A Spirit for Change: Danny Lafuente ’05 distills RE’s mission into a sustainable spirit

4/6/2026

Linda Robertson

The Simple Spirits company is one of the numerous brainchildren of Danny Lafuente ’05.

Lafuente calls himself a serial entrepreneur, which is another way of saying he is a procreator of ideas. He’s got so many ideas that one of his most successful ventures, LAB Miami, is a nerve center for generating ideas.

Simple Spirits sprang from his mind as a combination of two ideas: Sell vodka and fight hunger. Enjoy a cocktail while simultaneously giving food to someone in need. Convert vice into virtue.

Today, Lafuente’s company donates the equivalent of one meal per drink to Feeding America and other hunger relief charities. Simple. No middleman, no administrative costs, no strings attached. Simple.

Plus, the Russet potatoes that are the primary ingredient of Simple Vodka are grown in Idaho by farmers committed to environmentally sustainable practices. The distilling process utilizes wind power and fresh water from the Snake River aquifer, with no added sugars, artificial flavors or preservatives. Wastewater is recycled and byproducts are upcycled into animal feed. Simple.

“We’re proud to be the first social impact brand in the industry,” Lafuente said. “Vodka accounts for about a third of all spirits sold in this country. We targeted vodka to give purpose to an everyday transaction.”

Simple Spirits has donated more than one million meals since its founding. Lafuente expects to donate another million meals in 2026, based on sales projections.

He could reap a higher profit margin if his simple pledge to aid the hungry weren’t engraved on every single Simple bottle. But that would contradict the values he learned during seven years as a Ransom Everglades School student. Lafuente is a believer in founder Paul Ransom’s philosophy that he and fellow graduates “are in the world not so much for what they can get out of it as for what they can put into it.”

“Being educated at Ransom Everglades was a transformative experience for me,” he said. “The school played a big role in the direction of my life and it still does. Ransom Everglades is part of my DNA.”

Lafuente, 38, counts Ransom Everglades alums as best friends, business partners and mentors.

“I remember how we both arrived at this unique, storied institution, working-class kids on financial aid who wanted to fit in, surrounded by talented, smart, ambitious classmates,” said Wifredo Fernandez ’05, Lafuente’s soccer teammate, University of Pennsylvania roommate and LAB Miami co-founder.

They now live within a mile of each other in Coral Gables. “It was where we discovered the world was full of possibilities.”

Lafuente grew up in Allapattah near the Miami River with his older brother, Pablo. They were raised by their mother, Maria Lafuente, who worked as a cosmetologist and hair stylist in Coconut Grove. She was separated and later divorced from Danny’s father, who was mostly absent during Danny’s youth.

But Lafuente got plenty of attention, affection and guidance, thanks to his maternal grandparents. Grandfather Pablo Alvarez immigrated from Cuba to Miami in 1956 and helped dozens of relatives move to South Florida.

“In Cuba, my grandad sold chickens as the primary breadwinner in his family so he had to drop out of school in the fifth grade,” Lafuente said. “When he came here, he spoke no English and could barely write. That’s why education was his No. 1 priority for us.”

Lafuente inherited his entrepreneurial spirit from his grandfather, who owned various businesses – auto repair, construction, demolition, a flower shop and the River Canal Marina, where Lafuente spent summers working as a cashier and selling mangoes he collected from his aunt’s yard.

“I always knew I wanted to start my own business,” Lafuente said. “I wrote my first business plan when I was 8: A horror-themed ice cream shop with spooky flavors – Eye Scream. And in the back was a room where kids could have tutoring sessions.”

“I asked myself, ‘Why can’t social impact and profit be tied together? There has to be a way to do good and make money.’”

Danny Lafuente ’05

Lafuente attended Coconut Grove Elementary across the street from his mother’s hair salon. He’d come over after school and get his cheeks squeezed by her clients. Then he’d sell them fundraising-drive products like chocolate or Christmas wrapping paper.

“Danny was such a salesman he won first prize of $250 for selling the most wrapping paper,” said Lafuente’s mother, Maria. “His brother, Pablo, is more easy-going, more studious, more careful. Danny is like me. He can’t sit still. He’s a comedian. An amazing dancer. He had many girlfriends. He was a Boy Scout. He taught kids at our church. And he bakes his own bread.”

Lafuente applied to Ransom Everglades Middle School on the recommendation of his brother, who by then was a student at Penn, working part-time in the admissions office. Ransom Everglades had a spectacular track record of sending graduates to the nation’s top schools. Lafuente was accepted and received financial aid.

“Stepping on campus, standing on the bluff, in the Dell, you feel the ghosts of all those brilliant people. I fell in love with Ransom Everglades,” Lafuente said.

