A day after the resignations of two top Duvel Moortgat USA executives amid mounting accusations that management had turned a blind eye to instances of workplace harassment at Boulevard Brewing Company, John McDonald, the Kansas City craft brewery’s founder, has taken over as interim president.
McDonald, who sold Boulevard to Duvel Moortgat NV in 2013, will take over for Jeff Krum, who resigned from the company after more than 25 years in the wake of multiple women saying top management ignored accusations of workplace harassment and tolerated a hostile environment.
“I’m here for as long as it takes to help us get things back on track,” McDonald told Brewbound. “I’m committed to staying as long as they need me, and as long as I want to stay.”
The priority moving forward for the organization is ensuring “that not only women but everyone feels safe and respected here,” McDonald said.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do and we’ve got to repair our somewhat tarnished reputation,” he said. “I believe that Boulevard has a lot of good people, and we have a lot of good built up respect in the community, so I’m hopeful that people will give us another chance.”
McDonald’s return to the brewery that he founded in 1989 comes after a whirlwind week in which a Reddit post by a former Boulevard employee recounting instances of workplace and sexual harassment went viral, followed by denials from the company, a reversal and apology, the dismissal of the company’s chief financial officer, and then the resignations of the company’s president and chief marketing officer.
For McDonald, who had been away from the brewery’s daily operations for about six years, the message to employees now is to speak out without fear of reprisal.
“Absolutely, that’s the message I’m giving to every person I talk to,” he said. “If you have an issue with something and your immediate supervisors can’t help you, my door is open.”
McDonald said he was “disappointed” and “devastated that this has all happened.” He acknowledged that the company has “a lot of work to do” to regain the trust and confidence of its employees, while also determining how things went so wrong. He added that he and the company’s remaining leadership team has spent time “getting in front of all of our employees and talking to them and listening to them about the path forward.”
“We made some mistakes and there are some people that felt not listened to and not supported, so we’ve got a lot of work to do there but we’re going to do it,” he said.
As McDonald tries to put the pieces back together, the company has patchworked its leadership structure.
Bobby Dykstra, Duvel Moortgat USA’s VP of sales, will oversee the marketing department as the company decides its future direction after the exit of now-former VP of marketing Natalie Gershon.
The company will also lean on its existing financial team to fill the role of chief financial officer after the dismissal of Matthew Szymanski.
Meanwhile, the company is preparing to bring on a third-party human resources firm to audit the company and “give us advice on how to fix that.”
“We will be putting a lot of effort into rebuilding our HR department,” McDonald said.
Dykstra, who has worked at Boulevard for nearly nine years, about six of those as VP of sales, described what happened at the company as a “multi-system failure.” He added that the company is committed and open to the findings of the human resources audit and putting solutions in place.
“We’re trying not to be presumptive of the solutions that will come,” he said. “There’s hope and a commitment to the hard work to get back to where we should be.”
Should the audit find that employees still within the organization committed acts of harassment, they will be held accountable, McDonald said.
“That’s why we’re doing this,” he said. “We need to have a thorough investigation and act on the findings that we receive.”
Boulevard plans to name that firm in the next 24 hours, but it will not be OutrightHR, a Leawood, Kansas-based HR firm that previously contracted with the company.
In a testimonial video on OutrightHR’s website, former Duvel USA HR director Chelsea Bosak said the agency helped her conduct harassment investigations when she was “too busy.”
As Boulevard looks to fix the wrongs of its past, the company will also begin looking to the future with the search for a permanent successor to McDonald.
“We’ll look within our ranks,” McDonald said. “Who knows? I think there’s some good people in Belgium who have spent a lot of time in Kansas City who may end up here someday. I think it’s just a little too early. We’re just focused on fixing the issues at hand right now.”
