News broke late yesterday that New Belgium has named Rebecca Dye Yonushonis as the company’s next CMO, filling the vacancy left by Shaun Belongie when he was appointed CEO last fall.
Yonushonis has more than two decades of marketing leadership experience, most recently serving as CMO of True Food Kitchen. She also held positions at Land O’Lakes, Fox Restaurant Concepts, Dollar Shave Club and Starbucks, and spent more than four years at Molson Coors (then MillerCoors).
Yonushonis will be responsible for leading marketing efforts at not just Fort Collins, Colorado-based New Belgium, but also Michigan-based Bell’s Brewery. Her first official day as CMO will be April 18. However, she is meeting with teams in Colorado this week, and headed to Michigan next week in time for Oberon Day, Bell’s annual celebration of its summer seasonal offering.
Brewbound caught up with Belongie and Yonushonis to discuss Yonushonis’ hiring and what’s next for New Belgium and Bell’s. Below are highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
On the decision to add Yonushonis to the team …
Belongie: “We had a lot of candidates – which is awesome, but also challenging to get through. And Rebecca really stood out for the breadth of her marketing experience, and her brand building capabilities.
“But additionally, we talk a lot about our human-powered business model that Kim [Jordan] really built at New Belgium over the last 30 years, and that culture has been a really important ingredient for our success as a company. And Rebecca also stood out as somebody who could really lead in that way, who was an empathetic leader, and was able to build teams across her experience in all those different roles that she’s had across different industries. That made us believe that she is definitely the right person to carry the torch forward for development on the marketing side.”
On what attracted Rebecca to New Belgium …
Yonushonis: “Having been a huge fan of the beer business – even after I left, I watched it for a long time – you can’t really live the beer business without thinking about or knowing about New Belgium. They do things differently.
“The company wears its heart on its sleeve and puts its employees first, which unfortunately, very few companies do. And then seeing them go into certifying B Corp and really thinking through how to do business differently was really attractive to me.
“And then, as Shaun mentioned, I love brands, I love building brands, and seeing how the Voodoo Ranger brand has been built as a brand. A lot of brands are built liquid first. This brand, obviously the liquid’s fantastic and amazing – Tropic Force is my current love of my life, I love it so much – but the brand itself has been grown in such a thoughtful way that the brand is actually so resonant with the consumer.
“And then I’m a near lifelong Midwesterner. So I spent 35 years in the Midwest – Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois – and so Bell’s has always been a business that’s been very dear to my heart. When I heard about that particular coming together of such amazing breweries, it just felt like a dream come true to work on these brands. And then I met the people who, of course, are amazing. And every time I turned, it just kept getting better and better.”
On how to make your mark with a legacy brand …
Yonushonis: “Through my career, I’ve always done a couple of things: I’ve done right by the consumer, I’ve done right by the brand, and I’ve done right by my team. And when you do right by those things, things typically go pretty well.
“What I’m really excited about is there’s a group of people at New Belgium and Bell’s who are beyond smart, intelligent, wonderful. And my job is to come in and help amplify that work and also be a part of the team and help think through what else do we do together next.
“And I’m really excited because what I’ve seen them do so well already is think through the customer, think through the distributor network, think through all the different stakeholders along the way and do right by those folks. And really, my job is to come in and continue doing those great things and then also continue to grow the brands.
“I view brands as almost larger than us. I had a chance to work at Miller Lite and Coors Light and I love seeing what they’re doing – I’m like a proud mom, I’m still very proud of them for what they’re doing – and I see my role as I get to have a small part on these brands lives, and I’m really excited to be a part of that.”
On continuing to build on the Voodoo Ranger brand …
Yonushonis: “It really is about following the fans of the brand, while also inviting new brands in. I saw a lot of Voodoo Ranger activation here in Arizona over the weekend, when it’s a holiday that Guinness dominates. And that was a moment where even if people weren’t necessarily enjoying the brand, they got to see the brand and learn a little bit about it.
