[00:00:11] Justin Kendall: Hello and welcome to the Brewbound podcast. I'm Justin Kendall.
[00:00:15] Jessica Infante: I'm Jessica Infante. And I'm Zoe Licata.
[00:00:17] Justin Kendall: And this week we've got a lot of news to cover, but how y'all been?
[00:00:22] Jessica Infante: Good, I think. It's just a lot of news, right? We've been busy. We've been busy little bees.
[00:00:27] Justin Kendall: Yeah, it's one of those things where we don't have a featured interview, but we have so much news to cover that it just makes sense to do a news packed edition of this podcast. So we're going to get into it very shortly. But first let's plug Brewbound Live. It's December 9th and 10th in Los Angeles. You're going to want to be there because New Belgium's Aaron Rumsey, the Senior Director of Innovation and Brands, is going to be with us on stage on a panel discussion of CPG vets who have joined the craft brewing industry. And if you didn't know, Aaron Rumsey launched the record-breaking Starbucks Pink Drink and Paradise Drink. Are you a fan of pink drinks?
[00:01:07] Jessica Infante: Oh, I am going to just embrace the fact that I am an elder millennial woman and I'm basic AF and I love the pink drink so much. It's one of my favorites.
[00:01:18] Zoe Licata: Pink drink been in the news recently. Big controversial takes on the actual creation of the pink drink. There's an influencer that likes to say that he made it happen.
[00:01:30] Jessica Infante: Oh no.
[00:01:31] Zoe Licata: But yeah.
[00:01:31] Jessica Infante: Is this like another hot Cheeto situation?
[00:01:34] Zoe Licata: No, this is James Charles being James Charles and he is controversial for a lot of reasons.
[00:01:38] Jessica Infante: So. I remember like I once tried to order a pink drink, like as it is, like, like, Oh, can I have the, you know, strawberry hibiscus refresher with coconut milk? And the woman at the counter just looked at me and was like, you mean the pink drink? And I was like, yes, thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:01:54] Justin Kendall: We're in the heart of my season, the PSL season, so don't feel like you're too basic. I was going to say, God, you're more basic than me. Way a bit more, but.
[00:02:04] Zoe Licata: How many have you had already this season?
[00:02:05] Justin Kendall: Too many. Refilling that Starbucks card way too much.
[00:02:09] Jessica Infante: Well, join us in Peppermint Mocha season for this conversation. Yeah, I'm excited about this one. Erin is going to be joined on stage by two of my favorite women in beer. We'll have Ellie Preslar, who's the chief growth officer at Sierra Nevada, and Adeline Druart, who's the CEO at Lawson's Finest Liquids. This is going to be a really great conversation about the insights they have brought into beer from outside. All of them have had really successful careers in other areas of CPG, obviously with Erin having been at Starbucks. Ellie spent a long time at Procter & Gamble and Adeline came from the Vermont Creamery, aka cheese. I think it's really interesting to hear what they have to say, what they've noticed about beer since arriving and what beer can learn from elsewhere in the store.
[00:02:59] Zoe Licata: And they're all working now for like legacy craft beer brands. So it's really interesting to get their perspective on how that totally outside of beer is now helping usher those folks that have been in, you know, those initial craft days into what BevElk looks like now.
[00:03:17] Jessica Infante: And legacy craft beer brands that are growing.
[00:03:20] Zoe Licata: Right, they're finding ways to do it that works and is connecting with folks enough to still find growth right now.
[00:03:26] Justin Kendall: So get your tickets now and join us in LA. Before we get to the news, also check out the Brewbound job board. You can find your next job there or you can find your next employee. So check out the Brewbound job board at Brewbound.com. So let's jump into the news and let's start with the Labor Day scans and let's call it a mixed bag. That's probably being too generous. Is it? Would we say it ended with a whimper?
