Chris Fredrickson

Like many of his peers, Chris Fredrickson built a whiskey company alongside friends who all liked bourbon and all felt trapped in corporate careers. Serendipitously, about the same time, Fredrickson discovered a piece of family history that made the idea feel less like fantasy and more like destiny. With that, Fredrickson turned a hunch into one of Michigan’s best-known whiskey brands, one that made “cherry country” part of its identity, expanded into national retail with that cocktail fruit, then ultimately committed tens of millions to build Michigan’s largest whiskey distillery campus.

Fredrickson was born December 12, 1984 into a family farm tied to cherry agriculture. Chris, however, did not lean toward that career choice. Then, in 2011, Fredrickson and his father found Prohibition-era patents connected to his great-grandfather. The documents were not recipes, but techniques that suggested the family had once been closer to whiskey than Fredrickson ever realized. Using the find as a jumping-off place, he, Jared Rapp, and Moti Goldring, all unhappy in their corporate jobs, started talking about opening a distillery. At the time, Fredrickson was working as a management consultant, while Rapp and Goldring were attorneys. Out of that dissatisfaction, came the decision to start buying barrels and begin building a brand. 

Traverse City Whiskey Co. began operating in 2012 through those 20 mature bourbon barrels purchased from MGP, a meaningful investment for three young founders operating before “craft whiskey” became as crowded as it is now. The trio did not plan to source forever, however, and soon obtained a custom Kothe still. As their whiskey line matured, Traverse City Whiskey Co. also found a second business hiding in plain sight—garnish. In the newly built Stillhouse bar, Fredrickson saw how many cocktails demanded cherries, and he watched the costs pile up. The result was a product expansion that eventually became one of the company’s biggest national footprints: premium cocktail cherries. In 2021, Traverse City Whiskey Co. announced that Walmart would carry its Premium Cocktail Cherries in more than 1,900 stores, an unusually large retail win for a craft producer born in a touristtown. The growth put pressure on capacity, and by 2017, the company began positioning itself for a much bigger footprint. In 2018, Fredrickson said the company purchased a former fruit processing plant property and began reimagining it as a distilling campus. That move tied the brand back to Michigan agriculture in a literal way: a whiskey company repurposing a fruit-industry site into a production headquarters, while still leaning into cherries as a signature. 

By 2023, the expansion had become a public, state-backed project. In October 2022, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation announced that Traverse City Whiskey Co. planned an approximately $20 million investment expected to create nearly 100 jobs, supported by a performance-based grant. Then came the build. It was soon reported that Traverse City Whiskey Co. broke ground on a 70,000-square-foot campus set on 35 acres, and it put Fredrickson on record with the practical details: current production around 3 barrels per day, future capacity projected at 70 barrels per day—about 24,000 barrels per year. The plan was not just bigger tanks and bigger warehouses, it was end-to-end whiskey production under one roof—mashing, fermentation, distillation, and maturation—paired with a destination-grade tasting room and visitor center intended to pull whiskey tourism from across the state and beyond. 

Ultimately, Fredrickson belongs to the rare category of modern craft-whiskey founders who scaledwithoutabandoning their place-based identity. Traverse City Whiskey Co. did not outgrow cherries; it doubled down on them. It did not treat heritage as a label; it built a decade-long business around a Prohibition-era artifact found on a Michigan farm. And when it finally moved to industrial scale, it did it by converting an abandoned fruit facility into a whiskey campus—an “Up North” story told in steel, oak, and payroll.

Sources:

  1. MyNorth.com, “Distiller File: Chris Fredrickson at Traverse City Whiskey Company”, Tim Tebeau, November 7, 2018, mynorth.com

  2. Breaking Bourbon, “Traverse City Whiskey Co…” Nick Beiter, August 8, 2019

  3. Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), “Gov. Whitmer Announces Nearly 100 New Jobs…Expands in Traverse City,” Kathleen Achtenberg, October 28, 2022

  4. Whisky Advocate, “Traverse City Whiskey Co. Broke Ground…”, Madeline Ender, March 17, 2023

  5. American Whiskey Magazine Issue 1, “Making Whiskey in the Cherry Capital of the USA”, Maggie Kimberl, September 4, 2019, americanwhiskeymag.com

  6. Business Wire, “Traverse City Whiskey Co. Breaks Ground…”, January 24, 2023, businesswire.com

  7. Paste Magazine, “Traverse City Whiskey Co. Leans on its Michigan Roots”, Nathan Borchelt, February 20, 2019, PasteMagazine.com

Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee