A Brewing Success
Why Mark Anthony chose Columbia
Nov,2022
Mark Anthony Brewing in Columbia
By Richard Breen – columbiametro.com
Mark Anthony Brewing invested more than $500 million to build its plant in Columbia. Just 346 days after breaking ground, the first saleable product rolled off the conveyor. The facility has four high speed can lines, one bottle line, and two variety pack lines.
Jennifer McGehee, a beer buyer for Morganelli’s Party Store on Forest Drive in Columbia, has been connecting customers with their favorite alcoholic beverages for nearly a decade. The first hard seltzer she remembers seeing was Truly, from the makers of Samuel Adams beer.
“Then White Claw came in right after that and it just took over,” she says. “I first saw a White Claw that summer; I was literally floating down a river when a friend handed one to me.”
That was in 2017, and by 2019, “White Claw Summer” was proclaimed on social media by hard seltzer aficionados. User-created content reinforced White Claw’s message of a beverage that’s portable for youthful, outdoor fun and not targeted toward a specific gender. Major media outlets took notice.
The Wall Street Journal compared its viral trend power to the pumpkin spice latte. The Atlantic described White Claw as a symbolic response by millennials to years of being told coolness was found in fussy cocktails or complex IPAs. Jennifer says that after she saw her first White Claw, it became practically an instant hit in the Midlands — so much so she doubted its staying power.
“I totally thought seltzers were going to be a flash in the pan,” she says, but now even local craft breweries are concocting their own hard seltzers to have a beer alternative on tap in their tasting rooms. “They’ve become that popular. Seltzer’s not going anywhere. It’s here to stay.”
Somewhere between “flash in the pan” and “here to stay,” a booming company half a continent away began engineering a business pivot. As its plans unfolded, a patch of Midlands turf that had been curated for the right company at the right time met its moment. Now a 1.3-million-square-foot facility on Shop Road is producing can after can of fruity libations for all the White Claw Summers to come.
The logo on a can of White Claw Hard Seltzer depicts three cresting waves, a “white claw” in surfing dialect. The beverage inside hopes to evoke the refreshing spray of a crashing wave. It was introduced in 2016 by The Mark Anthony Group of Companies.
Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Mark Anthony was founded by Anthony von Mandl in 1972 as a wine importer. It has grown to encompass its own vineyards in addition to producing distilled spirits and ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages. Privately owned, its U.S. family tree includes Mark Anthony Brands, handling sales and marketing, and Chicago-based Mark Anthony Brewing, responsible for supply chain management and brewing.
For years, Mark Anthony Brewing had outsourced production of a beverage portfolio that also features Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Cayman Jack cocktails. As John Sacksteder, Mark Anthony Brewing’s president, explains it, the company relied solely on contract manufacturers to produce its product. The company would install its proprietary and patented equipment within its partners’ facilities, which allowed them to ensure the quality it demanded. Then White Claw took off.
“We were surprised and overwhelmed by the success,” John says. “We could never have planned for the level of demand we were being asked to produce. Because we did not own our own plants, to increase production capacity, we had no choice but to spend millions of dollars with our co-packers to increase both brewing and packaging capacity.”
At that point, Mark Anthony Brewing decided to take matters into its own hands. A company that likes to move quickly, in November 2019, it began construction of a new brewery and packaging operation in Hillside, New Jersey. By January 2020, it had also broken ground on its most ambitious project yet, a nearly one-million square-foot facility in Glendale, Arizona. The Hillside project took 202 days, John says. Glendale took 280.
“It’s something we think nobody else could have pulled off,” John says, and it is particularly true of Glendale, which began as an undeveloped greenfield site. “What made both of these projects even more challenging was that in March of that year, the world shut down due to COVID. We never stopped construction and found ways to work as safely as possible through this unprecedented challenge. But we never could fully satisfy the demand.”
Another facility was needed — fast. A Mark Anthony Brewing task force came up with 18 locations in five states, then narrowed the list to 10 and made site visits. Columbia was not at the top of the list.
The Social Media Insights Lab at the University of South Carolina examined more than 400,000 social media mentions related to “spiked seltzer” going back to the start of 2019. Its findings noted some surges in activity during the summers of 2020 and 2021 and the past three Super Bowls. A lot of the activity was being driven by marketing heavyweight Bud Light, which created a spike, so to speak, when it unveiled its own seltzer in late 2019. The biggest surge, however, went back to August 2019 and the peak of White Claw Summer, when young adults, social influencers, and media outlets began posting on Instagram, tweeting, and writing articles about hard seltzer.
In many ways, the hard seltzer market came of age right along with millennials and Generation Z. Fruit-flavored sparkling water gained popularity as those two groups grew up. Parents equated fruit with healthiness and saw it as a way to get their kids to drink water instead of more sugary options.
Brands such as Izze, LaCroix, and Sparking Ice grew, and plenty of generic, one-liter bottles are available at the supermarket. It’s little wonder the berry, watermelon, and mango flavors these kids were raised on now headline hard seltzers.
“Today’s young adult drinkers (those of legal drinking age to 27 years old) grew up with fruity drinks, including Capri Sun and other juice boxes,” writes Boris Oglesby in a blog for data analysis firm IRI Worldwide. “They’re carrying that taste for sweet, fruity products with them as they age.”
While many number-crunchers see the market as a zero-sum game — every hard seltzer drinker is a former drinker of something else — it may be more appropriate to recognize hard seltzer drinkers as new entrants to the world of alcoholic beverages. Many, upon turning 21, adopted White Claw as their first drink of choice and not a replacement for something else.
Mark Anthony Brands has grown to become the fourth largest beer company in the United States in terms of sales. Technically, it is considered a beer company. Fermented sugar forms the products’ alcohol base, so hard seltzers and lemonades are sometimes referred to as “malternatives.”
White Claw varieties are gluten free, contain 5 percent alcohol by volume, and weigh in at 100 calories. Most beer contains gluten, to which some people have an immune reaction and which others avoid for dietary reasons. White Claw’s alcohol content is slightly higher than popular light beers and the calorie count sits between 96-calorie Miller Lite and 102-calorie Coors Light.
Those factors satisfied multiple consumer trends, fueling the White Claw boom. John estimates White Claw’s market share of the seltzer category exceeds 47 percent, with the next closest competitor in the mid-20s. He’s proud of what the product has as well as what it doesn’t — a beery, malty smell or aftertaste.
“The taste is clean and pure,” he says. “What White Claw does is give flavor; we’re a flavor company. We believe we make the best alcohol base in the industry. We’ve spent 20 years in R&D perfecting this process.”
They didn’t have that much time to build their next brewery, however. Economic developers often say a site’s infrastructure makes the difference between attracting industry and missing out. That was no different in this case.
“They needed a bunch of power — fast,” says Jeff Ruble, economic development director for Richland County. “We ended up running a rail spur to their site. We’re blessed with a ton of water capacity. They’re using 3 million gallons of water a day, and 2.5 million goes back into the wastewater stream.”
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