The Esports Advocate talked to the principles behind the Milk Cup—including Fortnite content creator ThePeachCobbler, Raidiant CEO & Founder (and former professional player) Heather Garozzo, and MilkPEP Senior Marketing Manager Jennifer Grubb (who is in charge of the Gonna Need Milk and Milk Cup marketing and PR).
In our conversation, we touch on what everyone learned from last year’s Milk Cup, the origin story of the event, what’s new for Milk Cup 2025, the state of women-focused esports, the new Milk Cup Academy, and more.
The Untold Origin Story
First, it’s important to understand how this competition came to life in the first place, before talking about what its purpose is now. According to ThePeachCobbler (or Peach, for short), the Milk Cup was the result of a chance event at VidCon way back in 2023, and it almost didn’t happen.
Changing her representation at the time, she almost missed a message from Gonna Need Milk asking her if she’d like to take part in an all-women’s event, but she stumbled on the unopened email and ultimately said yes.
“Well, it all started with a beautiful little message in my inbox from Gonna Need Milk asking me to come and compete on stage at a little mini thing that they had set up at VidCon [2023]. And I was so excited. I was in transition with my management group so the email almost went completely unnoticed… so it all happened in like two days; I got there and Gonna Need Milk treated me like a queen. It was so nice. I was on stage for the first time with a bunch of other women because they focused it around women, which I remember thinking at the time, ‘this is so cool.’ I’m with other top females in the industry playing this awesome map that they created within Fortnite. The map was really fun, the vibes were great, and then after, I got to talk to the Gonna Need Milk staff.”
Being treated like a star, and participating in an event that put a spotlight on women inspired Peach to take a chance and propose doing something of a grander scale with the group in the future.
“Milk made me feel like a star that day, and I remember going back and talking to my manager, saying ‘I don’t know if Milk would be open to this, but it would be so cool to see if they could do more stuff for women, like they did at that event.’”
Her manager thought it was a cool idea and worked with her to put together a plan. At the time, there weren’t very many high-profile, big prize pool tournaments available to women, save eFuse’s Women of the eRena (Wote), which had a prize pool of around $75,000 USD. She was keen on being involved in that tournament series—and had even invested some of her earnings to facilitate scrims for women and tournaments on the side—but the opportunity to create another major tournament destination that was accessible to women and girls of all ages was something she really wanted to make a reality.
“We put all our stuff together in a nice little document and presented it to them. Like I said, shot for the stars, made some ridiculous claims of how it would be so sick to have females of FNCS and they came through. They came back to us and said ‘we love it and we’re going to run with it.’”
Lessons Learned
Milk Cup 2024 was, by all measures, a real success story. It had an incredible amount of visibility, an enthusiastic community behind it, and the backing of a partner (Gonna Need Milk) that believed in Peach’s vision. At the time, the wheels were coming off other women’s only vehicles such as the Women’s Carball League (bought by G1 and ultimately mismanaged) and Galaxy Racer’s Her Galaxy $100K Apex Legends tournament for North America (which ultimately didn’t pay any of the winning women the money it owed them).
While there were likely some missteps along the way, WOTE, Radiant, Peach, and Gonna Need Milk did a good job of organizing the event and creating an environment that made participants and their families feel safe, happy, and enthusiastic. According to data from Esports Charts, the finals held in Los Angeles on Oct. 5, 2024, recorded 57.6K peak viewers, 41K average viewers, 270K hours watched, and 6h 35m of airtime. The event had a total prize pool of $175,000 and was co-streamed by Peach and other Fortnite stars such as Clix.
As for what might have been handled poorly, Jenn Grubb immediately pointed out their choice of gaming chairs for the LAN event.
“We definitely did not have good gaming chairs. That was a big learning moment. It’s something that I think we all knew. We all know the type of chairs you should have at a competition, but when we were going through the production planning, it was just an oversight. The community made that very clear and it’s something we’re prioritizing this year.”
Jenn also pointed to the value of esports/gaming to reach audiences and raise awareness on milk as an alternative to drinks traditionally associated with the space, such as energy drinks. Value is an important part of being a partner—as brands have learned in recent years, that sometimes there’s no ROI on sponsoring grassroots events—or at least no quantifiable marketing lift, buzz, hype, elevated awareness, or whatever buzzwords you want to use—from participating in these types of endeavors.
“The main thing we learned is that this type of marketing where you find an interest that your audience really cares passionately about and then you add value to that interest in any way that you can. It works. You know, we’ve seen some really great results where teens aware of the Milk Cup have a more positive view of milk than teens unaware of the Milk Cup. And we’re excited to keep that going this year.”
Jenn also pointed out that they may have shot themselves in the foot a little last year, as the goal was to create a welcoming, unintimidating environment where women and girls could come together and compete, but the event gained enough popularity and recognition to the point that this year it is considered a prestigious event.
