Molson Coors has created a new commercial division for the U.S. and Canada that chief marketing officer Michelle St. Jacques will lead as chief commercial officer effective March 1, the company announced.
Under St. Jacques, the new commercial unit will combine “sales, marketing, innovation, digital capabilities and the company’s non-alcohol and liquor portfolios in the Americas, is designed to enhance focus and prioritization, allow the company to more quickly scale brands and capabilities, and provide more commercial support for Molson Coors’ portfolio of non-alc and spirits brands,” according to a Molson Coors blog post.
Leaders under St. Jacques on the new commercial team include president of U.S. sales and distributor operations Brian Feiro, VP innovation Jamie Wideman, VP non-alc Kevin Nitz, VP hard liquor David Coors and the company’s teams in Canada (led by Fred Landtmeters) and Latin America (led by Chris Wensel). The company will be assembling a commercial digital team led by a new chief digital officer. Tenth and Blake will shift to the U.S. sales team under Feiro’s leadership.
“This new function will unify multiple teams and geographies around a single strategy, driving clearer total portfolio and geographic prioritization and allowing us to more quickly scale new whitespaces, brands and capabilities across the entire region,” CEO Gavin Hattersley wrote in a memo to distributors. “It will provide more commercial focus and support to our non-alc and spirits portfolios, which are ready to scale after several years of successful growth.”
Sofia Colucci, global VP of Miller and economy brands, has been tapped as St. Jacques’ successor in the CMO role. In addition to those moves, president of emerging growth Pete Marino will depart the company on April 30 “to step out of our business and into his next entrepreneurial venture,” Hattersley wrote.
After a brief stint as marketing communications manager from 1998-2000, Marino rejoined Molson Coors as VP of communications in 2012 and was promoted to chief public affairs and communications officer in 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile. He became president of Tenth and Blake, the company’s craft arm in 2017, and was promoted to president of emerging growth in 2019, as Molson Coors embarked on the revitalization plan that has transformed it in recent years.
“In November of 2019, I was tasked with launching the emerging growth division to define our pivot from a brewing to a beverage company,” Marino wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Despite a global pandemic and a whole host of other obstacles in our way, we determined the categories in which we wanted to participate based on category size, growth, route to market and more.”
“We would not be in a position to scale our emerging growth business if it were not for the incredible work of Pete and his team over the past few years, and we should all be grateful for his leadership as we moved to a total beverage company,” Hattersley wrote. “From my conversations with Pete, I can tell you he is fully supportive of our new structure and, as you’ll no doubt hear from him directly, he believes that bringing these brands into the broader business will allow us to accelerate their growth.”
Molson Coors took a minority stake in non-alc incubator L.A. Libations in 2019 to expand its offerings; the relationship has resulted in offerings such as ZOA, the energy drink helmed by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. On the spirits side, the company is preparing to roll out Topo Chico Spirited, a tequila-based, ready-to-drink cocktail under its popular Topo Chico Hard Seltzer brand, which it produces under a license agreement with Coca-Cola.
In addition to supporting non-alc and spirits, the commercial division will help Molson Coors “build a unified digital ecosystem to ensure speed, consistency, and quality of output,” Feiro told wholesaler partners in a memo.
“We’ll better align innovation across the Americas to drive speed of innovation in beer, flavored beverages, non-alcohol products, liquor and more,” he added.
Since St. Jacques joined Molson Coors in 2019, she has shepherded marketing campaigns for Coors Light and Miller Lite, leading the brands to their first Super Bowl appearance in decades. The company has also launched several successful new products, including Topo Chico Hard Seltzer and Simply Spiked Lemonade, another Coca-Cola licensing partnership.
Colucci joined the company in 2017 as VP of innovation for North America and was promoted to lead Miller and economy brands in 2020. She “excels in her ability to balance creativity with brand building to drive growth, which is evident in the launch of the ‘Tastes Like Miller Time’ global creative platform, culturally relevant brand acts, and the recent success of our first Super Bowl ad in over 30 years,” St. Jacques told the Molson Coors Beer & Beyond blog.
Molson Coors is the country’s second largest brewer and accounted for nearly 17% of all off-premise dollar sales at multi-outlet grocery and convenience stores in the 52 weeks ending January 29, according to market research firm IRI. In that time, its dollar sales increased +1.9%, to $7.611 billion. Volume, measured in case sales, declined -4.6% compared to the same period the previous year.
Its largest brand families in the U.S., Coors Light and Miller Lite, are the beer category’s fifth- and sixth-largest sellers at IRI-tracked off-premise retailers, respectively.
In 2021, the company shipped 43.8 million barrels of beer, 20.2% of all the beer shipped in the U.S., according to data from Beer Marketer’s Insights published in the Brewers Association’s May/June 2022 edition of the New Brewer.