New Orleans flavored whiskey brand Big Easy Whiskey has named Carlos Quinonez as National Brand Ambassador and Market Manager, positioning the hire as the frontline resource for its Q4 distributor and on-premise push into Tennessee. The move underscores the brand's shift from single-state supplier to a multi-market growth story anchored in three-tier relationship building.
The Tennessee Play
Quinonez's mandate is explicitly commercial: activate bartenders, restaurant teams, and retail buyers while serving as the primary face of the brand to wholesaler partners. Big Easy Whiskey has secured distribution in Tennessee through DET Beverage in Nashville and Athens Distributing Company in Knoxville and Chattanooga — two complementary wholesaler relationships that collectively cover the state's largest on-premise and off-premise markets. For a brand currently available at hundreds of accounts across Louisiana, the Tennessee launch represents its first meaningful foray beyond its home state and a direct test of whether its positioning in the flavored whiskey segment can travel.
The flavored whiskey category has grown crowded at retail, with SKU rationalization pressure mounting at both the chain and independent off-premise level. Big Easy Whiskey's differentiation pitch — a 5-year-aged American whiskey built from a traditional bourbon mash and infused with herbs, spices, botanicals, and fruit — is designed to appeal to whiskey-forward on-premise buyers who have grown skeptical of overly sweet, single-note competitors. Quinonez's deep on-premise credentials make him a credible messenger for that argument at the bar level, where trial and staff education are the primary drivers of depletions for emerging spirits brands.
Why the Hire Matters
Quinonez brings more than 15 years in New Orleans hospitality, including beverage program development at the Adolfo Garcia Restaurant Group, Coquette, the Columns Hotel, and Fives. He most recently served as Beverage Director for the Turkey and the Wolf Group and co-developed a New Orleans-inspired bar concept in Guadalajara. That combination of program-building experience and cross-market credibility is precisely the profile suppliers need when asking a new wholesaler network to prioritize shelf space and back-bar placement.
"He has spent his career creating true New Orleans moments that are now woven into the fabric of this city's experience," said Kieran Walsh, COO and Blender of Big Easy Whiskey. "As we take Big Easy Whiskey into new markets, having Carlos out there telling our story, building relationships and representing where we come from will be incredibly important to how we grow."
For emerging spirits brands navigating the three-tier system, the brand ambassador role functions as a de facto field sales and education layer — particularly critical in new distributor relationships where the supplier's portfolio is unknown to the wholesaler's street team. Embedding a credentialed, locally trusted figure into those early market activations can meaningfully accelerate pull-through from distributor warehouses to on-premise accounts and, eventually, off-premise planogram inclusion. The spirits distribution landscape has made that kind of ground-level market development increasingly non-negotiable for brands without the marketing budgets of major supplier groups.
Big Easy Whiskey's Q4 timeline is tight, targeting the high-velocity holiday selling window when both on-premise gifting programs and off-premise promotional end-caps compete for wholesaler attention. How quickly Quinonez can build account relationships and drive trial events in Nashville and the Knoxville-Chattanooga corridor will be an early indicator of the brand's scalability outside Louisiana. The flavored whiskey segment continues to attract new entrants, making early depletion velocity data from Tennessee a meaningful proof point for any subsequent market expansion.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