[00:03:53] Zoe Licata: Yes, Wimper is accurate. I think I've used Mixedbag more this year than I have ever before in just coverage of things, particularly when it comes to scans. But yes, we got... So as we've talked about multiple times, Labor Day holiday not aligned for year over year comps, so it happened. Labor Day was September 1st in 2025, fell on September 7th this year, and it's made scan data kind of hard to compare. So, to give us the most accurate picture of how the holiday weekend at least went compared to last year. So, Kana did a two-week comparison. And so, they did the two weeks ending September 6th. So, that full weekend leading right up until the holiday. And all of Bellevue was in decline again. It was down 1.2% for dollar sales, case sales or volume down 3.1% year over year. Look at the numbers itself a couple different ways. You can say, well, it didn't meet last year. That sucks. It was going against already pretty soft comps. Last year was down single digits, so it didn't even meet those. That's hard. But then also the declines weren't as steep as last year, so maybe that's a positive sign of things improving. We've seen that in a lot of data that, you know, hey, declines are still around, but they're not as bad as last year's. So take with that what you will. I see really quite a range of results. And then across alcohol, it was a lot of the same stories we've been saying. It's beers down, wines down, beer is leading those declines. And then spirits is up and RTDs, which includes beer, wine and spirits based products are also up, but their volume is down. So I think we expected labor data to look like it, but we now have the numbers to back it up.
[00:05:39] Justin Kendall: You gotta love a, yeah, we're down this year, but we're not as down as bad as last year, but you're still down on top of being down.
[00:05:48] Jessica Infante: I feel like if we had a word cloud for this year so far, some of the biggest words in it would be mixed bag, but also misaligned comps.
[00:05:58] Zoe Licata: Yeah, all the holidays were a little weird this year, which made it really funky. Circana also released with the latest data, and we'll put this up later on the site, is they included a graph that compared all of the holiday results across beverage alcohol so far this year, and it was pretty consistent every holiday this summer in just terms of what was up, what was down. It's just the year has been a lot of down with some some growth from RTDs, from domestic super premium and kind of mix for imports. And that's kind of about it. So yeah, summer 2026, not as exciting as everyone hoped it would be. It was exciting in person, but BevElk sales-wise, not as exciting.
[00:06:49] Jessica Infante: It started with a lot of excitement with regard to the World Cup, and we just couldn't continue to keep that vibe going.
[00:06:58] Justin Kendall: Our friend Kaumil Gajrawala from Jefferies called it a cruel summer in his report on Monday. And he talked about how there was a lot of anticipation for this year and the big events and WorldCup. And while we saw some jump in WorldCup host cities, it wasn't so great. And in the non-host cities and they lowered their estimates and price targets for Molson Coors, Tilray, Boston Beer and Constellation Brands basically coming out of the summer. Yeah, not great.
[00:07:32] Jessica Infante: Do you think he's coming at Cruel Summer from a Bananarama, an Ace of Base, or a Taylor Swift standpoint?
[00:07:38] Justin Kendall: Bananarama, if I had to guess.
[00:07:42] Zoe Licata: I think you're right. Yeah, Molson Coors is going to be really interesting to see what they do moving forward, because it seems like they were a bit forgotten this summer. Compared to, you know, we saw a lot like Constellation was able to rebound and most of their brands, the exception of Corona had a pretty strong summer. Anheuser-Busch, again, it's a mixed Bud Light is not doing great, continues to not do great, but then they have Michelob Ultra and they have their non-alcoholics and they found momentum with Bush. So there's some stuff happening there. Molson Coors and we heard from Molson Coors leadership last week too, at the Barclays consumer conference. They still realize they got to figure out what's happening and there's some things that they can change on their end to combat everything going on beyond just out of control macroeconomic trends. So I'm very curious to see what comes from Molson Coors going into 2027. There's going to need to be some sort of major change, I think, to combat that.
