Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/tag/small-business/)
Atlantic County isn’t known for its small businesses or entrepreneurs. But in between the casinos, small business owners are working together to create new services and products.
At the end of October we sat down with Mark Ganter of Little Water Distillery for a live interview. It was the second episode in our Business Bootcamp series, which showcases the stories of local business owners and provides networking opportunities for entrepreneurs in the South Jersey area. In this recording of the event, you’ll hear Ganter talk about the challenges that Little Water Distillery faced in finding their Atlantic City location, bringing their first products to market and balancing their need to follow their business plan with their interest in supporting community events. Ganter also has a lot of useful tips for others looking to start a business in the area, particularly when it comes to analyzing local loan and grant opportunities. Route 40 is grateful to Jake Perskie of Fox Rothschild for sponsoring the event.
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Atlantic City will soon boast its first ever legal distillery, thanks to brothers Eric and Mark Ganter. The Little Water Distillery may not be the first to ever produce spirits in the city, but it will be the first to do so with federal and state licenses. The distillery, which began life as a family daydream after Eric and Mark’s dad received a still for his birthday in 2013, will launch an American whisky dubbed WHITECAP around December 15, just in time for those of us who failed to do all our holiday shopping this past weekend. The whisky is the result of a collaboration with a distillery in the Appalachian mountains that the Ganter brothers struck up a friendship with during their multi-year process to launch their Atlantic City site. The name is a play on the white caps of the mountains and the Atlantic ocean, Eric Ganter explained.
Essl’s Dugout on the Black Horse Pike has served five generations of families breakfast and lunch. The Dugout’s owner, Bob Essl, has seen the highs and lows of the Atlantic City area and believes the faded resort needs an image change to help it turn around. “For a resort to be as popular as it was and then to lose that….That image has been tarnished. They’ve got to bring that back,” Essl said. The positive news for his business is that weekends have been looking up.