ARRAN Brewery is eyeing expansion south of the Border after agreeing a distribution deal with Ooberstock, the online drinks wholesaler.
The craft beer producer, which recently opened export markets in Spain, France and Japan, hopes the arrangement will lead to a 10-fold sales increase in England and Wales.
Ooberstock, founded by former drinks trade executive Arran Heal last year, said the brewer had the potential to achieve UK-wide distribution on the back of the deal.
The business already distributes around 1000 products for big drinks industry names, including Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Coca-Cola Enterprises and Heineken. Irn-Bru was one of several new brands signed up in the last ten days.
Ooberstock, which bills itself a "champion" of small craft beer producers, said is able to offer keener prices to bar owners because, unlike bricks and mortar retailers, it does not have its own warehouses and trucks.
Its distribution is handled by logistics specialist Kuehne & Nagel from two hubs, in Yorkshire and Berkshire, with Ooberstock guaranteeing that all orders are fulfilled within two days. The company's telesales operation is also out-sourced, meaning that the business only has three direct employees.
Commercial director Phil Newton said: "We offer them [Arran] the potential for national distribution that no other wholesaler will do from where they are currently based. They may not want to go national from day one, but we have the ability do that for them.
"It terms of delivery timescale, it is far quicker from order to actual delivery to outlet. At the moment it can take anything up to five days for an order to be delivered by [a traditional wholesaler]. With us it is 48 hours."
The owner of Arran Brewery, Gerald Michaluk, said he was drawn to working with Ooberstock because "like us it is innovative and creating waves in the established beer distribution market."
He added: "Its new innovative model suits us and we are confident of seeing Arran and its associated brands have a strong national presence."
The link-up with Ooberstock comes after Arran announced plans to establish production centres in overseas markets to mitigate the high cost of distributing beer from the island.
That came after the brewer was denied grant from the Scottish Government to help expand production on the island. Mr Michaluk said that expanding on Arran was not viable without assistance because of shipping costs and because small brewers lose tax relief as soon as production levels reach certain thresholds.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article