[00:08:43] Zoe Licata: Hey listeners, the September 15th rush brings lots of new beer jobs. This week at cpgjobs.com, including from Wolfhound Nitro and Almanac Beer, Russian River Brewing, Bay 13 Brewery and Kitchen, and FIFCO USA adds strong openings. Beer people, search cpgjobs.com now. Every listing runs on Brewbound, the beer industry's daily read. And if you're hiring, reach brewers, beer sales leaders, and distributor people tracking beer. Your role can reach passive candidates inside beer news they already read. Post your job on cpgjobs.com today. Use code brewbound26 and save money on your listing.
[00:09:20] Speaker 1: Your inbox should reflect the parts of CPG that matter to you. Choose from BevNET's seven free newsletters covering beverage, food, beer, spirits, careers, education, and more. Sign up and select your favorites at cpgmedia.com slash newsletter.
[00:09:37] Justin Kendall: Well, let's talk about a major change and we can get into all of that with with Jess here because. Molson Coors' lone owned distributor, Coors Distributing Company, is going to lose, I would say, what? It's either top or number two brand portfolio?
[00:09:58] Jessica Infante: Yeah, man, this is not where I thought we were going. But yes, Coors Distributing Company, which is Molson Coors', as you said, only wholly owned distributor in the Denver area. We received the proverbial black rose from Constellation Brands last week in which they now have received notice that the Constellation portfolio is going to be on the move in like 30 days. And it's hard to get hard numbers on stuff like this, but some of the estimates we've seen floating around. place it at about 40-ish percent of their total volume. So that's a huge hit. And we'll see. I mean, course distributing, it's not really like any of the AB1 branches. It is a very well-balanced portfolio. Like, it's not just Molson Coors. It's Molson Coors, it's Constellation, it's Boston Beer. Like, it looks more like a Reyes house, right?
[00:10:45] Justin Kendall: So... And this is their Denver metro area distributor.
[00:10:50] Jessica Infante: Yeah, so we'll see. No successor wholesaler was named, but I think if you have been around the block long enough, you know where this is going, which is to say that Ray has somewhat recently entered Colorado. And I think that's probably where these beers are going to line up because obviously these two entities, Constellation and the Reyes Beverage Group, are extremely well known to each other. Reyes came into Colorado beginning of this year when they picked up 11 markets from Republic National Distributing Company. I'm sorry to spell all of this out. I'm just trying to be mindful of the occasional podcast reviews that we get where people say we use too many acronyms. So...
[00:11:27] Justin Kendall: I don't listen to them.
[00:11:28] Jessica Infante: Sometimes I like to do a little listener service. I mean, not the people who say that we say like too much. That's come on, man. We've moved. We've all moved on. Anyway, probably that's what's going to happen, right? Like, can we bet on this somewhere?
[00:11:41] Justin Kendall: Yeah, I think Cali or one of the poly market or something would be probably. Yeah. But this is what's played out in California over and over again. We've seen it. And this is if you were to put betting odds on it, I would say Reyes is the likely successor. Even the company quote was kind of like, well, we love opportunities to work with constellation brands and no shit you do like. Of course. And I think the biggest question I have coming out of this is, is this just the constellation portfolio or are they basically going to take over Coors Distributing Company and fold that in? Because as you deftly pointed out, their beer book is lacking major suppliers. I mean, their two biggest brands, I think were Deschutes and Outlaw.
[00:12:33] Jessica Infante: Right. And to be clear, you are talking about the beer book of RBG Wine and Spirits of Colorado, which is the rightest subsidiary in the state. Yeah. I mean, they picked that up from RNDC, which really wasn't that much of a beer distributor. So yeah, it's Outlaw and Deschutes, as you just said. And I think, yeah, maybe this will look like that because with the loss of this big of a chunk of your business, like KenCDC, Coors Distributing Company, really carry on, or is this time for Molson Coors to say, you know what, we've done this for a while, but now it's time to sell, you know, this asset and move on.
[00:13:07] Justin Kendall: And Coors Distributing Company essentially said all options are on the table, that they were going to review everything. Although, here's 30 days to figure it all out, guys.
