Small Business Spotlight

Back Pocket Provisions is a mission-based craft beverage brand in Richmond, VA. Back Pocket works with a network of Virginia farms to turn fresh fruits and vegetables into a line of award-winning cocktail mixes. Our mission is to make life more delicious, healthy, honest, and fun by helping small farmers succeed. Today, Back Pocket products are available at retail and restaurant locations throughout Virginia and in select retail locations nationwide.

Our work is centered in the belief that small farms are the foundation of a food system that builds stronger communities, ecosystems, and local economies. However, the current industrial food system, along with racial and economic injustice, catastrophic climate change, and the hollowing out of rural communities, have made it harder than ever before to make a living as an American farmer.

We can’t solve these problems ourselves. But Back Pocket is committed to living our mission by designing innovative products that create new small farm opportunities; redesigning supply chains until they treat farmers as partners, not costs; and demonstrating a new kind of food economy in which we can all act locally to build collective impact.

Will Gray, founder of Back Pocket Provisions, is passionate about food and drink that doesn’t just taste good, it does good – by building stronger communities, ecosystems, and local economies.

Prior to Back Pocket, Will was a Program Officer at the Wallace Center in Arlington, VA, a national nonprofit working to make the food system more healthy, green, fair, and affordable. There, he led the Wallace Center’s Regional Food Economies portfolio. Along with the rest of the RFE team, Will worked to develop a business environment within the food system that enabled the success of mission-based farm and food enterprises as they balanced performance, sustainability, and impact. Will started day-dreaming about launching his own food brand in 2013, co-founded Back Pocket Provisions with his sister as a “side hustle” in 2015, and made the leap into full-time CEO in the spring of 2019.