New Belgium CEO Steve Fechheimer and Bell’s Brewery EVP Carrie Yunker wrapped up Day One of Brewbound Live 2021 in Santa Monica, California, to discuss what comes next, following the sale of Bell’s to New Belgium’s parent company, Kirin-owned Lion Little World Beverages.
The sale, announced in November, is expected to close by early 2022. Combined, the companies now own eight of the top 30 craft beer brands in off-premise retail sales, and hold a little more than 1% share of beer category dollar sales, according to the market research firm IRI.
“From a people perspective, there’s wonderful teams from both companies,” Fechheimer said. “And we just need to think about how do we bring those teams together in a way that allows us to drive growth.
“There’s a lot of things at New Belgium we would say we do really well, [and] there’s a lot of things that Bell’s does really well,” he continued. “In some cases those are the same thing, in some cases those are different things, and I think we have an awesome opportunity to learn from each other and figure out bigger and better opportunities.”
Along with detailing goals for the new year and beyond, Yunker and Fechheimer eased some concerns that the Michigan-based craft brewery will lose its identity with the acquisition, and the retirement of founder Larry Bell.
“Both New Belgium and Bell’s are really well known for their culture and so how do you take really the best of the best and come up with something even better? And that’s not just the beer platform that we’re building, but certainly the culture that we’re looking to build and hopefully set an example of,” Yunker said. “I’ve been doing a lot of work with Steve and the team over the last several months and I don’t feel like the smaller brewery. My voice is just as big in the room as them and they’re great leaders and I think really our job is to be bullish about making sure we protect the things that matter to our people.”
Watch Fechheimer and Yunker’s full conversation with Brewbound’s Justin Kendall and Jessica Infante below.