[00:13:17] Jessica Infante: Yeah. Good luck. Good luck. Yeah, we'll see. There's been a lot of other activity in Colorado this year too, Justin, as you call that. And a lot of this kind of comes from the... There's two different major shifts that are going on across the country. The biggest being the RNDC fallout and the other being Southern Glaciers Wine and Spirits increasing interest in beer, specifically Anheuser-Busch.
[00:13:39] Justin Kendall: And that was another plucking of a former wholly owned distributor from an independent AB distributor who had just moved into the state five years ago and was encouraged to sale, I would say is probably the nice way of saying that.
[00:13:56] Jessica Infante: Yeah. I think that's a nice way of saying that too.
[00:13:58] Justin Kendall: I'm sure there are much more not nice ways of saying it, but yes, Southern Glazers, Wine and Spirits, very interested in the AB portfolio. They've formed their own gold division at this point. They just hired somebody to lead that. It's funny that they call it the gold division. I think that that's probably a little jab at somebody else.
[00:14:18] Jessica Infante: Yeah, I think that's a little rude. There are many other colors that you could have gone with. Or metals.
[00:14:24] Justin Kendall: I don't think of gold when I think about AB. Maybe the red division? Why not the red division?
[00:14:29] Jessica Infante: Well, it's associated with communists. Come on. Can we circle back to Molson Coors for a moment? Zoe had a great point about being like, where were they in this summer conversation? And something that I think, you know, Dave Infante brought up the last time he was here was like, so much of their marketing just hinges on like creating one small object they hope that goes viral and is available in limited numbers. And that's just what they keep doing like time after time after time. And, and I know resonating online is important, but like, you know, where you also need to sell beer. in grocery stores. So you got to like build some displays, man.
[00:15:04] Zoe Licata: They're really struggling in that channel, specifically like anything where they have kind of that larger format beer specifically. Brago Goyle, their CEO pointed out like that, that really had a tough time in Q2 and they're trying to figure out how to do that. And I don't know what is going to happen to their beer brands because it seems like a lot of their focus is on the beyond beer stuff. They, you know, Royal did say, you know, we still are focused on prioritizing beer. We want beer to grow. But another main priority is expanding how many beyond beer options they have. It was around 2% of their portfolio. Now it's like 10%. And they've had mixed results with the products in that too. They admitted simply spiked, not doing so hot right now, but then they also just picked up Monaco this summer and that is doing wonders for them. And that has a really small distribution network right now, so they're expanding that and have lots of opportunities with that.
[00:15:58] Jessica Infante: I also think the numbers on Topo Chico Hard have been somewhat better.
[00:16:02] Zoe Licata: Yeah, but their core beer is still kind of up there. I mean, High Life is all right. They've found success with Capple or the Keystone Apples, which are coming back this fall. But that's another one where it drives off of virality and limited editions and how far can you go with something like that.
[00:16:22] Jessica Infante: Right. Banquet does okay, but it's small. Smaller than Coors Light, obviously. Justin, I'm sorry. I feel like we had a really neat segue into the next discussion item, and I just totally derailed us, but... It's totally fine.
[00:16:35] Justin Kendall: It's nice to go on diversions every now and again. I think that one of the other interesting things out of this is just the interplay between Reyes and Molson Coors out of this, because Reyes is a huge customer for Molson Coors. And when they essentially pluck 40% of your business from your owned wholesaler, it's a little awkward. So I wonder how that distributor meeting's going in Vegas this week. That's right, that's right.
[00:17:02] Jessica Infante: We are not there.