Math teacher Alina Mendoza, now faculty emerita, was his favorite, and her son Antonio “Toto” Collazo ’07 became one of Lafuente’s best friends. She and drama teacher Kate Denson encouraged him to act in school plays.

“Danny was a performer, a go-getter,” said Mendoza. She sewed costumes for the plays while Lafuente’s mother did hair and makeup. Mendoza sometimes took Lafuente home after school so he didn’t have to wait there for his mother to get off work and pick him up. “He used to watch the cheerleaders practice and he learned all the cheers. During Spirit Week for the lip-sync event, I taught them oldies and he did an amazing impression of Boy George singing ‘Karma Chameleon.’

“He was also so smart that I’d teach the lesson, he’d get it right away and then play around and disrupt the entire class. I’d tell him, ‘You may step out, or you may help your classmates.’ He was very good at tutoring.”

Lafuente continued to excel in high school, playing soccer, competing in track and field, serving as class president in ninth and 12th grades, acting in such plays as The Man Who Came To Dinner and Much Ado About Nothing.

“My grandad came to every play and afterward he’d say, ‘You were great, but acting is not a career,’” Lafuente said. “He wanted me to be a lawyer.”

Lafuente said he always felt comfortable with his wealthier classmates even if some of his friends did not.

“I had fun every day,” he said. “It was a magical place.”

His mother said he never obsessed over materialistic comparisons.

“I dropped him off to visit at some grand houses,” she said. “I asked him how he felt. He said, ‘Our house is smaller and that makes us closer.’”

Lafuente was not every teacher’s pet.

“I spent a lot of time in detention for goofing off in class or for not shaving. I cracked jokes, fooled around, acted like a smartass,” he said. “On senior prank day I hired a mariachi band to follow the head of school around the entire day.”

Lafuente was admitted to Penn via early decision, received significant financial aid and majored in international relations. He and Fernandez joined the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and started a campus chapter of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), the pro-democracy, anti-Castro organization founded in Miami in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa and other Cuban exiles.

Lafuente took the second semester of his sophomore year off to come home and start a business he invented called Miami Waiter. It was a precursor to Door Dash or Uber Eats but he was ahead of his time and it didn’t last.

“I sold the brand and broke even, learned a lot about a good concept versus a well-executed plan,” he said.

Back at Penn, Lafuente and Fernandez held late-night brainstorming sessions. Among their ideas – a textbook marketplace, a store stocked with donated items where everything was free, advertising on movie theater seats.

“We were thinking about novel business models that had a social impact,” Fernandez said, citing companies like TOMS shoes and Bombas socks, which combine commerce and charity with a one pair purchased-one pair donated model.

After studying abroad in Prague and completing his degree, Lafuente returned to Miami and was hired as CANF’s director of media and government relations. He worked with U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Sen. Marco Rubio on such issues as family travel and funding for human rights activists in Cuba.

“Ransom Everglades is part of my DNA.”

Danny Lafuente ’05

Along the way he grew disillusioned with the nonprofit model.

“I asked myself, ‘Why can’t social impact and profit be tied together?” he said. “There has to be a way to do good and make money.’”

So he and Fernandez, fresh off two years teaching under-resourced students through Teach For America, put their heads together again and started LAB Miami. They partnered with RE graduates Collazo and Elisa Rodriguez-Vila ’05. On a shoestring budget, and using their own credit cards to buy supplies, they created a 700-square-foot co-working space in Wynwood. Collazo built desks and benches out of shipping pallets.

LAB represents the three common letters in Laboratory and Collaboration, and originally stood for Love, Art, Business – and later Learn, Act, Build.

The goal was to nurture a hive for Miami’s talented thinkers and tinkerers, put Miami on the startup map and stop the brain drain from their hometown.

“We knew a lot of our Ransom Everglades classmates had left for other cities where there were more opportunities in innovative business and tech,” Fernandez said. “A co-working space was a brand new real estate concept in Miami. We had to convince developers and landlords to experiment. We had to raise capital. We had to put together website design workshops, coding classes, investment seminars, hackathons, networking events.”

It was 2011. Wood Tavern, Panther Coffee and Lester’s were about the only places to get a drink. But Wynwood, an industrial area transitioning into Miami’s funkiest neighborhood, was buzzing with energy. The LAB even hosted art shows to align with the Second Saturday Art Walks.

“At that time, Wynwood was the best expression of Miami’s creativity,” said Fernandez, now director of global government affairs at X AI. “It was all over its walls, and we were right in the middle of it.”

Lafuente was thrilled to be on the cutting edge, leading a new wave of entrepreneurship. The LAB later expanded to a 10,000 square foot warehouse on NW 26th Street.