“The brand has been extended into Fruit Force and Juice Force and Tropic Force and now Hardcharged Iced Tea and we’re learning from our fans that we can take the brand into those spaces. So I’m excited to see where else our fans let us take that. But, as always, [it will be] where the consumer has interests, where they have a passion point and where we can continue to bring them along the journey.”
On the next chapter of New Belgium and Bell’s …
Belongie: “Our internal perspective of ourselves is that we’re these little craft breweries, and we’ve got to be pretty big craft breweries.
“We are brushing up against 2 million barrels across our two companies that we think we’ll end this year on … that’s pretty big. And so we really need to start thinking about how do we operate in that way where we’re a bigger company now and it’s more complicated. And how do we do that in the right way that we’re not pulling our hair out as we’re trying to keep that thing going, in ways that maybe worked when we were a smaller company, but maybe don’t work so well as a big company. While not losing the culture and the way we build the company, which is, in some ways, less corporate and less bureaucratic.
“We talked about this idea of the human-powered business model, it really rests on people feeling ownership of the work that they’re doing and how they’re contributing to the company. We want to make sure that that continues onward and that people feel like they have a part to play in this company and a big role to play in this company, while also thinking about how we adapt to being a bigger company.”
On 2024 innovations …
Belongie: “[Bell’s] Big Hearted is a top five craft launch in the markets that are their strongest – so its core seven states, where the majority of their businesses is, a top five craft launch.
“Tropic Force is the No. 1 category launch nationally. Not sure we’ll hold that, I would love to. Not just craft category, that’s total beer category launch, which is pretty insane. So it’s off to a smoking start.
“And then Hardcharged Tea is also really coming out of the gates well, considering we only had two 24 oz. single-serves at this point. The two 12-counts – the variety pack and the lemon flavor 12-pack – just started rollout now as shelf resets are occurring with the big national customer.
“Those are the big bets from an innovation standpoint, and we really see the opportunity to build platforms.”
Yonushonis’ thoughts on the craft segment and how it recovers …
Yonushonis: “One of the best parts of the beer business was how dynamic it is and there’s not another business as complex. It’s a complex product to manufacture, it’s a complex product to ship and it’s a very complex product to sell, because you think about all the different stakeholders, all the laws, all the regulations, etc.
“What craft is starting – and Voodoo Ranger is at the tip of the spear of this – is really thinking through how do you build brands that connect with the consumer, that’s still true to who the brand is. You don’t want to build a brand that’s not connected to the brewery, but it isn’t just about the brewery anymore, it’s how do you really bring the consumer into the dialogue and into the brand.
“If you look at brands in 2024, they’re built by other people in a lot of ways. I’ve got two of these (holds up Stanley Quencher tumbler). This was a random influencer on TikTok, this was not necessarily planned by the Stanley guys, although they did a great job embracing it. As brands grow, it’s really inviting the customer and the consumer in.
“People sell each other brands all the time. How do you take advantage of that and really help people tell your story?”
On filling the chief sales officer position …
Belongie: “We have Shannon Cahalan, who is a longtime New Belgium sales veteran, filling in as interim chief sales officer while we go through that process of finding a permanent chief sales officer. We have a number of great internal candidates and obviously we’re looking externally as well to see if we can find a superstar like Rebecca in that sales role. I would suspect it will take us a couple months to find that last piece of the puzzle for the exec team.”
On filling ESG officer responsibilities …
Belongie: “I worked with Katie [Wallace], who was the chief ESG officer – we talked a lot, as she had let me know that she was looking for a change, she had been at New Belgium for 20 years and wanted to pursue some other things – on how to structure that and we looked at a lot of different kinds of models. One of the things that became clear is that we’ve had such a foundation for ESG for such a long period of time, unlike other companies who are probably really trying to do the foundational work to understand what they need to do.
“We really knew what we need to do, it’s really a matter of operationalizing it. The model we ended up going with is putting the experts from Katie’s team or managing sustainability, or community, putting them into the function where the work is actually happening.
“For example, our person who leads sustainability is joining the operations leadership team, because that’s where all the work is happening. That’s the model we ended up going with, which doesn’t require necessarily a chief ESG officer to do it. It’s more of the leadership as a team, as a whole, taking ownership of the work itself.”