THE GIST
According to a former employee, Boston-based hard seltzer company Willie’s Superbrew laid off at least eight employees on April 8, leaving a staff of as few as two. It’s unclear what financial options are available to save the company—according to the ex-employee, who was laid off last week and asked to remain anonymous so as not to impede their job hunt, this follows the earlier layoffs of five employees on March 25. The former employee says it’s likely Willie’s Superbrew founder Nico Enriquez will pursue a sale for the brand, potentially to East Boston-based Downeast Cider House, which contract-brews its seltzer.
In a message posted in a private Facebook group and provided to Good Beer Hunting, it was shared that "Willie’s Superbrew is going bye bye, and everyone on the team is now for hire." The post referenced positions previously held by state-wide and regional account and sales managers, state-level sales representatives, and marketing positions.
Enriquez and Willie’s Superbrew did not respond to a request for an interview by press time. According to the former staffer, who had worked for Willie’s Superbrew since 2021, Enriquez and chief financial officer Jason Halsted remain employed by the company.
Willie’s Superbrew, which touted its natural ingredients (“nearly a pound of real fruit in every pack”) had early momentum.
Chain retail sales tracked by market research company IRI showed the seltzer grew by triple digits in 2019 and 2020, from $343,501 in sales in 2018 to $3.5 million in 2020.
At the time it was the 26th-best-selling hard seltzer family in chain retail and among 28 brands that earned at least $3 million in 2020.
In 2021, however, those chain retail sales declined -46% to $1.9 million, about as much as Great Lakes IPA and Leinenkugel’s Lemon Haze IPA sold the same year in those stores.
The former employee says that despite a “dream team” of talent (according to LinkedIn, Willie’s Superbrew employees previously worked for Drizly, AmazonFresh, Diageo, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and New Belgium Brewing Company) and an “awesome” product, the company seemed to be chronically underfunded or suffering from poor financial management. It was a difficult mix for a sector as fast-moving as hard seltzer, which was one of the most profitable alcohol categories in the country last year and among the few to show growth in chain retail.
“I started seeing that the math wasn’t adding up. I know how much profitability per case there is; I know how many employees there are,” the employee says. “I thought, ‘Hopefully they have the financial backing to keep this going.’”
WHY IT MATTERS
Though Enriquez frequently touted his and late co-founder Willie Fenichel’s humble, non-beverage-industry backgrounds, it appears that unfamiliarity may have been part of the company’s undoing. Willie’s Superbrew’s website says the company was “started by a surfer and a goat farmer,” and, as part of its origin story, states: “With no idea how to start a business, the pair started Willie’s Superbrew anyway.”
In what might be the final year of full production, Willie’s faced competition from an array of upstart brands from small and large producers. In 2021, seven of the top-25-selling hard seltzer families were new to the category. The Superbrew portfolio fell outside the top-50 in the process.
Suzanne Schalow, CEO of Massachusetts-based beer and wine chain Craft Beer Cellar, speculates that the company’s initial launch as a ginger beer called Farmer Willie’s, then its decision to rebrand as Willie’s Superbrew in 2018, could have sparked consumer confusion. Despite being a hard seltzer, Willie’s also described itself with the term “superbrew,” a relatively unknown category that the company told Brewbound is “a hybrid of hard cider and hard seltzer.”
“It wasn’t clear [initially] what they were really making,” Schalow says. “They were making some kind of fermented beverage, then decided they would turn 100% to hard seltzer.”
Schalow says the seltzer itself was well-liked by drinkers. In a late 2019 blind hard seltzer tasting event for consumers hosted by Craft Beer Cellar Belmont, Willie’s Superbrew Pomegranate & Açaí flavor placed third out of 32 entrants (Truly Pineapple won first place). At Craft Beer Cellar, it’s priced the same as Truly Hard Seltzer for a single 12oz can ($2) or six-pack ($12). (At Passion Vines, an alcohol retailer in New Jersey, a 12-can variety pack of Willie’s Superbrew retails for $19.99, the same price as Cape May Brewing Co.’s 12-can hard seltzer variety pack, and $2 more than Oskar Blues Brewery’s Wild Basin Hard Seltzer 12-can variety pack.)
Despite the strong showing in Craft Beer Cellar’s taste test, though, Willie’s Superbrew never seemed to fully catch on among shoppers.
“They sit still [on the shelf] for a little too long and who knows why that is,” Schalow says. “There are hotter seltzer brands for us—people are buying the hell out of ranch water, which has big marketing money. … I just don’t know that they were getting people’s attention.”
Enriquez acknowledged some of the challenges inherent in being a relatively small hard seltzer brand in the Northeast, a region that has a higher percentage of independent stores than chain retailers than other areas of the country. This requires more individual account visits and fewer opportunities for quickly scaling up volume sales, he told BeerNet Radio in mid-March.
“I think it is a more competitive market, especially if you’re a smaller brand that doesn’t necessarily have consistently distributor muscle behind you of the large dogs,” Enriquez told BeerNet Radio.
At the beginning of this year, though, overall sales showed promise. Bouncing back from its 2021 drop, sales of Willie’s Superbrew were making up lost momentum and rose more than +100% in the first quarter of 2022, Craft Business Daily reported in March. While Willie’s worked to get back to 2020 levels, the company eyed new markets, according to the outlet. As recently as February, the company was hiring for an innovation brewer position that referenced a future taproom.
The company had hired former New Belgium Brewing Company chief marketing officer Greg Owsley to lead a packaging rebrand, and told Brewbound in October the goal was to double its sales numbers in 2022 by expanding distribution to the entirety of the East Coast from its Northeast base, helping the company make up the ground it lost last year. But now, just a month after that packaging rebranding hit shelves, Willie’s Superbrew appears to be a casualty amidst hard seltzer’s long tail. Meanwhile the category as a whole remains strong:
In IRI’s most recent 52-week sales period that ended March 20, hard seltzer was up +6.7%, ahead of the flavored malt beverage category in which it’s nested (+5.4%) and way ahead of beer overall, which was down -4.6%.
Through three months of 2022, 33 different hard seltzer brand families have sold at least $1 million in chain retail compared to 23 in the same time period last year.
The former employee says that signs of financial trouble were visible during the company’s rebranding, which was completed in March. The company had to buy back out-of-code products as well as inventory with the previous packaging, which reportedly cost it more than leadership had anticipated. According to the former employee, a few cans of a jalapeño-flavored seltzer in the company’s variety pack also exploded earlier this month—likely because of refermenting sugar in the can—prompting a recall of the variety pack.
“Everything they listed [as a roadblock], I was like, this is business 101 in this industry,” the former employee said.
Words by Kate Bernot