[00:17:03] Justin Kendall: Allegedly, yes. Surprise us. Let's go for chaos. Maybe some people have some money on this on Polymarket. We can all make out. Yeah, let's segue and talk a little bit about Southern Glazers and what's going on over there, which is they've paid $12.5 million to resolve the federal bribery probe that was going on in California. And this essentially will wrap up that. And for a little more details on that, Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits admitted to and acknowledged responsibility for the actions of their, I would say, primarily former employees at this point. According to the DOJ, several California-based Southern Glazers execs, including VPs, were directly involved in the conduct, which included substantial cash payments, prepaid gift cards, flights, golf trips, resort stays, and luxury goods to major chain grocery buyers in the state. And Southern Glazers has agreed to cooperate in prosecutions and some compliance measures. But yeah, $12.5 million is a lot of money to me and you and a lot of folks out there. But you know who it's not a lot of money to?
[00:18:22] Jessica Infante: Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits?
[00:18:23] Justin Kendall: I don't know, man. Like, I don't know. Like, just looking at it, eyeballing it, it's like, oh, $12.5 million. And then you think about it and it's like, that is not that much money. And for the alleged conduct, I don't know, it happened over close to a decade, it seemed like. So a little more than a million dollars a year you're paying for...
[00:18:49] Jessica Infante: I wonder how they landed on it. Is that the amount of the bribing? That'd be quite something.
[00:18:54] Justin Kendall: once they tabulated up all the golf trips and resort stays and gift cards. Luxury goods. I want to know what the luxury goods were. I want to know what the gift cards were too. What was it, like Applebee's or? So we need some placements. Here's some $20 gift cards to Applebee's. Enjoy your riblets. I was reading Dave Infante over at Fingers over the weekend and he had intimated, you know, for someone like Southern Glazers, this looks like a rounding error essentially. Is this a slap on the wrist? Is it is there some teeth to this?
[00:19:28] Zoe Licata: connections and people-to-people operations. And even though the main principle and the legal principle is you can't do these things, you can see how this can become a practice and then ends up becoming just part of how you operate. And they got caught. And they knew that this was not a thing. According to this resolution, they also falsified documents. So there was some sort of attempt to hide a paper trail or make a false paper trail. So there's plenty of awareness that this is not okay, but also we are aware that this is something that sometimes happens.
[00:20:12] Jessica Infante: I'd like to know what happened to the recipients of these items.
[00:20:15] Zoe Licata: I would like if you were a recipient and want to honestly talk to us and tell us what cool things you got. So we can put into our brain what exactly these things are. Let us know. I want to know. Tell us about your luxury goods.
[00:20:29] Justin Kendall: It sounds like there is a wave of prosecutions going to happen. And so.
[00:20:35] Zoe Licata: And the FTC stuff is still kind of up in the air ish, right?
[00:20:41] Justin Kendall: It's still ongoing. So they have not yet fully resolved that they were working on a settlement for that. And that is a price discrimination. lawsuit investigation that was ongoing where they would sell items to major chain retailers at a cheaper rate than they would mom-and-pop stores. So more legal wranglings for Southern Glazers to untangle, but they seem to be doing okay with their string of acquisitions and everything else they've got going on. I wonder how long it takes them to make $12.5 million. Are we talking hours? Are we talking days?
[00:21:24] Jessica Infante: Minutes?
[00:21:25] Justin Kendall: minutes.
[00:21:25] Jessica Infante: Yeah, I don't know. I wonder if, like, did the government know about both of these things or did one uncover the other? Because there was that big raid of their offices.
[00:21:36] Justin Kendall: Yeah.
[00:21:36] Jessica Infante: I want to say it was around Halloween time one year. And I wonder if, you know, they were looking for something but discovered something else. I would watch a Netflix documentary about this. Just putting it out there.
