Three industry leaders who built their businesses on craft beer shared how they’re viewing the opportunities and challenges in the bev-alc industry’s hottest growth area, the fourth category of offerings, last week during Brewbound’s Brew Talks meetup in Boston.
Dogfish Head co-founder Sam Calagione, Mass. Bay Brewing co-founder and CEO Dan Kenary and Craft Beer Cellar co-founder and CEO Suzanne Schalow shared how they’re approaching offerings such as ready-to-drink canned cocktails, hard kombucha, hard seltzer, and hard tea.
“If you’d have told me 10 years ago or 12 years ago … that we were going to be looking at all of these canned cocktails and FMBs and hard seltzers and that they were going to be in all of our stores, I just wouldn’t have believed it,” Schalow said. “I would have told you to pound sand.”
Schalow admitted to still wrapping her head around the category, which is becoming a bigger part of Craft Beer Cellar’s sales.
Kenary added that consumers “like a story,” but the story needs to be “authentic.”
“They like to know a product is authentic,” he said. “They like when they check on it that these are the people that we thought made this product. They’re actually the ones who make it and they actually make it where I think they make it and they make it how I think they make it. That story has got to check out.”
For Dogfish Head, Calagione stressed that the same facilities where the craft brewery brews its beer is the same place where its distilling operations have taken place for the last two decades. That experience, he added, gives Dogfish Head “a big point of differentiation” when conveying the story to its distributors, retailers and customers.
“Because we’ve been working on those recipes under the same roots as the beers we’ve been making for 27 years, that really helps with that DNA, authenticity,” Calagione said.
Watch the video above for insights on how much time each of these industry leaders are giving these products to succeed in the market, how important they are to building portfolios and much more.