Reddit Post Shakes Organization; Additional Women Speak Out
The former employee who first detailed her experiences in a Reddit forum for beer industry workers over the weekend described an environment hostile toward women in general and pregnant women in particular
“I reported this to HR, but it started a cycle of reporting his behavior to HR and then being punished (by him) for going to HR,” the former employee wrote. “This wasn’t a one time incident. My boss’s bad behavior was a well known ‘joke’ in the brewery. Former employees warned me about him. When coworkers found out I was pregnant, their response was ‘Oh, he didn’t take that well, did he?’”
The employee wrote that she left the company in March 2020 as a result of the alleged harassment she faced while pregnant. Under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), a 1978 amendment added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, companies cannot discriminate against employees or applicants on the basis of pregnancy.
Another former Boulevard employee, Hannah McEldowney, published her account of alleged sexual harassment and assault at the hands of an unnamed company employee. She wrote that she “filed multiple complaints” with Boulevard’s human resources department but was rebuffed.
“I was told that they did not believe I was assaulted because it ‘didn’t happen on company property,’ and that regardless — I should really ‘not speak of this,’” she wrote.
When McEldowney filed a police report and provided evidence of harassment in the form of multiple text messages and emails, the officers advised her to obtain a restraining order against her co-worker.
“I was too afraid, I didn’t want to lose my job,” she wrote. “I needed my job. It’s a terrible spot to be in, to choose paying bills over being safe.”
McEldowney said HR staff discouraged her from seeking a restraining order against the older male employee, whom she once considered “a mentor, a friend, almost a grandfather-like figure.” She developed post traumatic stress disorder and lived in fear that another male co-worker would groom her for abuse.
“He was eventually asked to ‘retire early’ soon after I quit, due to other women filing complaints,” McEldowney wrote. “They even threw him a party.
“Boulevard did everything they could to not let his disgusting behavior be known,” she added.
Speaking to Brewbound, McEldowney described her encounters with Boulevard’s HR department as contentious.
“I was told that I would misunderstand what they said,” she said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get a ton of stuff in writing until it got really bad. But I was continually gaslighted by HR.”
Since sharing her story, McEldowney said four other women have told her they’ve also been harassed by her alleged attacker, and 15 others have told her of mistreatment by company higher-ups. In all, she said she’s heard similar stories about harassment and abuse from “probably about 30” women, “at least.”
McEldowney, who started at Boulevard in April 2016 as a bartender at its beer hall, described the company culture as “toxic … the whole time.” She added that the culture of covering up employees’ wrongdoing was “pretty extensive.”
“Anytime someone reports anything, it’s written down and pushed to the side and then they ignore it,” she said. “Even if you try to raise hell about it, they will continue to try to ignore it.”
McEldowney offered advice to women being harassed: “You have a voice, speak up. If no one hears you, speak louder.
“It’s terrifying — get a support system around you,” she added. “It took me two years to get to this place of feeling comfortable to talk about it. Give yourself space, give yourself that space and time to do what you need to do.”
Employees Stand Up to ‘Toxic Culture’
Boulevard’s workforce expressed their collective frustration with the company’s former management team in a letter posted to a Reddit forum Wednesday.
“Today, we returned power to the people,” the employees from multiple departments wrote. “After years of begrudgingly trudging through a toxic culture and harmful work environment created and cultivated by certain members of our executive team, we finally have had enough.
“We are the ones who make this brewery run, and we have become tired of being overruled, bullied, ignored, and utterly misrepresented by inept and insensitive ‘leaders,’” they continued. “Their lack of accountability and awful missteps this week were the last straw — so today, we raised our voices and our voices were heard.”
In the letter, the employees also claimed credit for Krum’s departure.
“No longer will our brewery be clouded and characterized by his indifference, ego, pride and lack of humanity,” they wrote. “We can find, and desperately deserve, a leader who actually represents our values and acts on them.”
McDonald confirmed to Brewbound that the company’s employees made demands Wednesday “and some of those happened.”
“It was a hard day here for us,” he said. “And we did the things that we thought we needed to do.”
“We’re proud that our people care so much about this place that they wanted to see it made better, to the ideal state that we believe that it belongs,” Dykstra added. “We’re proud they shared their voices.”