About Cocktail Stix

Mother and son team Max Leahy and Laurie Leahy are the founders of Cocktail Stix. Laurie Leahy is a graduate of Cornell University’s prestigious School of Hotel School Administration ( now SC Johnson Business School) who founded her catering business Food Fantasies in 1983, creating events in NYC and the surrounding areas for names such as Def Leopard, Elizabeth Taylor, and Vice President Al Gore. Max Leahy started bartending at 18 and continued until he was 30. During his time as a bartender, he first noticed that at least 50% of his patrons in a small bar in West Hollywood would drink vodka or tequila mixed with soda. They wanted a cocktail that was free of sugar and low in calories & carbs. He then saw the meteoric rise of White Claw seltzers... It’s then that the idea came to him, to create a simple 4 ingredient mixer with 0 carbs, 0 calories, and 0 sugars that could be mixed with a spirit of choice. Using Laurie's connections through the Cornell Hotel School she found a retired flavor engineer from a major soda company (It's not Pepsi, but the other big one). The three would spend the next 4 years and over 50 variations of each flavor tweaking and testing to make Cocktail Stix the delicious mixer it is today. After years of sampling each variation with his bar patrons, Max finally achieved the perfect formulas that make up Cocktail Stix today! Read their story