Pour One Out for the Stars: Why Every A-Lister Suddenly Wants to Sell You a Drink (Or a Snack)

There was a time when a celebrity's side hustle meant a perfume that smelled vaguely of ambition and a clothing line that appeared exclusively in department store clearance sections. Those days are gone. The modern A-lister has developed far more sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts — and far more expensive taste in what they want to put their name on.

Today, the hottest accessory in Hollywood isn't a handbag or a fragrance. It's a tequila brand. Or a wine label. Or an oat milk company. Or, in at least one case, a mayonnaise. (We'll get to that.)

The celebrity food and beverage industry has quietly exploded into a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem, and the question worth asking isn't just why — it's which ones are actually worth your hard-earned cash, and which ones are essentially very expensive fan merchandise with a proof percentage.

The Business Case: Why Stars Are Trading Scripts for Spirits

Let's start with the money, because that's where this story really begins. Traditional celebrity endorsement deals — the kind where a famous face holds up a product and smiles — have been declining in cultural cachet for years. Consumers are savvier now. We can smell inauthenticity from approximately three sponsored posts away.

Ownership changes everything. When Ryan Reynolds acquired Aviation American Gin in 2018 and subsequently sold it to Diageo for up to $610 million, Hollywood paid very close attention. That wasn't an endorsement deal. That was a masterclass in brand building, and it proved that a celebrity with genuine personality investment and smart marketing could turn a mid-tier spirits brand into a cultural phenomenon.

The formula clicked for a lot of very ambitious people simultaneously. Add to that the post-pandemic boom in premium at-home consumption — Americans spending more on quality food and drink experiences — and you have a perfect storm of celebrity entrepreneurship.

The Wins: When Star Power Actually Delivers

Ryan Reynolds and Aviation Gin remains the gold standard for a reason. Reynolds didn't just lend his face — he built an entire comedic universe around the brand, using his signature deadpan humor to make gin feel like the funniest drink at the party. The marketing was genuinely creative, the product was legitimately good, and the result was a cultural conversation rather than just an advertisement. Template established.

George Clooney's Casamigos Tequila is the other case study every celebrity entrepreneur cites like scripture. Clooney and his partners built the brand from a bottle they actually wanted to drink at their own homes, sold it to Diageo for a reported $1 billion, and essentially invented the celebrity tequila gold rush that followed. Every star currently hawking agave spirits owes Clooney a commission.

Dwayne Johnson's Teremana Tequila has quietly become one of the fastest-growing spirits brands in American history — a claim that sounds like marketing copy but is actually backed by sales data. Johnson's relentless, authentic social media engagement with the brand has made Teremana feel less like a celebrity product and more like a genuine passion project. Whether you believe that or not, the numbers don't lie.

Kylie Jenner's Khy and the broader Jenner-Kardashian food and lifestyle empire deserves acknowledgment simply for scale. Love them or loudly not love them, this family understands brand extension in a way that business schools will be studying for decades.

The Spectacular Flops: A Cautionary Tale in Three Acts

For every Aviation Gin success story, there's a product sitting in the back of someone's cabinet, purchased once out of curiosity and never opened again.

Kendall Jenner's 818 Tequila launched to significant fanfare and immediately ran into a wall of controversy, with critics and Mexican tequila producers raising legitimate questions about cultural appropriation and marketing authenticity. The brand has persisted, but it never achieved the clean cultural moment its launch was clearly designed to create. The lesson: tequila is deeply rooted in Mexican heritage, and consumers — increasingly — notice when that heritage is treated as aesthetic rather than substance.

Several celebrity wine labels have launched with enormous press and faded quietly into the background of grocery store shelves, victims of a market that is absolutely saturated with options and a consumer base that has learned, often expensively, that a famous name on a label is no guarantee of what's inside the bottle.

And then there is the celebrity snack space, which has produced some genuinely bewildering entries. Multiple stars have launched chip brands, jerky lines, and novelty food products that seemed to exist primarily to generate a press cycle rather than a sustainable business. The shelf life of these ventures — ironic given that shelf life is literally their business — tends to be short.

What Actually Makes a Celebrity Food Brand Work?

The pattern among the success stories is remarkably consistent, and it has nothing to do with fame level. It has everything to do with authenticity, product quality, and marketing that treats consumers as intelligent adults.

The brands that thrive are the ones where the celebrity's involvement feels genuinely motivated by something beyond a revenue stream. Reynolds actually seems to find gin funny. Clooney actually drank his own tequila before he sold it. Johnson actually posts about Teremana like a person who enjoys his product rather than a person executing a content calendar.

The brands that struggle are the ones where the connection feels contractual — where the star shows up for the launch party and the photoshoot and then retreats, leaving a product with a famous face and no discernible soul.

Consumers in 2024 are, to put it plainly, extremely good at detecting the difference.

The Next Frontier: Food Halls, Restaurants, and the Dining Experience

Spirits and snacks are only part of the story. An increasing number of celebrities are moving into the restaurant and hospitality space — a notoriously brutal industry where even experienced operators fail regularly. The celebrity advantage here is marketing reach and initial buzz, but the restaurant industry has a way of humbling everyone eventually.

Several high-profile celebrity restaurant ventures have closed quietly in recent years, their initial fanfare giving way to the grinding reality of food costs, staffing challenges, and the simple fact that people ultimately return to restaurants because the food is good — not because the owner once starred in a Marvel film.

The Bottom Line

The celebrity food and beverage boom isn't going anywhere. If anything, it's accelerating. The smart money — literally — is on the stars who approach these ventures as genuine entrepreneurs rather than brand ambassadors of their own mythology.

As for the rest? Well, there's always room on the clearance shelf next to the 2009 celebrity perfumes.

Cheers. Or don't. Depends entirely on whose tequila we're talking about.