ready-to-drink category, and it enters a US segment that Food Dive sized at roughly $23 billion.

Growth has come from distribution as much as from marketing. Liquid Death moved from a direct-to-consumer site into Whole Foods Market in February 2020, a 7-Eleven trial in Los Angeles and San Diego in August 2020, and Publix and Sprouts in December 2021. Store count went from about 16,000 to about 60,000 in the year to October 2022, and by October 2023 the company said it was in more than 100,000 retail locations in the US and UK. In October 2025 it signed New York distribution with Big Geyser, a step Cessario described as bringing in 'the top operator in NYC and New York distribution'.

Reported retail sales have scaled from about $3 million in 2019 to nearly $45 million in 2021, $263 million in 2023 on SPINS data, and $333 million in 2024. Growth is decelerating from the triple-digit rates of the early years, which is the central question for a buyer: whether the brand can keep opening new categories fast enough to sustain a valuation set in a different growth regime.

The company remains private and closely held. It has raised roughly $260 million of equity across seven rounds since 2019 and was last priced at $1.4 billion in March 2024, when it sold $67.6 million of equity. Goldman Sachs was hired in the summer of 2023 to prepare an anticipated 2024 listing that has not happened; SEC EDGAR shows no registration statement for Supplying Demand, Inc., only Regulation D exempt-offering notices, the most recent filed on 15 March 2024.