Carmen O’Neal | 58 & CO

Our Guest Editor and 58 and CO founder Carmen O’Neal shares her story

London has a way of asking you who you are and then daring you to prove it.

I did not grow up in the drinks industry. I grew up in Canada in a house that smelled of lavender oil and eucalyptus. My mum owned some of Canada’s first health stores, long before wellness became an aesthetic. I was eating tofu and chickpeas before protein was a buzzword. I watched her choose suppliers carefully, build relationships slowly, and treat her ingredients as though they carried meaning, because to her, they did. Profit and principle were never opposing forces in that house. They were partners.

My first business was making beeswax ornaments at the kitchen table at age five. I did not know then that I was quietly absorbing the foundations of what would one day become a distillery in East London. But I was learning something that has never left me: what you make carries your values with it, whether you intend it to or not.

When I moved to London, I fell hard for its contradictions. It is relentless and generous, traditional and wildly experimental, a city that will test your resolve on a Tuesday morning and reward your conviction by Friday night. It is also a city with one of the most curious, demanding, and genuinely discerning hospitality scenes in the world, a place where what sits behind the bar is increasingly as considered as what ends up in the glass.

When the opportunity came to build a distillery here, I knew I wanted it to carry the same values I had grown up with. Not as a brand story. As actual practice.

I did not launch 58 and CO with a sustainability manifesto or a polished impact report. We just made decisions, one at a time, deliberately, and with the understanding that early choices set the culture of a company long before the culture sets itself. Renewable energy became part of the architecture, not an afterthought bolted on later. Our driveway was built from recycled plastic straws. We committed to on-site composting, UK-made recycled glass, and British wheat. We created a pink gin using rescued wonky apples, fruit rejected by supermarkets for failing to meet their cosmetic standards, destined for waste until we got to them first.

None of those decisions were accidental. Some were more expensive. All were deliberate.

There is something that happens inside a team when sustainability stops being theoretical. When people see waste composted, bottles refilled, and energy drawn from the roof above their heads, it becomes instinct rather than initiative. That shift matters more than any certification. Though the certifications, as it turned out, would matter too.

Then Covid arrived and theory was replaced by urgency. Almost overnight, the hospitality industry, our community, our ecosystem, shut down. Orders evaporated. Bars closed. The London we had built our business inside went very quiet, very fast. We had two options: protect what little revenue remained, or pivot entirely.

Within days, we switched our full production to hand sanitiser. No partial lines, no limited batches. We repurposed our still and redesigned labels. We became one of the first distilleries in the UK to do so at scale. We supplied hospitals, shelters, care homes and the Metropolitan Police. I remember personally delivering sanitiser to frontline workers who had none. In that moment, the purpose of what we had built crystallised. An ethical business is not defined in good times. It is defined in crisis.

When 58 and CO became a certified B Corporation in 2021, the first female-founded distillery in the UK to achieve it, it felt less like a milestone and more like a responsibility. Recertification last year reinforced that. B Corp is not a badge you wear once. It is a continuous audit of your impact. It forces you to examine governance, pay equity, supply chains and environmental footprint. It asks uncomfortable questions, which is precisely why it matters.

London’s hospitality scene has been an essential partner in that journey. Venues like Big Penny Social and BAMBI, groups like JKS Restaurant Group and Ottolenghi, these are places that understand provenance. They ask where things come from. They care what story a bottle carries before they put it on their back bar. That belief led us to rethink something deceptively simple, the House Pour.