Zest Tea
When James Fayal started working at a venture capitalist firm in Cincinnati, he realized he needed either coffee or an energy drink to keep him alert throughout the day — his drink of choice, tea, wasn’t cutting it.
In response, the 2012 alumnus and his roommate Rickey Ishida founded Zest Tea, a company that produces tea with up to 160 milligrams of caffeine per cup, as opposed to the 135 milligrams in a typical cup of coffee.
“We’ve been tea-heads (sorta like deadheads but with different plants) long enough that we knew how to blend a great tea, but to start it was only for ourselves,” the co-founders wrote on Zest Tea’s website. “Then our friends heard about what we were doing. They loved the idea and when they tasted the teas they had to have it for themselves. Eventually we succumbed to our [friends’] pleas and decided to make our blends available to the masses.”
To help fund their company, Fayal and Ishida worked with Venture for America, a program that recruits top college graduates and sends them to start-ups in lower-cost cities such as Baltimore and Detroit to teach them how to become entrepreneurs.
“We were absolutely impressed with James from the first time we met him. The chairman of our board, Cameron Breitner, ended up being his mentor because he saw James on our selection day and saw a lot of himself in him,” said Mike Tarullo, vice president of corporate development. “We recognized that James had a lot of experience in finance, but he also had the aptitude of someone who could be the CEO of a company.”
With four flavors of Zest Tea on the market, Fayal has found some success with the company — even while balancing day-to-day operations and work at his full-time job.
“Right now, I am not really interested in having our own retail locations,” Fayal said. “That being said, we want to work with distributors to distribute to retail shops, grocery stores, small local coffee shops. So we want our products being all over the place, but right now we have no interest in our own retail locations yet.”
Fayal’s father, who earned a master’s degree in business from Harvard University, has served as a mentor to his son in terms of manufacturing the product.
“I am proud beyond words,” James Fayal Sr. said. “He has done an incredible job of conceiving the product, putting packaging together, sourcing the materials, the marketing he has done. Everything he has done has been absolutely marvelous.”
