In this inaugural episode of the "Who, What, Wix" podcast, hosts (Speaker A and Speaker B) sit down with Kate Levenstein, founder of Cannonball Productions, an events company that specializes in beer‑and‑food festivals across the United States. Kate recounts her journey from growing up in New Jersey, studying at the University of Wisconsin‑Madison, and working in the booking department of the Oprah Winfrey Show, to leading Midwest operations for the daily‑deal platform Living Social. She explains how her experience crafting show concepts for Oprah sparked an interest in event‑style experiences, leading her to organize a beer festival at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. The success of a bacon‑and‑beer dinner there inspired the creation of the "Bacon & Beer Classic" series. When Living Social shut down its live‑events division, Kate’s entrepreneurial parents encouraged her to launch her own company. She founded Cannonball Productions, secured the name, built a website, and quickly moved to plan her first large‑scale festival in Seattle, partnering with major league baseball stadiums. The conversation highlights the challenges of scaling a niche festival, the importance of food‑beer pairing, community building, and the leap from employee to founder.
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From Wix.com, this is who what Wix. Hey, all.
Welcome to another episode of who what Wix. Justin and I today are enjoying a nice, cold beer. Cheers.
Benjamin Franklin, my friend, said beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. If that's the case, then I think beer festivals are proof that man knows how to make the most of God's gift. You like what I did there?
Love it.
Beer festivals have taken off around the world in the past few years. And just to get everybody in the mood, can we get that bottle opener sound effect one more time? And one more for good measure. Thank you very much. So, yeah, we're talking about events today, but our guest today has built her career on planning creative beer festivals all over the country. She's here to teach us how you can plan exciting events that get people off their asses.
Yeah. So you don't need to love beer, you don't need to drink beer, you don't need to care about beer to be into this episode. This episode is about how to throw huge, successful events. And our guest, who's extremely detail oriented, knows exactly that. So trust us. You want to get out your pen and paper for this one?
What's up, everybody? We're here with Kate Levenstein. She's the founder of Cannonball Productions. They're an events company out of New York City that specializes in beer festivals all over the United States. So, Kate, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Sure.
I grew up out east in New Jersey and ended up going to school in the best state in America, in Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And that's where my love for beer really, really, really came through. Beer and cheese. And after I graduated, I moved down to Chicago and started working at the Oprah Winfrey show and was there until that ended and sadly.
What did you do with Oprah?
I worked. I worked in her booking department. So we basically, we were the. It was the best team. We got to come up with all the different ideas for different shows and then actually make them happen. So it was a really creative team. So we would say what would be a really great surprise for Oprah? Like, we'll get the Black Eyed Peas to come up with a song, and then we'd call up Will I Am and see if they'd be into it. So it was hard to move on after that. But luckily Living Social was on its way up on the rise, and they were growing. I was tapped to run the Midwest
market for folks that have never heard of Living Living Social. Could you tell us a little bit about it?
Sure. In the heyday of Living social, back in 2010, 11 and 12, it was one of the biggest daily deal marketing sites for businesses around the country and around the world. So when I started there, they were based in D.C. we were at about, I think, five or six hundred people and boomed over a two year time frame to four or five thousand people.
Wow, that's a big step.
So, yeah, yeah. So you really got to see a company grow and figure out what it did well, what it didn't do well. My job was basically to come up with really cool ideas that local Chicagoans would just love. And we were running it at one point, about 40 different types of trips. So we took it from nothing. I was alone in that market. And then by the end of it, I had a team of about 65 people helping me to run these amazing trips for tens and hundreds of thousands of people in the city. Wait, what about.
Since you hadn't worked in events like this before, what about the job enticed you to leave Oprah? Like, why did you think that you. Your next step should be an event?
Great question. Well, so the show was ending, so it was time for pretty much everybody to move on. But at the same time, they. I thought almost every show at Oprah was an event in and of itself. There was a very, you know, structured timeline of what was gonna happen, what prepar we needed to, you know, to think about before every guest, before every scene and segment, different props, different. And really the idea that both of the jobs had in common for me was the concept creation and coming up with what would resonate with a specific audience.
Kate, you spent years working for other people, other companies, and now, you know, you're here because you're working for yourself. How did you start to make that transition? I mean, what put all the pieces into place?
So we transitioned from Living Social. We were doing these day trips and we started thinking about bigger events that we could do. So we threw. We were basically asked to throw a beer festival in our market and thinking about where I would want to go to a beer festival. The one place that hit me was Lincoln Park Zoo, which is downtown. It's the. This beautiful open space. And so called them up and we convinced them to throw the very first beer festival at Lincoln Park Zoo. And that was about a Month and a half before Living Social decided it was kind of done with the live events division because they were trying to focus more on the daily deal platform. And so I had these ideas after seeing we had 10,000 people in one night, in one session come through and drink and eat and play. And really this idea of community was driving through me at that point. To get 10,000 people in one space at a time for beer was really exciting to me. So the one thing I thought that was lacking from that event was the idea of food being included. I'm a huge foodie. I love the idea of getting to try a lot of different things. And so the idea of food was really missing in that scenario to me. I had gone out to breakfast one morning at one of the most popular breakfast spots in Chicago. They had a bacon platter on the menu. So my boyfriend and I looked at each other and we were like, yeah, we need to get that. That's going in our belly. So it was like maple syrup bacon and black pepper bacon and jalapeno bacon.
Basically, the idea light bulb went off over your head when you saw that massive platter of bacon.
Yeah. I was like, well, that's awesome. You know, I want to eat this all the time, and what can we do with this? And the restaurant was so hard to get into. They were only open until 4pm and approached them about holding dinners there. So we put together a bacon and beer dinner, and they basically created. They created different bacon sample dishes with each of those bacon strips and then gave you a strip on the side. So it was like, here's the jalapeno bacon strip, and then it's made into, you know, a jalapeno Mac and cheese sample dish. And then we paired different craft beers with each of those dishes. So that event, that was the first one in Living Social within Living Social. And it was so successful that other markets, my counterparts in other cities around the country, started to try and mimic it. And it was successful in almost every city that we went to. So I went back to the higher ups and said, look. Look at all this opportunity is here. We already know it's a. Well, you know, it sold really well on our platform through the dinners. Let's do it. And I think within the week, it was. Within a couple of days, they let the whole company division go. The whole Live events team go. So thankfully, my parents were both entrepreneurs, and they said, you know, what you should do is take these companies that want to hire you and bring them on as clients and start your own company and try and put together one of these events that you're so passionate about.
Was that a scary idea to you at first? Yeah. Yeah.
I was like, you guys are crazy. You don't know how it works. Like, you're ancient. This isn't, you know, this isn't the 80s anymore. This is. This isn't how it happens. But they were exactly right. It was super scary.
Do you think the tipping point was where you said, okay, I'm not just, you know, trying this out anymore. I'm actually going to sort of hunker down and make this a business?
There was really no option at that point. You know, we found the name Cannonball. I knew that that was gonna be the name. And starting a website and, you know, it was just. It all happened really fast.
Let's talk about the very first festival that Cannonball planned. And I want to know specifically what went wrong.
Oh, God. Oh, God. So much went wrong. It was more went wrong than went right. We put together. Our very first festival was Bacon and Beer, and the Bacon and Beer Classic in Seattle. So that's when things started to get. We just started calling up every major league baseball stadium in the country. And two of my colleagues from Living Social ended up joining me. They quit their jobs and came and joined me full time to help run these adventures and festivals. And the vision was to just have one festival, one Bacon and Beer Classic.