And then one night at the Wood Tavern, while sipping a Moscow Mule, Lafuente had what he refers to as an “Aha moment.” As he did on many nights, he had dropped off leftover trays of food from the LAB at the Miami Rescue Mission. Rather than throw away the hors d’oeuvres, sandwiches and snacks ordered for events, Lafuente and Fernandez took the food to homeless shelters and churches.

“In the process, I saw how food insecurity is a massive and widespread problem that affects single parents, workers laid off from their jobs, people who have no grocery stores in their neighborhoods,” Lafuente said. “I learned that one in eight Americans – 44 million people – do not know where their next meal is coming from. I also learned how 92 billion pounds of perfectly good food is wasted each year, thrown into landfills or incinerators.

“Hunger relief organizations like Feeding America are saving food that is donated and diverting it to people in need, but they face hard costs to complete the social good loop, such as sorting, refrigerating and transporting.”

Thus, Simple Vodka was born. About 17 meals are donated per 1-liter bottle (the size used by bars and restaurants) and 13 per 750-ml bottle (the size sold in liquor stores for $21-23). Lafuente first thought about selling table salt “but I wanted to target a ubiquitous product in an industry where we could stand out.”

Simple Vodka won a platinum medal at the 2023 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, where it was praised for its smooth finish. Lafuente was named Innovator of the Year by the Tasting Alliance.

The company has added two spirits to its lineup – Hawthorn’s Gin and Xoma, a small batch Pulcatta made from agave.

“What’s unusual about Danny’s brand is that he is donating proceeds directly to the charity whereas most CEOs donate personally to a charity,” said Larry Waks ’72, an attorney who specializes in the food and beverage industry and Simple’s counsel. “Paul Newman set the standard with his products where every penny went directly to charity.”

Waks mentioned how one of his clients – Jon Bon Jovi, who started the Hampton Water rose wine brand in 2016 – is known for his charitable giving but from his personal funds, not as a percentage of sales.

“Vodka is a tough category in a competitive industry,” Waks said. “Vodka is vodka – it doesn’t have the variations of wine or rum – and the spirits industry is down because young people don’t drink as much.”

“Other than our families, nothing gave us more of a rocket launch into life than Ransom Everglades.”

Larry Waks ’72

Lafuente considers Waks to be one of the most important mentors in his life. Again, there’s a Ransom Everglades connection. Waks, half Cuban, son of a shoe salesman, raised in Miami’s Westchester neighborhood, said he attended the Ransom School but departed before graduating to support his siblings after both parents passed away.

“Danny is the son I never had,” said Waks, who met Lafuente serendipitously six years ago when Lafuente was on a marketing trip to Texas and ran into Waks in Marfa, where he owns a ranch. “He said he went to Ransom Everglades and bingo! We hit it off.

“Other than our families, nothing gave us more of a rocket launch into life than Ransom Everglades,” Waks said. “Before I went to Ransom, my goal was to live in a house with air conditioning and drive in a car that didn’t have holes in the floorboard.

“I get to Ransom and holy cow! I joined the sailing team. There were kids from Gables Estates talking about Harvard and Yale. I thought, if I work hard maybe life can be like this. If I can make it here I can make it anywhere.”

Although Waks recalls struggling to fit in and experiencing social hardships, he remains loyal.

“I love, love, love Ransom Everglades with all my heart,” he said.

Waks and Lafuente have become close friends. They are already discussing Lafuente’s next endeavor.

“I struggle with vodka as the tool for good,” Lafuente said. “I’d love to move off of spirits and focus on hunger relief.”

In addition to running Simple, Lafuente has returned to LAB Miami, in partnership with another Ransom Everglades alumnus, Scott Srebnick ’83. They want to extend its reach and create a venture fund and startup residency to support local talent.

He’s devoting more time to his family – wife Sabrina, whom he met at LAB, and their sons Nico, 5, and Marco, 1.

Lafuente can’t sit still. His brain is brimming with ideas. There are problems to solve, communities to build, models to test, risks to weigh. The “Aha moments” can strike anytime – in the middle of the night, or at cocktail hour.

“Maybe I could launch a non-alcoholic beverage. And at some point in my career I’d like to run a museum, bring back a sense of awe to culture. But my superpower is really bringing people together,” he said. “There’s lots to learn. That’s the beauty of it: The love of learning.”

Linda Robertson is a journalist at the Miami Herald, formerly a sports columnist, now an investigative reporter. Twice she has been part of the Herald‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning news coverage, and her stories were selected for The Best American Sports Writing multiple times. She was president of the Association for Women in Sports Media and a University of Michigan Knight-Wallace fellow. She grew up in Miami and loved attending Dan Leslie Bowden’s annual reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” at Ransom Everglades before his passing.

Back

RE founder Paul Ransom, circa 1903

News Page

A Spirit for Change: Danny Lafuente ’05 distills RE’s mission into a sustainable spirit

Middle School

Upper School

Accreditations and Memberships