Meet My Co-Founder, Stephan.
How my Sigma Chi brother and his family's 109-year legacy are changing Zero Hunger Water forever.
The Day It Became Official
On April 8th, I posted a photo on Instagram. You can see it here. It’s me and Stephan Peeler at a Mexican cocina in Irvine — both of us in his Peelers Stoic Series cutoffs, me in white, him in black, both smiling because something had just become real. Stephan is now the co-founder of Zero Hunger Water. I’ve been looking forward to sharing this with you, because his story is one of the most important reasons I believe in what we’re building — and I think once you hear it, you’ll understand why.
Where He Comes From
Stephan didn’t discover the beverage industry. He was born into it.
His family’s roots trace directly to the founding of Cheerwine — a legendary cherry soft drink created in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1917 that has been continuously, proudly family-owned for 109 uninterrupted years. If you’ve spent time in the American South, you already know what Cheerwine means to people there. For everyone else: imagine a brand so genuine, so rooted in community and consistency, that multiple generations of families have grown up drinking it, sought it out in every city they’ve moved to, and passed it down to their children the way you pass down a family recipe. That’s Cheerwine. It wasn’t built by a marketing department. It was built by a family that simply believed in what they made and served their community with total commitment for over a century.
Stephan grew up watching that happen. Not reading about it. Not studying it as a case study. Watching it — up close, as a kid — seeing firsthand what it looks like when a beverage earns a century of loyalty. That kind of education cannot be replicated in a classroom or a boardroom. It lives in you. And it lives in Stephan.
What He’s Built on His Own
Beyond where he comes from, Stephan is a builder in his own right — and I want you to know that, because it matters.
He founded Carolina Malt House, a craft beverage company built on that same generational instinct for what makes people fall in love with what they drink. He brought his family’s deep knowledge of the beverage world into something new and earned a devoted following for it. He co-created Peelers Apparel — a luxury activewear brand featured in Maxim and LA Weekly — which is what we’re both wearing in that photo, the Stoic Series cutoff that I basically live in. And now Zero Hunger Water is his next chapter in beverage.
That’s three ventures. All of them rooted in the same thing: genuine quality, real community, and a deep belief that the best products don’t just solve a problem — they bring people together around something that matters.
I’m honored this is where he’s pointed that energy next.
How We Found Each Other
Stephan is my Sigma Chi fraternity brother. That’s where this starts — not in a boardroom, not through a pitch deck, but through shared values and years of genuine friendship. He has believed in Zero Hunger Water for years, long before April 8th, long before any of this was official. He understood what I was trying to build and he supported it as a friend. The fact that we’ve now formalized that into a real co-founding partnership is something I don’t take lightly, and neither does he.
I’ve spent 25 years in wellness. Thirty-nine books — including 13 New York Times bestsellers — across HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hay House. My first book, 8 Minutes in the Morning, launched in 2001 with a foreword from Tony Robbins, and Oprah followed. Twenty-five years of asking the same question: why do people — men and women in midlife, people doing everything right — keep struggling with wellness? Why do the solutions keep falling short?
I know wellness. What I’ve never known is beverage. Stephan was born into beverage. That’s what makes this partnership something neither of us could have built alone.
The Mission Behind the Product
Here is what Zero Hunger Water actually is: a clean, simple water additive — no sugar, nothing artificial — built on one insight that took me 25 years and a lot of research to fully understand. Most hunger isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a mineral deficiency. Seventy years of industrial agriculture have stripped our food supply of the sodium, potassium, and magnesium our bodies need — and when those minerals are depleted, our brains fire hunger signals that no diet, no discipline, and no prescription medication can permanently silence. Zero Hunger Water replenishes those minerals and quiets that signal at the source. No GLP-1 required. No side effects. Just science, in a stick pack you stir into water.
It’s for women. It’s for men. It’s for anyone who has spent years fighting their body and is ready to understand what their body has actually been trying to tell them.
The Community We’re Building
What Stephan and I are building together is bigger than a product. We want to do for Zero Hunger Water what the Peeler family did for Cheerwine — build something that people don’t just buy, but genuinely belong to. A community of people who found this early, who share it with the people they love, and who pass it down the way you pass down the things that actually changed your life.
That means real connection. It means access to 25 years of my research and resources. It means a place where the science of hunger gets translated into something you can actually use, every single day, without a medical degree.
Stephan brings the beverage DNA that turns a great product into a great brand. I bring the wellness knowledge and the audience we’ve spent 25 years building together. And together, we hope to build something you’ll still be sharing with your family years from now.
More coming later this year. Stay close.
— Jorge Cruise Founder, Zero Hunger Water