How to Make Your Community A Better Place Through Your Business

Zach Cranford discusses the benefits of starting and growing a business in the Catawba region. Zach is the founder of Foothills Distillery, 1712 Spirits and Standard Oyster Company.

I'm Zack Cranford. I am the founder of Foothills Distillery and the founder of Standard Oyster Company. I would consider myself maybe a serial food and beverage entrepreneur. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs so you could say I kind of had that fire in me already. One of my motivations is trying to make the community a better place — make the world a better place.

For those who have that fuel or have that fire, I would recommend going out there and doing that because they do make the community a better place. Not everybody is able to do that or not everybody has the drive to do that or the means to do that, but the ones who do, I would highly recommend just going out there to make it happen.

One of the coolest things I like about the oyster bar is we are a hole in the wall. We're in a strip center in kind of an area that you would not think you would see us in. And seafood, to interact with a dish, a lot of times you're opening oysters with your hands, you're eating it with your hands, so you sit at a bar. You also make friends with the people that are sitting next to you and that's what we wanted with Standard Oyster Company.

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