Interview, Part 2: Spirit of Gallo EVP And GM Britt West

In the second part of our interview, Spirit of Gallo executive vice president and general manager Britt West discusses the latest offerings from High Noon and the rest of the RTD stable, on-premise growth for the company, and potential portfolio additions looking ahead.

SND: High Noon’s latest is a foray into vodka and tea drinks. Why was that the next step for the brand?

West: This was not a decision that we took lightly to go into tea. We did a lot of consumer research around the question, did the High Noon brand have permission from the consumer to go into tea? And what we found was that actually High Noon doesn’t mean seltzer to these consumers. It means premium ingredients, premium spirits, a lower-abv usage occasion, and it encapsulates the day-drinking occasion. Tea can be a part of that.

SND: How is progress in the RTD portfolio beyond High Noon?

West: As the industry continues to evolve, one of the things that we were seeing is how beer wholesalers execute against RTDs, and while we have obviously been successful building High Noon through the wine and spirits network, we were looking at having a second network that was entirely beer-based. The VMC brand, which is our partnership with boxer Canelo Alvarez, is absolutely on fire. It’s now in many Hispanic groceries, and its three SKUs are now the number-one, number-two, and number-three RTD SKUs in the stores. We added Illinois and Colorado this summer and continue to see high reorder rates and high velocities going through the business.

VMC was our first foray, but we’ve been on an acquisition spree because, if we’re going to be in the beer network, we’ve got to have scale within that network as well. Montucky is a piece of that, but we’ve also acquired Waterbird, acquired Salt Point (both spirits-based RTDs), and acquired most recently a small brand out of the Southeast called Pinball. Gen Z is drinking in a very different way, and each one of these we believe is in a unique space, from lower-abv to higher-abv and from full-flavor cocktail to a lower-flavor profile. There are a lot of different areas of the RTD landscape that consumers are looking at depending on their different usage educations.

SND: You’ve added several brands at the higher end of the spirits market lately. How has that transformed the portfolio?

West: If you look back four or five years and ask the question, “What did Gallo have that was relevant in white tablecloth, in craft cocktails, and in higher-end hotel bars?” The answer was Dalmore, and that was it. But now you look at brands like Don Fulano, Komos, Dalmore, but also Germain Robin and Argonaut brandies, for example. This is a collection of very consumer-relevant brands and a very differentiated portfolio that allows us to have conversations with those types of accounts that previously we might not have been able to have.

SND: In what categories do you see room for further expansion?

West: American whiskey is a huge category. We have Horse Soldier, and this past year we introduced Lazy K Bar Whiskey in Montana. It’s an 8-year-old sourced Kentucky Bourbon that’s in partnership with actor Cole Hauser, who plays Rip on Yellowstone. We will be expanding that to Texas in the coming months, but it still is very liquid constrained and in its infancy. American whiskey is a big enough space that we should have other offerings too.

Tagged : Argonaut, Dalmore, Don Fulano, Germain-Robin, High Noon, Horse Shoulder, Komos, Lazy K Bar, Montucky Cold Snacks, Pinball, Salt Point, Spirit of Gallo, VMC, Waterbird

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