Comparing his decision to create his own company and launch Empirical to “walking the plank,” CEO and co-founder Lars Williams was aware of the many unknowns and risks he faced when first starting Empirical, but he was not deterred. Instead, his perseverance and ingenuity paid off, resulting in a flavor company setting a new standard (and category) of drinks, with upcoming plans to expand to the United States with a new facility in Brooklyn, New York.

Born and raised in New York City, Williams didn’t just decide to create Empirical on a whim. He spent many years working in the food industry, particularly in research and development at Denmark’s Noma, one of the world’s most-renowned restaurants under Chef René Redzepi. While he loved the creative aspect of his years there, he wanted to create a brand and business that focused solely on flavor and sense memories within a drink. In his mind, going from creating new experiences through food to the same conceptions with drink was no more different than “switching between a Mac and IBM computer. There are some hardware differences, but it’s fundamentally the same process. It’s about how we democratize a lot of the hard work we do in kitchens.”

© Empirical

 It took Williams and cofounder Mark Emil some time to figure out what exactly they wanted to do with Empirical. At the start, when solely based out of Copenhagen, they concocted interesting and delicious flavors as a spirits company. As the company matured, however, Williams found himself and his team “trying to create experiences through flavor. We started with spirits to make experiences shareable. We leaned into the idea of getting more complex and having a full narrative of flavor.” This, in turn, led to Empirical becoming a flavor company rather than a spirits business.

Williams has successfully tapped into the universal feeling of tasting something that brings us back to a specific memory in our childhood or youth, evoking strong (and often nostalgic) emotions. On one of his most recent Empirical projects, called Symphony 6, Williams drew inspiration from the perfume industry. Having always been fascinated by the fluid delineation of what we think of aromas, flavors and taste, Williams wanted to put these elements together to create fluidity between what we consume versus what we categorize as a perfume or scent.

Symphony 6 © Empirical

In creating Symphony 6, Williams said, “We used some perfume ingredient and I played around to build a sense memory that have never existed.  So, I was trying to create one of these lost narratives, sort of like these stories we tell ourselves about being a child on a perfect evening with the sun setting. For me, it’s being by the water and having a crush on someone, like those crystallized evenings. It’s more about those moments and building a teen crush love song, where there’s little bits of it that remind us of something in our own lives.”

With Symphony 6, Williams and his team used some overlooked ingredients, building on citrus and coffee leaves. Playing into the contrast between light and dark flavors, Williams went further by wrapping these flavors in vetiver, fig leaves and blackcurrant buds, ingredients often found in perfumes.

Another flavor hitting closer to home for Williams, in which he sought out to create a sense memory of his time seeing his sister and nephew for the first time since the pandemic, had to do with a Danish forest in springtime. During his reunion with his sister, they walked a forest in Copenhagen. Williams recalled, “I remember thinking, ‘I wish I could just capture this moment and send it to her [his sister]. And then I remembered, oh, right, that’s what we [Empirical] should fundamentally be doing.” To harness the emotions and specific details associated with that memory, Williams used moss and Douglass fir needles to imitate the evergreen aroma and spongy green moss beneath his feet as he walked the forest floor. While only a limited-time, small-batch release, this flavor was a hit and sold out quickly.

© Empirical

These sense memories made through such concoctions see Empirical sell out in minutes, which is why Williams plans to open his first U.S.-based facility in Brooklyn this summer to create a larger scale of each flavor released. Often, the company sells out within 45 minutes of launching a new flavor via the website.

“It’s great we have some very enthusiastic customers, but it’d also be nice to share it with more people, and that’s ultimately the point of Empirical, to share these experiences. We want the Brooklyn facility to focus on the weird and strange parts. It will be kind of like a playground, so I’m looking forward to getting that online,” Williams added.

Empirical’s successful flavors don’t often fit into any category we might be familiar with; one recent flavor, also a favorite of Williams, is one of the weirder ones that sets Empirical apart from other beverage and flavor companies. This flavor, called Anne Bonny (after a famous female pirate), has a flavor profile of oysters and green gooseberries.

When first hearing an oyster was used in a flavor, most of us might raise an eyebrow and speculate how that could possibly be good, but Williams explained, “We had to separate the oyster into its constituent parts. When we fractioned the parts, you get the real sweetness of the oyster, the brininess, a touch of the metallic and a sense of the shell. With hundreds of fractions of oyster flavors, I was able to take all of those parts of the oyster and select parts of them and build up to what I had in my head of this perfect oyster flavor that was sweet and had this beautiful ocean taste, but also a touch of brininess and the smallest bit of metallic flavor to bring it all together.”

The Plum, I Suppose © Empirical

Anne Bonny eventually went online and, sure enough, once people tasted it, they loved it. When thinking back to the trials of making this flavor, Williams laughed, “This specific concoction made me realize that I’m in my own little bubble sometimes where I think, ‘Yea, of course, why wouldn’t you make a spirit of oysters and green gooseberries?’.”

Williams’ extensive experience in the food and beverage industry has allowed him to not only create a successful flavor company but also to foster a work environment embracing risk and failure. Williams encourages his team to push the boundaries to find that next strange flavor, “For us, that’s where we want to be in pushing forward and having a lot of terrible failures, because otherwise, we won’t have those beautiful moments where something really clicks together.”

Empirical’s success stems from those times things click together, and with a new facility opening this June, we can expect more exciting flavors to reach more of us to try to bring back memories of our youth and of happy times.