“What’s really interesting about it is when we went out to launch the Milk Cup last year, we wanted it to be this really welcoming, non-intimidating space where women could come and compete. And it could be your first competition and that’s fine, but because it was so successful last year, we kind of shot ourselves on the foot a little bit because it is viewed as this more prestigious, intimidating tournament now. So we had to kind of take a step back, go back to our roots and try to figure out how we could make this more approachable and less intimidating again for that group of women who might need a little nudge or a little support to take that first step.“
Peach was delighted by the results of the first competition, seeing her vision that she had put together into a pitch document turn into something tangible. She was also surprised to see a range of women of girls from so many different age groups coming together—from teens to women in their 30s or even 40s.
“It was a dream come true. I think the best way to describe it is that I dreamed really big, and I just shot for the stars. MilkPEP just really pushed it to the moon, so watching everything come to life was just another monumental moment of how much women need this. Milk has put such an emphasis on women in gaming, everyone is starting to reopen their eyes to it. In my opinion, way more than before, you have teams that are specifically only picking up women and being like, ‘okay, we need to look at women now because there’s a space for them here.’”
Heather noticed a number of things, having been on both sides of the competition process–from a player to an organizer over the last 20 years or so. The most noticeable thing, she says, is how the Milk Cup was the very first event for around 60% of participants, which meant they had no idea how to prepare for it, and many had never even traveled outside their own zip codes.
“One of the biggest things that stood out in our minds is that like 60% of those players have never played in a tournament before, and so the whole reason a lot of this exists is because we want these women to graduate to the big leagues. I want to see them playing in the world championship. They don’t have to necessarily play in women’s only events either. We want them to be able to build that confidence, build those skills to get there. And so the fact that 60% of the competitors have never played in an event before, meant—we had to help guide them through the process, train them.”
To do this, Heather said that they brought on a lot of player handlers to guide them through things like getting on a plane, getting to the venue, competing, returning home, etc. “Every 10 sets of players had their own player handlers,” she told us, adding that returning players “gained more confidence,” learned from the experience, and are more prepared for this year’s competition.
The other thing she learned is that parents view gaming competitions like the Milk Cup as the new “little league,” on par with other scholastic sports, and they are just as enthusiastic about these competitions as they are of those.
“For a lot of those parents, this is their new little league; they are taking their kids to the Milk Cup event to compete instead of taking them to little league games. I just thought that was so cool. If you’re under 18, you had to have a Guardian and there were so many supportive parents there, and they were really into it. I just love to see that.”
The Milk Cup in 2025
Some changes have been put in place for this year’s Milk Cup that range from mild to game-changing, including a new verification system, a dramatically increased prize pool, and a new training program that aims to prepare for grander competitive stages.
The biggest public-facing change announced in March is the increased prize pool from $175,000 last year to $300,000 in 2025, and a change from Fortnite trios to duos format. Around the same number of players will be able to participate at the end of it all, up one person from 99 to 100 compared to 2024. The structure for this year’s event was detailed in the Milk Cup’s March announcement, which you can read about in this article on TEA.
New this year and announced today (May 2) is the Milk Cup Academy, which aims to give resources to players who want to compete at a higher level in events like Milk Cup and eventually international events like the FNCS. Heather told us that this new program will feature scrims for players to find a duos partner (with the help of Peach), guest pro player Q&A, and tips & tricks sessions, health and wellness Q&As featuring sports psychologists and nutritionists, and more.
“The good thing now is the Milk Cup is the biggest Women’s Fortnite event in the world—and we love that—but there’s still a group of players out there that just feel intimidated by playing in the big leagues. We want to help them take that path, we want to get them started, make them feel more comfortable in a scrim environment, and then graduate to the Milk Cup and then hopefully to FNCS.”
Another small change (but a big undertaking) Heather mentioned is a new verification system—many tournaments use insecure platforms/methods to verify players, which is potentially dangerous (and possibly illegal), particularly when it comes to safeguarding the private information of minors.
“We built a new proprietary verification tool, because historically all of that is handled in Discord. I’ve played in these women’s events for 20 years; they ask you to send your IDs and stuff over Discord and it’s a little uncomfortable, so we built a whole secure verification system where all your data is looked at, approved, and then deleted immediately forever.”
Ultimately, the 2025 event is seeing everyone involved is doing a lot of lifting to make sure it is a success; Raidiant is handling player verification, broadcasts (including securing on-air talent), content, and promotion through its channels; Peach is promoting the event on her various platforms, participating in the new Academy program, and co-streaming; eFuse’s WOTE is offering support and serving as an advisor; and Gonna Need Milk is providing financial support, securing sponsors, and ensuring that both the online qualifiers and the year end LAN finale runs smoothly. Will it be bigger than Milk Cup 2025? We’ll see.
You can learn about the Milk Cup, the Milk Cup Academy, and the schedule of online and offline competitions at gonnaneedmilk.com.