Leaders of San Diego craft brewery Modern Times fielded questions on the state of the business, its potential sale and the future of its membership clubs (the League of Partygoers and Elegant People and the Theory of Leisure Committee) during a 53-minute Zoom meeting earlier this month.
A video of the meeting was obtained and posted to YouTube by The Full Pint on Monday. The Zoom recording took place on Monday, March 14, and was shared with around 1,850 League members across the country the following day, marketing director Dan Reed confirmed with Brewbound.
In the video, Modern Times CEO Jennifer Briggs, Reed, League manager Steven Michael, commissioner of flavor Andrew Schwartz, director of hospitality Ellie Kovara, VP of sales Dani Jackson, and membership coordinator Leanne O’Neil fielded several questions on the potential sale of the company in the wake of Briggs’ comments to Good Beer Hunting that Modern Times would entertain a buyer or investor.
Briggs stressed that there are “no offers on the table.”
“There’s nothing really right now,” she added.
Although “several parties” have inquired about the brewery in the wake of Briggs’ comments about seeking an acquirer or investor, the company has not yet identified a buyer and there is no criteria for one. Briggs added that the company plans to “run a really methodical, solid process” and get a better understanding of the value of the business.
In regards to Modern Times’ Employee Stock Ownership Plan, Briggs said it would be up to a potential buyer if that would be retained or bought out.
Asked if the financial state of the company was a failure of past management, Briggs declined to play “Monday morning quarterback” and hang the financial troubles on past leaders. Instead, Briggs said those leaders, much like other brewery leaders at the time, took out debt to chase growth. They couldn’t foresee a pandemic that shut down own-premise sales.
“We took out a lot of debt and when you don’t have the revenue to cover that debt, it makes it really hard,” she said. “In particular, the last few months with COVID and staffing, just a lot of things were hitting us all at the same time. We knew that it was tight, we knew that the company was in a different level of financial distress but it just continued to get worse.”
Briggs noted several factors hurt Modern Times’ business over the last couple of years, including lost placements with a major chain retailer after the company was cited as an example of a toxic workplace in last year’s outpouring of stories from women who had experienced sexual harassment and mistreatment in the brewing industry. She added that the company completely turned over its c-suite leadership team in the wake of those revelations.
Additionally, the company’s business was hampered by COVID-19 restrictions that shut down on-premise establishments, including the company’s taprooms, and slowed business during the Omicron variant from November through January.
Briggs, when asked about her one and five year plans for the company, said “financial stability” is the goal in Year One. However, she said five years is “a hard question to answer,” as it’s difficult to predict where the marketplace and consumer tastes will be in five years.
“We want to be a company that lives its brand,” she said, adding that one of its mantras is to be “smaller, healthier and stronger.”
Asked if the closures of taprooms in Portland, Oregon; and Oakland, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, California, were permanent, Kovara confirmed they were permanent and “fully vacated.” In a follow-up question, Kovara was asked about the likelihood of other locations closing, specifically Anaheim, she said there was “zero” chance of additional closures.
Briggs addressed the layoffs of 73 workers as part of those closures and called it an “imperfect” and “painful” process. She said she wishes the company didn’t have to “do it at all” and she feels “rotten about how people were treated.” Still, the layoffs and closures didn’t fix all of Modern Times’ issues.
“We’re still working in an imperfect situation,” she said. “I wish that would have cured everything for us, but it didn’t. So we still have a lot of work to do, and just trying the best we can on any given day.”
Asked if the League was a priority for her, Briggs said “it is.” She said she appreciates “the passion” and “loyalty” that League members have for the company. She added that the League will continue on in the future, but company leaders would look at improving it. She added that she wants to ensure that the company “lives its values through the membership club.”
Modern Times terminated the employment of the league’s former coordinator, Derek Freese, after allegations of inappropriate behavior surfaced among the hundreds of accounts of sexual harassment and assault in beer industry workplaces last year.
The overall focus in the short-term for Modern Times will be on dialing back the number of releases to ensure every release is more intentional and given more of a window into the business and its employees, Reed said.
“We’ll be honing in on less frequency and more quality a little bit,” he added. “We’re also going to be focusing on diversifying our year round beer calendar a little bit more, which I think you can see with this year’s releases a bit.”
Reed addressed whether the company’s political stances in recent years had negatively affected its business. He said it would be “impossible to answer that with any real clarity” due to the pandemic-dampened retail landscape over the last two years.
“Our core audience has been overwhelmingly supportive over the years of the stances we’ve taken,” he added. “While we do see a lot of negative pushback on social media and things like that, the majority of that is from outside groups who aren’t Modern Times customers in the first place.”
Reed added that he doesn’t believe taking a stance negatively impacts a business.
“It’s when the values that you’re espousing aren’t backed up by your workplace culture that you end up getting hurt,” he said. “That’s something that we always were mindful of and we knew was a legitimate problem for us in the past years. Having our workplace culture and our employee culture match the stances that we take externally was something that we were working on and falling short on, frankly, for a few years, and a lot of us were actively working toward those goals before it was highlighted in a very necessary and also dramatic way by the Ratmagnet posts in May. That definitely hurt us.”