[00:21:46] Justin Kendall: Maybe we'll get it someday. We got to move on and talk about some other things, but I think one of them that sort of was like a gut punch to me last week was the Middleby News. And I wasn't super familiar with Middleby Corporation, but their brewing division, I was very familiar with, and that is Wild Goose and SS Brewtech and Deutsch, and especially Wild Goose during the heyday of craftling. I feel like we're hearing people getting wild goose canning lines all the time. And Middleby announced last week that they are discontinuing their brewing division. And we don't have a read on how many jobs will be affected by this or like how or how soon that they're going to be shutting down operations. I just understood that it was by the end of the year. But the thing that really stood out to me was their chief commercial officer was talking at a Jefferies forum and he mentioned that there's a, as he called it, heavy secondary market for beverage equipment. And anybody that's subscribed to the Brewbound newsletter knows this. They've received auction notices, and those are only a few of the auction notices going out. There are auctions all the time, equipment selling for pennies on the dollar. We know this. To hear them essentially say, we're getting out of this business because we can't compete with the secondary market essentially for some of our own goods is kind of stunning. And SS Brewtech made home brewing systems, so there's... one pipeline gone for aspiring brewers and Deutsch made large brewing equipment and so did SS Brewtech. But yeah, it's a bummer to see.
[00:23:46] Jessica Infante: Yeah. I mean, that secondary market is flooded though. I mean, that's like, there's really, I think you hear everybody say there's just no real reason to buy anything new right now because there's so much stuff out there that you could buy that's pretty close to new. In a way, like in a very big way, does this, you know, maybe it helps keep stuff out of the landfills, proverbially.
[00:24:07] Justin Kendall: I think that's a nice way of looking. I don't know that it's just one of those sign of the time moments that is kind of jarring. And if, you know, we go to these trade shows and we see like the brew expo floor, I think about that at CBC and how you would see all this brewing equipment. And a few years ago, we were seeing a lot more distilling equipment. And now I wonder if we're going to see a lot less of this on the floor as things go forward, just the way the market is.
[00:24:37] Jessica Infante: I mean, especially the way that craft brewers are trending, which is a much more like onsite hospitality focus. Do you need a canning line? I think we'll see. Do you need a palletizer? Maybe not.
[00:24:49] Justin Kendall: We'll see what this does too for equipment. And as far as if you need spare parts and you need something to fix your wild goose canning line, what happens then? Right. Anyway, there are a lot more sign of the time stories coming to Brewbound.com. You can read about Buoy Beer joining Great Frontier Beverage, the Ninkasi-led platform. We're going to have a story up on what's going on with Summit Brewing and their bank, as the bank appears to be trying to take control of the brewery, and so much more. But let's leave on a high note, though. Would you buy a 2Z?
[00:25:30] Jessica Infante: No. Do you know how many regular koozies I have? I don't need one that's also two at the same time.
[00:25:38] Justin Kendall: So what we're talking about, the 2Z, is the invention of dad strength brewing, which is essentially a koozie, but for two beers instead of one.
[00:25:48] Jessica Infante: I like the idea.
[00:25:49] Justin Kendall: I don't know. It's very on brand for them.
[00:25:51] Jessica Infante: Yeah. I mean, I'll let you write up. It is very much like a dad joke come to life. Yeah. So the idea is that you hold two dad strength beers and then that's the equivalent of having had one beer. Yeah. I dig it. But the secondary market for koozies in my house is robust.
[00:26:09] Justin Kendall: Don't take the koozie companies. They need the business too.
[00:26:12] Zoe Licata: As long as weddings and bachelorette trips and everything keep happening, the koozie folks will be fine.
[00:26:19] Justin Kendall: All right. I think that's a good place to end it.
[00:26:22] Jessica Infante: And that's our show for this week. Thank you for listening. The Brewbound Podcast is a production of BevNET CPG. Our audio engineer for the Brewbound Podcast is Joe Krachie. Our technical director is Joshua Pratt and our video editor is Ryan Galang. Our social marketing manager is Amanda Smerlinski. Our designer is Amanda Huang. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your colleagues and friends and review us on your listening platform of choice. You can find our work at Brewbound.com. And we also welcome feedback and suggestions at podcast at Brewbound.com. On behalf of the entire Brewbound podcast team, thank you for listening. We'll be back next week.
